Coming soon: A dramatically improved Metro station in Arlington

Metro Center has four main entrances. Gallery Place and L’Enfant Plaza each have three. Union Station, Silver Spring, Dupont Circle and countless others have two. Rosslyn, the highest-ridership station in Virginia, has but one.

One entrance with one set of long, slow escalators and one often-broken elevator, to serve all 36,000 daily passengers who enter and exit there (more than Baltimore’s entire light rail line). It is serious capacity bottleneck and safety risk, and it has to be fixed if Rosslyn is to accommodate its slew of planned new skyscrapers.

So Arlington is building a second entrance across North Moore Street from the existing entrance, in what will become a new plaza.

The entrance will include three new high-speed elevators (like those at Forest Glen), an expanded mezzanine area, a new station manager kiosk with additional fare gates and pay stations, and an emergency stairwell. It will also include additional parking for cars and bicycles as part of the private development above.

[To learn more about the design for the revamped station, continue reading this post by Dan Malouff at BeyondDC.com here.]

Dan Malouff is an Arlington County transportation planner who blogs independently at BeyondDC.com. The Local Blog Network is a group of bloggers from around the D.C. region who have agreed to make regular contributions to All Opinions Are Local.