A couple months ago the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved plans by Cityline to provide a temporary paid parking lot for metro at the McLean Silver Line station in Tysons. We’ve watched some early sitework occurring over the past few weeks including some minor building demo, milling of the old asphalt surface, and repaving for what appears to be a construction lay down as well as future surface parking.
In the background you see Westgroups former office buildings, badly dated, and soon to be demolished. The plans for the parking lot include 711 spaces associated to a 10-year deal which could be terminated earlier than 10-years if Cityline plans to build earlier than anticipated. Why is Cityline planning to wait 10 years to build on the lot?
Well it’s not.
Scott’s Run Station, Cityline’s massive redevelopment project surrounding the McLean metro stop, will likely begin construction within a year but due to the scale of the project will likely take years if not over a decade to complete and meet equilibrium in market conditions. In other words, there’s no point of leaving underbrush and abandoned buildings on a parcel when it could be used to provide short term commute options to residents.
This doesn’t mean we full-heartedly support the plan. The problem with temporary parking is it becomes permanent and obligatory parking to many residents which leads to near impossible conditions in order to remove the spaces. Long term, having even more people driving into Tysons to take metro and more wasted land use via asphalt surface parking lots are detrimental to the goals of the Tysons Comprehensive plan.
Hopefully in ten years the parking lot will not be deemed as a permanent need in the Tysons area.