In 2022 I began work on a history of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, which extended Metro 23 miles to Tysons, Reston, Dulles Airport, and Loudoun County. As a tentative description of the project, I offer a narrative I wrote as part of a grant application in September 2023, which resulted in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities program, Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities.
Of course, the whole point of research is to learn new things, so my current thinking on the topic may not match the description below.
Project Summary
In 2022, authorities completed the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, at $6 billion among the nation’s largest construction endeavors so far in this century. After decades of planning and construction, it extends the Washington Metro rail transit system for twenty-three miles from Arlington, Virginia, through Tysons Corner and Washington Dulles International Airport into Loudoun County. Operating as part of Metro’s new Silver Line, the extension seeks to give airport passengers, airport employees, commuters, and shoppers an alternative to constant driving, and to cluster economic development into transit-accessible nodes instead of the suburban sprawl that characterizes so much of Northern Virginia and the United States. The project is remarkable for two reasons: space and time. Physically, it consists of a heavy rail rapid transit system—traditionally an urban technology—built far outside a traditional downtown. Temporarily, it is a massive infrastructure project built long after the end of the federal largesse that funded the original Metro system. My research therefore has two main questions. First, how did the creators of this project overcome suburban skepticism about transit? And secondly, how did they do so in an era of fiscal austerity? My book project, Rail against Sprawl, seeks to answer those questions, and to explore the dangers and opportunities of rail rapid transit in the twenty-first century.
Significance and contribution
If Americans seek a more sustainable future, they need to rely less on the automobile. Even electric vehicles consume scarce resources, demand energy to operate, endanger pedestrians and cyclists, and pollute the air with dust from tires and brakes. Auto-dependent suburban sprawl also divides American society, as those who can afford cars gain more access to jobs and housing. For cleaner air, less stress, and greater equity, many argue that we need to reshape our suburbs to encourage denser clusters that mix offices, commerce, and housing, and that give people a choice of how to travel.
To understand the possibilities, I am writing the history of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, among the nation’s most ambitious efforts to reshape daily transportation choices. After decades of planning and construction, the project was completed in 2022, extending the Washington Metro rail transit system for twenty-three miles from Arlington, Virginia, through Tysons Corner and Washington Dulles International Airport into fast-growing Loudoun County. Although it operates as part of Metro’s new Silver Line, the project should be understood not merely as an extension of Metro, but rather as a bold undertaking in its own right. Its creators hoped to give airport passengers, airport employees, commuters, residents, and shoppers an alternative to constant driving, and to cluster development into transit-accessible nodes instead of the suburban sprawl that characterizes so much of Northern Virginia and the United States.
Historians’ stories of infrastructure are often bleak. We tell stories of projects that failed to meet their goals: going over budget, over schedule, or not serving people as intended. We tell of projects that privilege one group over another, as when white commuters travel on highways that destroyed or isolated predominantly minority neighborhoods, or when wealthy homeowners rejected projects in their backyards. We tell stories of engineering that came at the expense of the natural environment, whether from pollution or habitat destruction. These stories matter, and I learn from reading them and teaching them to my students.
But we also need stories of big projects that worked. Stories that can guide citizens, public officials, and companies as they plan for the future. Stories that show that Americans do sometimes work together on solutions that serve the greater good. While the future of Dulles Corridor rail remains uncertain—not least because the ongoing pandemic challenges both office work and mass transit—we can still learn lessons from this attempt to give Americans new choices about how to live and how to travel.
Like my previous work. this research will benefit scholars, policy makers, technical professionals, and the general public. According to Google Scholar, my previous scholarly writings on rail transportation have earned around 280 citations. I have reviewed at least a dozen books on urban transportation, either in print or in manuscript, and I am regularly called on to review article manuscripts as well. Yet I do not no write for scholars alone. My first book, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro, has sold more than 8,000 copies, indicating substantial interest among non-scholarly readers interested in the histories of Washington and transportation. The Washington Post alone has interviewed me or quoted my written work dozens of times, and I have also been quoted about Metro or written works under my own byline in such outlets as the New York Times, Politico, and All Things Considered. A 2016 podcast, Metropocalypse, produced by a public radio station, featured me in several episodes, and I also appear in films about Arlington County’s tradition of smart growth and the architectural significance of Metro’s stations. For more than two decades I have offered public lectures about Metro’s history, to historical societies, conferences, museums, universities, and groups interested in transportation. For the new project, I would expect to continue such public engagement.
My works have also attracted the attention of policy makers and other officials. I have presented my transportation-related work at the annual conference of the Transportation Research Board, at the Federal Transit Administration, and repeatedly in presentations to staff of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, some of whom credit my work with helping them understand Metro’s needs. For example, I am told that my telling the story of Lance Wyman’s design of the iconic Metro system map led to his being hired to revise the map in preparation for the addition of the Silver Line.
I hope my research on the Dulles extension will have equal impact. Policy makers are already interested; I started this project in large part due to conversations with retired senior executives—including three former chief executive officers—of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), which built the system. They want this story told, even as they understand the need for critical appraisal. I would expect that story to be of interest not only to current MWAA staff, but also to officials at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, in local governments, in Virginia government, at the federal level, and in other metropolitan areas considering major transit investments.
As Peter Norton has recently argued, historians of transportation (myself included) have shown “that high-tech mobility does not always prevail and is not always better. They have shown that social power (i.e. politics, defined broadly) often plays favorites with technology. They have shown that diverse publics are not mere users or consumers of transport modes but resourceful agents of their own mobility. And they have shown that the histories publics most often encounter may serve to legitimize and perpetuate agendas that we should be questioning.” He concludes that “historical expertise is not only of academic value; it is also necessary in any practical efforts to identify and choose among alternative futures, including alternative mobility futures.” I hope to remain part of that project.
Environmental scan & project history
The project both builds on and challenges recent histories of public transportation. Some, such as Philip Mark Plotch, Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City, and Nicholas Dagen Bloom, The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight, present fairly dismal tales of an industry that has absorbed billions in public funds while barely changing travel behavior. Ethan N. Elkind, Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City, offers a slightly more hopeful account, but laments that neighborhood resistance has limited ridership on Los Angeles’s new system “and wasted a significant portion of the investment.”
At times, the Dulles Corridor story resembles these accounts. As with other projects, initial estimates of cost and time proved optimistic. A 1997 study suggested that Metro could be extended along its eventual route for $1.45 billion in 1995 dollars—considerably less than the roughly $6 billion the project eventually required, even when inflation is taken into account. Whereas in the early 2000s, planners told the public that they could ride Metro to Dulles in 2010, in reality the first passengers took that trip only in November 2022. And some station areas have thus far failed to attract the kind of transit-oriented development sought by planners, in part due to the same preference for automobiles that other scholars have found.
But the story also complicates existing understandings for two reasons: space and time. Physically, it consists of a heavy rail rapid transit system—traditionally an urban technology—built far outside a traditional downtown, the focus of most transit planning and historical research on transit. In other metropolitan areas, wealthy suburbs rejected rail, preferring cars and isolation. But Virginia’s suburbs have embraced it, overcoming (albeit by sometimes narrow margins) the resistance of those who favored low taxes and exclusionary zoning. While new plans could take decades to be realized, already several station areas are being transformed. Can rapid transit shape the outer suburbs of a metropolitan area as effectively as it has shaped that region’s core? Will counties once dominated by endless acres of single-family homes and scattered office parks find denser, less energy-intensive ways to live and work?Can we undo sprawl?
As for time, the project began in earnest in the 1990s, long after the period of federal largesse that funded the original Metro system. To be sure, the project exists in part because Washington’s airports occupy such an important role in the lives of members of Congress. But instead of relying on Washington’s position as the national capital, the project’s creators had to persuade Virginians to raise taxes and the tolls on the Dulles Toll Road, diverting billions of dollars from the wallets of taxpayers and drivers to the passengers on a future transit system. This remarkable, bipartisan decision could represent part of a shift away from America’s generations-long dependence on driving. Thus, my research has two main questions. First, how did the creators of this project overcome suburban skepticism about transit? And secondly, how did they do so in an era of fiscal austerity?
Beyond the specifics of rapid transit, the story raises questions about the capacity of democratic societies to achieve the consensus needed to undertake big projects. Whatever its particular function—such as moving water, power, sewage, or people—a large infrastructure project is also a means to shape the future. That requires hard decisions about land use, labor relations, and aesthetics. It also demands weighing the promise of new technologies against the proven reliability of older ones, and the need to maintain existing structures against plans for growth. Infrastructure also imposes costs. Most obviously, it requires billions of dollars for construction, operation, and maintenance, which must be paid from taxes or user fees. In addition, it can damage natural environments, require the destruction of historic buildings, impede paths and views, and generally inconvenience or annoy its neighbors. To placate or overcome their critics, infrastructure’s designers and advocates must build coalitions by promising a range of benefits. Yet promising something to everyone can produce a system that fulfills no functions well. Moreover, the most successful projects not only meet existing needs, but create new ones.
Given the difficulty of achieving consensus on what to build where, it is tempting to hand power to unelected officials who can, in historian Ken Alder’s terms, strike a “technocratic pose” of “seeming neutrality.” Public authorities—mixing elements of government agencies and private firms—can likewise insulate decision-makers from public accountability, for good or for ill. My research will trace the complex interactions among elected officials, citizen activists, business interests, and government experts, as they each tried to make the case that their own views would best serve the public good.
While the Dulles Corridor extension is new enough that some might ask why it needs a historian, the fact is that it is the product of decades of deliberation, and now is just the time for a historian to tell that story. In 1999, when I chose to write my dissertation about the creation of Metro, I knew I would be the last historian to speak to many members of Metro’s founding generation. Indeed, most of the key figures whom I interviewed in the 1990s and early 2000s have since passed away. Though the Dulles rail extension is a more recent project, some important participants in its creation have already left us, including one whom I interviewed in 2022. Others are advanced in years. This work is urgent.
Activities and research team
As the author of four previous books—three of them historical monographs based on archival research and interviews—I believe I have all the competencies needed to write a fifth. My residence and work in Northern Virginia is ideal for this project. One of the most substantial archival collections, the Dulles Corridor Rail Association records, is housed at my own university’s library, which also holds other relevant collections, such as the papers of Congressman Frank Wolf. I can easily reach other collections there and in Fairfax and Loudoun counties, Virginia. I have already made two trips to Richmond to access state records, some at the Library of Virginia, others still in possession of the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation. Many records of this twenty-first century project were born digital and can be accessed online. While veterans of the project are scattered around the country, many still live in the Washington metropolitan area, and the others can be interviewed by Zoom.
I began work in this project at the start of 2022, and as of September 2023, I have drafted just over 40,000 words, about 40 percent of the projected first draft. I have taken about 70,000 photographs of archival documents and have conducted ten interviews. Most of that work was done in winter and summer breaks, as well as in the spring 2023 semester, when I had lighter teaching duties.
What I need is the time to continue to work through these records, interview these witnesses, and write up my findings. Thanks to a study leave from my university, I will be able to work full-time on this project in spring 2024. An NEH grant would pay for course buyouts in 2024-2025, speeding my work in summer 2024 (sinch I would have less course preparation for the fall) and through spring 2025.
Final products and dissemination
The main product will be a book of roughly 100,000 words, plus notes, most likely published by a university press strong in the history of technology or city planning. Rail against Sprawl will narrate the story of the project from its conception to completion, based on a blend of archival research, print and born-digital texts, and interviews with key players. While it will draw on the work of planners, economists, political scientists, and journalists, it is at heart a work of history, analyzing primary sources to explore more than a quarter century of decision-making. Blending concepts from the history of technology, the history of planning, and policy history, it asks how diverse groups with competing priorities reached consensus on what to build and how to pay for it.
Chapters will flow in a mostly chronological sequence, though some will narrate separate stories that unfolded in parallel. In particular, chapters on the planning debates in Tysons Corner, Reston, and Loudoun County will overlap chronologically with each other and with chapters that focus on the rail extension itself. Chapters will address three themes: the roles of federal, state, and county governments; the trade-offs between public and private initiatives; and the place of transit in a suburban landscape dominated by automobiles. With more research, especially interviews, I will be able to bring out the individuals whose choices drove the developments described in each chapter summary. Taken together, the story will show the continuing importance of public transit in the twenty-first century.
My earlier books have reached not only my fellow historians and scholars, but also a range of professionals and policy makers. The Great Society Subway also reached activists who hope to reduce suburban sprawl and automobile dependence and build a world with more choices for work, housing, and transportation, and I would hope this book will do the same. I have accompanied each of my previous books with op-eds, media appearances, public lectures, briefings to government officials, websites, social media, and other forms of outreach, and I intend to do the same with this topic. I am cheered that my previous books are accessible to people with disabilities on Bookshare, and I trust Rail against Sprawl will join them.
The secondary product—already in progress—is the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project Oral History Collection, to be housed by the Special Collections Research Center at George Mason University. In building this project, I strive to adhere to the Oral History Association’s Best Practices and to the training in oral history I received as a student at Columbia University. I am recording my interviews with professional-grade equipment and preparing full transcripts which my narrators review. Once a narrator is happy with the edited transcript—which can easily exceed 15,000 words—I deposit both recording and transcript with the library for future researchers to use. The deed of consent, developed by library staff, places the interviews in the public domain, to ease and encourage such use. Since these are born-digital documents, I expect them to be accessible through a variety of assistive devices. Decades or even centuries from now, Virginians will still live in a landscape shaped by this project. They deserve to hear the voices of its creators.
