The DC Metro's Least Used Station
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- Опубликовано: 12 май 2023
- Hello!
In this video I explore Loudoun Gateway Station which I consider to be the DC Metro's "loneliest".
Correction: In the video I state that there aren’t recent statistics on ridership. This is incorrect and it was the least used station in 2022 by average weekday entries although it is a very new station. Thanks to rickscott5290.
If you have only one elevator, and it breaks, your station is suddenly no longer wheel chair accessible.
According to Wikipedia, Loudoun Gateway has the least ridership of all the stations, but it is only 6 months old. The next station with the least ridership is Cheverly, which opened in 1978. Instead of building Loudon Gateway, they should have extended the silver line even further to Leesburg.
The ridership stats on Wikipedia are wrong, wiki says 920 daily but it’s more like 200. Somebody screwed up when analyzing the WMATA graphs and I’ve been meaning to fix it
@@CoinsOfAmerica The "List of Washington Metro stations" article shows the correct ridership of 159 daily in 2022.
@@rickscott5290 that’s sounds correct. The page for loudoun gateway itself is wrong.
Leesburg is way outside the DC area. Hell, might as well extend metro to purciville
Their mistake is having the station track 267 and not Route 7. There should be stations on Leesburg city center, Leesburg Outlet Mall, Wegmans area, Belmont-Chase/INOVA, One Loudoun, Dulles (Mall), Sterling (Potomac Falls), etc connecting to Tysons station. They’ll have to create a new track to accommodate this route, they should do it with byciclists in mind since it’s close to suburbs. There’s a good video out on a new train station that combined two villages in the Netherlands that show what a good station layout looks like.
Not surprising considering the nearby residents came out so strongly against a bus route. Loudoun is the very definition of exclusionary car-dependency.
From Loudoun, the car is ALWAYS the best option into the city. Metro takes FOREVER to get into the city. A car will ALWAYS beat the metro into the city - by a huge margin.
Metro made sense when I lived in Arlington, but Loudoun? Forget about it! 😂
I think it's built with future growth of the area in mind (you can tell by all the new development being built around the new station), especially since that part of Loudoun keeps growing rapidly. Gotta give WMATA credit for at least thinking ahead.
I thought that too but I recall seeing that the land surrounding the station isn’t zoned for housing because the planes fly directly above this area when landing. They were exploring the option of rezoning this to have housing built but here but I think it unlikely wmata actually thought about future housing developments
@@ItsLikeAShammy That's interesting to know. I've always wondered why that part of Loudoun wasn't as developed as other part of the counties are.
TOD in action! 👍
1. Hopefully there's going to be transit oriented development nearby in a couple years. The surface parking lot could easily be developed into TOD. Having a station with empty land around it may not seem good at first, but it has basically a blank canvas to build new developments.
2. Double elevators are the norm these days because if one elevator is out of service, there is a backup elevator to allow full accessibility
WMATA's updated design standards require 2 elevators between all levels for redundancy.
Loudoun Gateway is more easily accessible from the Dulles Greenway then Ashburn. When the Dulles Greenway was built in 1995 a Transit Center was built just east of where the Loudoun Gateway station is today. It is likely that at some future date the Transit Center will be moved to the Loudoun Gateway station and the site will be redeveloped for other uses.
There is no Park and Ride facilities for commuters at Dulles Airport.
It is likely that the station will not be viewed as being over built in 50 years.
Yes, sometimes transit stations are built in advance to spur future development, just like early railway networks led to the development of towns across the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th century. That being said, 50 years is a long lead time for such a huge investment and carbon footprint.
Meanwhile, the DC Metro’s older brother BART (SF Bay Area), has yet to loop the bay as originally envisioned.
So I agree with you that the station is clearly overbuilt -- but I think it's also important to point out that you were there on one of the very worst days to judge busyness! 😅 First, April 21 was in the middle of most of the DMV's Spring Break, so of course it was quiet. And even if it had been a different week, Fridays are not a good day to judge normal commuting busyness, especially Friday afternoons. Office workers have a whole different set of scheduling norms. I used to work in an office that housed about 80 people and on most days maybe half of them were present at any given time -- but on Fridays there were often fewer than 10 of us present in the morning and by the afternoon half of those had left. That was even before the pandemic. Since the pandemic, with so many office workers in DC, I imagine most of them telework on Fridays -- if they work Fridays at all! I know a lot of people at that job who took every other Friday off.
That is good to know!
Two elevators is an accessibility consideration - if one is out of service, the station is still accessible to people in wheelchairs.
Yup! Metro now includes a minimum of two elevators in all stations to allow precisely for this.
Even in rush hour there are only about 5 people who get off here per train. Outside of that it’s only 1 or two, and sometimes the train stops without dropping anyone off or picking anyone up at all. Most commuters either go all the way to Ashburn and use the giant parking garages there, or they take a commuter bus to a Loudoun County park and ride. If you’re going to build a station on empty land, put some useful development there or something.
The surface parking and bus bays predate everything else by about 20 years. It was a park and ride (the bus) to places like Rosalyn or downtown DC before the silver line existed. That’s why so many bus bays. It was actually quite busy pre-COVID and pre-Silver Line.
Ashburn station is now easier to get to from the west/north west. For people in say South Riding or Stone Ridge this may still be the best park and ride. There will never be houses here because it’s inside the airport high noise area. There will never be tall buildings because it’s in the approach of a runway. There was talk of a new Football stadium near here as an option, but most local residents are opposed.
Oh also the two lane road is going to become a four lane arterial soon connected to Shellhorn to the west and Sterling Boulevard to the east. That will bring more traffic.
The old bus park and ride surface lot is a little further up the road, the one at the new station is brand new and largely unnecessary.
I was working in that area in 2019. The station was almost completely built by that time. I'm sure that it would have had a lot of commuters parking there and taking the Metrorail or Loudoun bus if everything wasn't shutdown in March of 2020.
It should be mandatory to coordinate station and housing development.
It takes about 52 minutes on the DC Metro between Loudoun Gateway and Farragut West. Driving takes about 31 minutes. So there is about an hour difference round trip when a time buffer for driving to the station and waiting for the train are added. For a lot of people it is just much more convenient to drive the whole way, depending on destination parking and traffic conditions. Increasing the toll on the Dulles Greenway Toll Road might increase ridership.
What DC are you living in, ive never made a trip like that in under 50 min and you need to pay a toll on the Dulles access road unless you want to make the trip closer to an hour ten
There's talk of increasing the toll again. Still not convenient for Ashburn traffic.
Pentagon City Station was built in the middle of a grassed field.
Look at it now!
Give it time.
As a local of the area, I could give you some information.
Firstly, the station serves the Sterling area (better for INNOVATION CENTER imo) and low-level industry.
Secondly, the theee bus routes that do stop here are actually pretty used for loudoun bus standards. However, there have been proposals to move these to Ashburn.
This station was overbuilt and will never have any development (based on my research)
I work at Dulles Airport, stuff will probably be built around in the future
They just built it. Plus there’s still land to develop
I think Covid-19 and the resulting workplace and commuting changes really removed a lot of the potential riders. I like using the median for the tracks and stations because I think it makes a lot of sense and is a great use of otherwise wasted space. Outside of less people commuting to D.C., I think the main problem the metro has in Loudoun in general is that it's usually about twice as slow as driving and limits your freedom of movement in a way people who live there aren't used too. It's just not convenient and the daily riders aren't there.
Even before the line opened, I could tell just my looking at a map that this station was really pointless. A station at Wolf Trap would have been far more useful.
Lol you hit the nail on the head with all your points. It's so frustrating.
I wonder if this could be converted into an apartment complex. I feel like that would be a lot more helpful and useful than an unused parking garage.
I wonder what ridership and parking would look like if this station was built pre-pandemic.
Incredible infrastructure. Good to see.
That location is not too far away from Amazon warehouse, Metro rail yard, and other warehouses may be is for the worker?
Once Shellhorn Rd connects Loudoun County Pkwy and Moran Rd by the station, I’m guessing ridership here will jump up, since getting here will be much easier then. Currently, coming from the west (unless you can drive up Old Ox Rd) is inconvenient without paying the Greenway toll, and if you’re on the east, it’s probably more time efficient to just go to Innovation Center. Trains run slow past IAD as well, which just makes Innovation Center seem like a better starting point for journeys into DC. Once the north side of Innovation Center develops, I imagine ridership will again drop at Loudoun Gateway, since there will likely he adequate parking at Innovation, closer to both Sterling and Washington, which means both shorter drives and train rides. A better spot for a second west-of-Dulles station could have been further west at Belmont Ridge Rd (if not all the way to Raflo Park in Leesburg where the open right-of-way ends).
I always kind of wondered why Loudoun Gateway was even built tbh rather than juts go straight to Ashburn from IAD and have there be 5 stations for phase 2 over 6 and 10 stops on the segment from McLean-Ashburn altogether over 11 and Dulles be the second to last stop rathe than 3rd last going west to Ashburn. Similarly to Potomac Yard given how close it is to both DCA and Braddock Road
I agree about Loudoun Gateway but I think Potomac Yard is a very useful station to kickstart more development and density in the surrounding area. I may make a video about that in the future :)
not a bad idea at all because I am sure I am not the only one who is kind of careless ab potomac yard. And unrelated but some of the name changes to stops I think lots of people are puzzled too like for me personally changing white flint to North bethesda made sense cause the white flint mall doesn't exist anymore and that is the northern portion of bethesda and for while I don't like the term "Downtown" in Downtown Largo and I would prefer if they said just "Largo" only if the "Largo Town Center" name really had to go to make it easier on everyone (although I didn't mind the Town Center part) and since Largo is a suburb but i'll let it slide since it does still have the word "Largo" in it. The change from Prince George's Plaza to Hyattsville Crossing was the only one that did not make any sense whatsoever to me. PG Plaza was the better name given that the mall is called the Mall at Prince Georges and it is in a Plaza like area and it is located in the center of Prince George's County right? @@nathantransitj
I think it was mostly a waste too, great video; thanks for sharing!
Yeah that's a good use to the top floor of the parking garage the plane spotters can use it.
It’s wild to me that anyone would build a metro station 2 miles from the nearest homes!
The suburban NIMBY is a wild and dangerous creature when you get closer than two miles - beware!😀
really unimaginable (and quite daft to be fair) outside of the US and Canada.
I could be trying too hard to be optimistic about this station, but perhaps it was built ahead of the possibility of future Transit-oriented development in the surrounding greenfield. It's clear that it's a ways off from that, but the station does at least serve some riders as a commuter station until the surrounding area is filled in at some undetermined point in the future.
The land around it is not zoned residential due to the Dulles airport flight path. The immediate area around the station will probably be data centers one day
All of this and yet there is still only 12 overnight parking spots in the whole metro system
They need to bring in better bus service from nearby neighborhoods
it may not be the most used but that’s cause of remote jobs once offices make you come metro travel from ashburn would skyrocket, and also this is a new station
New subscriber: I enjoyed the video. Do you plan to revisit in a year or so?
Not that it will probably help/change much, but there is plans to extend Sterling Boulevard over towards the station which will hopefully? lead to some bus routes connecting some of the apartment complexes and town home developments along there to Metro.
Unfortunately not much will be built near the station development wise, as most of that land is zoned for data centers and warehouses. That red building in your shots is a new data center in fact.
This parking structure checks all the boxes and accommodates everyone. Also totally useless.
Ngl I’ve lived in dc all my life and catch the metro everyday and I’ve never heard of this station 😂😂😂
To be fair, it only opened recently :)
Some day they'll extend the metro to Frederick County Md.
I doubt it as the per-mile cost to build Metrorail is the most expensive alternative compared with light rail or regional rail. Expand the MARC system and you're in business.
In all honesty, the station's heavier uses would be during the rush hour periods, and from what it looks like, even that's hoping for too much at this time. Great idea by WMATA, but poorly utilized. The public restrooms are AN ABSOLUTE MUST because I cannot tell you how many times I've shown up at the station needing to use the restroom, and the nearest one would be a long bus ride away.
I definitely agree that restrooms are nice to have but I always think about cost/benefit. Unfortunately, public transportation budgets are quite limited so if we could get more mileage at the cost of no bathrooms at minor stations, I would easily take more miles of track. This is, of course, my opinion.
Seams to be what in the uk we would call a park and ride station but in a country with parking minimums instead of parking maximums in city’s it’s pointless but you could build apartments around it with shops on the ground floor as a new development with great parking and transit options but hay I’m from England where what we call Suburbs are what you call inner cities so ya know 😂😂
Very sad, but I am going to be an optimist and say that it is good that they built what they could while funds were actually available. The minute that liquid fuel is appropriately priced, these facilities will be a lifesaver to those stranded in the suburbs. The extra elevator is for redundancy in the event of failure. The bathrooms, well maybe some form of segregation is returning.
I don’t know about the bathrooms but the extra elevator definitely makes sense.
@@nathantransitj By the way when you see little holes in wall and ceiling panels, there is soft material behind and it is for sound absorption. These started showing up in public in the 70s in the phone stands that replaced phone booths. They really absorb sound well!
Bathrooms! This is what the new stations are getting?
Yes. Loudoun Gateway absolutely doesn't need to exist. They should have taken the money from Loudoun Gateway and used it to extend the silver line to Leesburg.
I live in Leesburg and that would be great if the silver line was extended towards Leesburg.
i’ll never understand the big amount of useless parking lots in US cities
Wayyy overbuult. But this station only recently opened, and I'm guessing thry hope to spur development around here as they did with phase 1 of the silver line
This is much less idiotic as it looks like. Now you have a transit hub with huge room for development of transit oriented neighborhoods. And if the pricing feels right it will attract car drivers. Give it time.
It's better to have it and not need it....
#singlefamilyhousing
We don’t use it because it takes SO LONG to get to DC. The train has to stop at EVERY SINGLE station on the way in. It takes FOREVER - car is always a better option - ALWAYS.
Just a huge waste of taxpayer funds.
I don’t think it’s a waste but I understand your point.
Virginia's Silver Line has its own major cores -- Rosslyn, Ballston corridor and Tysons Corner.
DC is catching up with LA. LA loved to build you need cars touse rail stations. The worst part is metrolink.
A lot LA stations are in middle of busy neighborhoods. However, walking 5 miles is faster than taking buses. That's the reasons LA non car drivers hate rails because they don't benefit n many bus lines got cut. Hmm, building rails hurt non car drivers. Only American transit advocates could come up this dumb idea, but selfish train lovers love the idea. The fight very hard to force the rail agencies to spend more money to build n expan parking lots in expensive neighborhoods. Oh the rail projects also kill rail stations. LA gold line skipped one stations because the rail agency couldn't secure the land near train stations.
Unlike DC metro, Loudoun has terrible public transportation just like LA.i was there twice. The money could have spent to improve local bus. Oh no, that will anger selfish train lovers. If Americans cannot get out cars to take public transportation, you will see more of this. Even if train stations build in busy neighborhoods, without proper public transportation, its useless. I was in DC. I was very happy that Pentagon city, Crystal city n other stations have many local bus connections not like LA. Hey liberal n progressive love to destroy American including public transportation. I used to vote Democrat. Then i became independent. Politicians like Antonio Villaraigosa, Eric Garcetti, Gavin Newsom, Diane Feinstein n Joe Biden love to screw up non car drivers by promoting you need car rail systems.
Its good things there are many parking spaces. However, do those out of touch designers even know this, the majority of handicap who use public transportation are visual impaired or other handicap that hinder driving. I guess putting couple handicap spaces is cheaper.
Wait, after complaining, are you selfish train lover. Did you get to this station by rail or your car is one of visible objects in this area.
For one, I did get to the station by rail; I can’t drive. DC and LA are extremely different cities especially in their density. The transportation in Loudoun county and LA is bad because there isn’t enough density to support more infrastructure and more frequent bus service. If more transit oriented development was built around frequent rail lines, people would take advantage of being walking distance to the station and wouldn’t have to drive and parking lots wouldn’t be needed. Why build a parking lot for thousands of polluting cars when you could build housing for thousands of residents that wouldn’t need to drive everywhere?
I think that it’s an oxymoron to say “selfish train lover” because the fact that one supports trains in turn means that they support the public benefit it provides. I don’t think any group should be considered “selfish” because I believe that most people just take the most convenient option when getting around. The best case scenario would be a society where any person could move around using the mode of their choosing, rather than being limited to cars.
Politically speaking, why don’t we all work together and give everyone as many options as possible? Why blame one group or another for “prioritizing” or “limiting” their preference especially when it’s very environmentally and financially inefficient (cars)? I believe that change is good and we should all strive to build efficient cities where people can choose how to get around.