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Washington's Metro was controversial from its inception

Book explores the origins and development of Washington's Metro system

Date published: 4/27/2008

THE WASHINGTON Metro, conceived in the 1960s, was designed to be the premier rapid transit system in the United States, not just moving people or steering development patterns but displaying a certain elegance.

Even the District of Columbia's Commission of Fine Arts was involved, insisting, for example, that a signature curved-vault design be used in Metro stations, which were dug initially as underground boxes.

In "The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro," Zachary M. Schrag tells the story of how Metro came to be and how it developed--writing about "how an entire metropolitan area faced its choices about transportation."

Washington was one of the first cities to choose rapid transit rather than more highways within its boundaries, but at first it was not an easy or popular choice. Travel by automobile was ascendant, and public-transit ridership was falling. The interstate highway system plan called for numerous highways through and around the District of Columbia.

Washington architect Louis Justement proposed what Schrag describes as "a city shorn of many or most of its houses, shops, and side streets, filled instead with large apartment complexes, drive-in shopping centers, and high-speed arteries linked to feeder roads by cloverleaf intersections."

Justement's ideas came to partial fruition in the Southwest redevelopment, which in the 1950s and 1960s bulldozed the area's slums and replaced them with present-day L'Enfant Plaza and its environs.

Urban renewal faltered when it came to the Inner Loop, however. Not today's Inner Loop (the inside circle of the Capital Beltway) but an additional, inner beltway. This and other limited-access highways would have been built through much of central Washington.

Schrag says the plan "awoke the wrath of District residents," and the city's response was to fight the highway construction and push for rapid transit instead.

Yet the new National Capital Transportation Agency was small and weak, designed to engineer a modest rapid-transit system, though even this much was strongly opposed in some quarters. Arlington's planning director in 1962 claimed that "rapid transit for the Washington Metropolitan Area simply will not work." He thought helicopters would be more practical.

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Date published: 4/27/2008