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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
As I mentioned above, the population is projected to increase 33% within the next 11 years.  [b]Where are those 2M new residents going to live?[/b]  Even with buildups and converting green space to housing, you can't come anywhere close to housing the influx.  So, the new residential housing will continue to move out of the city.  And the number of residences that will be close enough to a good rail system is still limited.  You will likely only have about 1/3 of that influx (say 750K) that will be ablet to take advantage of the improved good mass transit infrastructure.  You will have over 1M incoming residents, plus existing residences that will be far enough away from mass transit as to make it a poor solution.  Additionally, even if all of them were close enough to take advantage of mass transit or you found a way to incentivize it, even with upgrades, the system can only handle so many people.  The Rosslyn tunnel is already at capacity with blue and silver line trains.  You can increase 6 car trains to 8 car trains, but you can't add any more runs on the line, so there is a limit to how many additional people in  Virginia along those lines can be accommodated.  So, while a good transit infrastructure is desperately needed and will help the lives of many, it will not handle the vast majority of the incoming population growth who will need to use cars for various reasons.

As I said above, we need plans to improve both the mass transit and the road infrastructure or traffic and congestion in the second worse commuter city in the US will make it the worst commuter city by 2030.[/quote]

In places where they aren't forced to drive long distances in single-occupancy vehicles on expensive, polluting highways in order to get to work.[/quote]

And where in the DC metro region are those places where you can fit a few hundred thousand more people?  Assuming that with 2M more people, that about 10-20% of them will live inside the beltway, where are you going to fit 200-400K additional people?  And where outside the beltway will you fit the addition 1.6M-1.8M additional people where they don't have to drive long distances to get to work?

It's nice to have this fantasy of a non-urban sprawled area, but DC doesn't build up like many of the other major metropolitan areas, so you have a limit to the density that you can attain.  And inside the beltway is already pretty dense.  There isn't a lot of undiscovered territory where you can add buildings, so you are forced to convert single family or minimal family housing to multi-family housing.  And there's a limit to how much housing you can create that way.

You are deluding yourself if you think that this metro area can continue to adapt for the growing population with only adding mass transit over the next 10 years.  If you don't add highways and only add mass transit the average commute time for those people who cannot use mass transit will be over 2 hours each way.  Fortunately, there are others who understand this issue.  Yes, when you add the highways, it will not shorten commute times, but as the population grows, the commute times will not grow much longer than they already are.[/quote]

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