Your city's transit vision

[Komeht]

[Joke Insurance]

This isn't necessarily an official transit vision, but rather someone's fantasy vision, which I believe should be heeded by WMATA:

Track Twenty-Nine: Making Your Mind Up *read the section called Airporters but if not, here is a snippet/excerpt of it*

Airporters
A new concept in my plan would provide a faster trip from Dulles to downtown. From Union Station to East Falls Church 'Airporter' trains would share tracks with the Silver Line. Once in the median of the Dulles Toll Road, however, these trains would get their own set of tracks which would bypass the four Tysons Corner stations by staying in the median. A 4-track Whiele Avenue Station would allow passengers to transfer to "local" Silver trains. After While Avenue, Airporters would be express to Dulles Airport, where trains could turn back on a center track at the platform (like National Airport) or proceed through and use a turnback loop west of the station (like Brooklyn Bridge on the #6).

These trains would allow passengers coming from Ryan Road to change for a faster trip to downtown in addition to allowing flyers a shorter time on the Metro. From Dulles to Farragut Square on an Airporter is only 6 stops. On a Silver train there are 12, and that number is 16 under Metro's current proposal, running Silver trains along the existing Orange Line.

While sharing tracks from Union Station to East Falls Church would degrade express service, I don't think it's feasible to construct 2 more tracks through downtown. Besides, if we assume that trains can operate every 135 seconds (current design capacity at Rosslyn), in a 10 minute period, 4.4 trains can pass a given point. Since Metro says higher frequencies can be produced without switch realignment (like at Rosslyn) we can assume that more trains can fit through, perhaps up to 5 in a 10 minute period.

If that is the case, 1 out of every 5 Silver trains could be an Airporter, giving a 10 miunte headway, while service on the Silver Line west of EFC is 2.5 minutes apart on average and 2 minutes apart downtown. Of course, WMATA could adjust service necessarily, but I don't think a lack of separate Airporter tracks downtown will make the service infeasible.

Map of what it would look like: SilverStrip.png (image)