Mapping Metro, 1955-1968: Urban, Suburban, And
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The result, 25 years after the first stations opened, is a network that binds together a metropolitan area spread over two states and the District of Columbia. Courtesy, Washingtoniana Division, D.C. Public Library, © Washington Post Company. 4 Mapping Metro, 1955-1968 Urban, Suburban, and Metropolitan Alternatives by Zachary M. Schrag two centuries, planning Wash- People familiar with other cities are often ington has meant planning the fed- puzzled by this combination. Those accus- eral city. From L'Enfant's original tomed to the New York subway expect flat design of the 1790s through the McMillan fares and closely spaced stations. In con- Commission plan of 1901 and the building trast, those more familiar with commuter- of the Federal Triangle in the 1930s, plan- rail systems, including San Francisco's ners and architects poured their efforts into BART, are likely to gasp at Metro's $10 bil- creating a stately home for the federal gov- lion cost, not understanding that Metro's ernment within the District of Columbia. urban sections required extensive tunnel- Even the National Capital Planning ing. Only when Metro's true function is Commission's 1996 Extending the Legacy understood does its form make any sense. plan, though determined to look beyond It is a metropolitan system, designed to the Mall, scarcely mentions the suburbs serve both city and suburb and to bind that house four-fifths of the urbanized them into a working whole.2 area's residents. The best-known regional Metropolitan planning is not easy. plan, the Commission's 1961 Policies Plan However interdependent, city and suburb for the Year 2000, has long been derided do as have different priorities. In the 1950s and vague and Utopian.1 1960s, planners and politicians mapping out But hidden in plain sight is a regional routes for the new system had to reconcile plan for Washington that is neither Utopian the District of Columbia's demands for nor vague; indeed, it is as real as concrete good service and minimal disruption with and has been planned down to the inch. theIt suburbs' calls for economy. The system is Metro, a 103-mile-long rapid transit sys- they eventually produced is far from perfect tem serving Washington and its suburbs. in either its urban or suburban sections. Yet Metro is a hybrid technology, combining it does work, as both a political compromise the long reach of a commuter rail network and a transportation system. In a nation with the frequent service and underground where city and suburb are often seen as downtown stations of an urban subway. inevitable antagonists, such regional coop- eration is no small achievement. As a physi- Notes begin on page 90. cal embodiment of metropolitan identity, 5 Washington History, Spring/Summer 2001 Metro is worthy of its name. concentric ring roads: one-way streets and The first serious consideration of bring- expressways in an inner ring downtown, ing rapid transit to the capital emerged parkways and freeways in an intermediate from the suburbanization of the Washing- ring three to five miles from the White ton region. Before World War II, the House, and an outer ring outside the District of Columbia had dominated the District of Columbia, a proposal that even- region in population and employment. tually But evolved into the Capital Beltway.3 the growth of the region during World War The 1950 plan was only a rough sketch II, plus the postwar explosion in automo- based on spotty data, so Bartholomew rec- bile ownership, changed that. By 1950, ommended the a more thorough transportation Maryland and Virginia suburbs housed study. 40 As it turned out, he was essentially percent of the region's population. recommending a course of action for him- Moreover, the construction of the Pentagon self. In September 1953 President Eisen- heralded a movement of federal jobs hower to appointed him chairman of the suburban locations. National Capital Planning Commission City planner Harland Bartholomew did (NCPC), which succeeded the NCPPC. And not think that this dispersal of jobs and in 1955 Congress granted his wish for a people was necessarily a bad thing. Born intransportation study, appropriating 1889, Bartholomew had become, by mid- $400,000 to create the Mass Transportation century, one of the nation's preeminent Survey. As chairman of the NCPC, a mem- planners, having worked on comprehen- ber of the National Capital Regional sive plans for dozens of cities. When the Planning Council, a planner with decades of National Capital Park and Planning experience in the region, and the man who Commission (NCPPC) began work on hada originally suggested a transportation comprehensive plan for the Washington survey, Bartholomew controlled the survey, region, Bartholomew was a natural choice setting its agenda and picking its expert for chief consultant. He warned that staff. As one congressional observer put it, Washington's downtown could not absorb "as the dominant personality, a considerable any more government employment, lest measure it of credit or blame for the outcome choke to death on traffic. of the survey can be attributed to him."4 Responding in large part to his advice, The biggest question on the table was if in 1950 the Commission proposed a decen- mass transit had any significant role still to tralized plan for the region, based on the play, or if, in Bartholomew's words, "indi- dispersal of government agencies to subur- vidual automobile transportation can take ban locations, continued residential subur- over the full burden of transportation in a banization, and increased reliance on thelarge metropolitan area such as Wash- private automobile as the means of getting ington." Following a strike in the summer of people from home to work. Judging that 1955, the future of the city's streetcar system "the automobile is here to stay [and] its wasuse in doubt. And even a healthy streetcar will continue to increase as the metropoli- and bus system was no substitute for rapid tan area continues to grow and distances transit: buses or trains running on their own become greater," the plan suggested right-of-way, a unimpeded by automobile series of expressways and parkways and pedestrian traffic, and frequent enough throughout the region to serve its thou- that schedules would be unnecessary.5 sands of new automobile owners. With On this issue, Bartholomew himself employment dispersed, the region could no was undecided. He had a record of sup- longer serve all commuters with radial porting highways, sometimes to the detri- highways converging downtown. There- ment of transit. In 1945 he had advised fore, the 1950 plan proposed a set of three against a proposal for streetcar subways in 6 Mapping Metro Washington, arguing that it would "over- concentrate" real estate values in a small area of downtown. The 1950 plan for which he had served as chief consultant dismissed rapid transit with a single sentence, stating that "neither the existing nor the probable future population pattern" in the area would provide the densities needed to make rapid transit economically sensible. As he would tell Congress in 1960, while some commuters could be lured to transit, "this is the age of the automobile and we cannot ignore it.