As an ongoing effort to document and archive the horror that has befallen our town of Tysons, Parkageddon, we are starting a weekly discussion on how parking is going around town. So far there have been a couple of anecdotal disturbances in neighborhoods (can count them on one hand) of people taking the cheap way out and parking in subdivisions that are close to metro. This is being combated by the HOAs and shouldn’t last much longer.
However, outside of the oddity of having a strange park in front of your house, there has been no widespread traffic or parking nightmare as of yet.
At the McLean Station Silver Line parking lot, there were 75 vehicles counted at 4PM on July 31st. It should be noted, business is so poor for the “Parkageddon” sieged lot that a sign flipper was brought on board to help drum up some customers.
Of course, this is only week 1 of the Silver Line, so it’s foolish to draw conclusions, but it is clear at this time that forecasts that parking would be an immediate concern were overblown and falsely accepted as a given. Had cynics been listened to, we’d have thousands, not just hundreds, of empty parking spaces in Tysons, disrupting the ability to get around town on foot, taking up valuable tax earning real estate, and costing residents tens of millions in bonds in the short term at a minimum.
We’ll keep an eye on numbers through out the summer and into the fall, but I’d be surprised if by September the lot was perennially full.