The Colossal Expectations of D.C.'s Newest Metro Line

TYSONS, Va.—On a blustery Saturday evening in April, the gates of the Spring Hill Station on Leesburg Pike are locked, their bars freshly painted, and the steel of the dormant escalators just beyond them impossibly shiny. Even the benches and bike racks are shrouded in transparent plastic wrap, as if to warn would-be sitters or bike-lockers that these amenities are experimental and completely untested. As the sun sinks, they fall into the shadow of the elevated rail rising three stories above what used to be the median strip in the center of Leesburg's Pike usually-choked eight lanes of traffic.

The development near Spring Hill Station is the most visible sign yet of Tysons' public pledge to remake itself as a more transit-accessible, walkable, appealing urban center. Amputating "corner" from the Tysons name is an attempt to revise its history as an archipelago of office towers and chain stores surrounded by vast oceans of parking lots — "44 million square feet of unmitigated traffic hell," as Christopher Leinberger, an urban development scholar at the Brookings Institution and George Washington University, puts it. Spring Hill is one of five new Silver Line stops that have been under construction since 2009 and that the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority hopes will open this summer — four of them right in Tysons.