April 18, 2006
National Harbor Project Picks Up Steam
The National Harbor, a perplexing development scheme rising from the Prince George's County river flats just outside the Capital Beltway, has attracted additional hotel investments, giving the complex a planned total of 3,000 available rooms.
The development will be anchored by the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, which will house 2,000 hotel rooms and a massive convention area and is scheduled to open in 2008. Yesterday, officials revealed that five more hotels will be joining a site that will also include a wide variety of dining and entertainment options, office space, and residential structures. Broadly speaking, it seems like it's going to be a combination of Crystal City, Mount Vernon Square, and Branson, Missouri.
The project is a major development for Prince George's County, and officials there are understandably elated, but it's a little hard to determine how the Harbor fits into the city as a whole. At present, transit options are limited to automobile traffic. WMATA has identified National Harbor as a terminus for a proposed transportation corridor to be traversed by streetcar or rapid bus running from Mount Vernon Square. It also seems likely that a proposed water transport system will include a Harbor Station stop, but neither of those options seem fit to handle the task of ferrying thousands of conventioners to and from the city and its airports. In 2004, we noted that project organizers were hinting at incorporation into the Metro system, but nothing appears to have come of that idea. At a time when attention is focused on bringing centers of population into the Metro system, such an auto-centric project seems anachronistic.
It also remains to be seen how the convention and hotel space at the development will affect regional demand for such capacity. Washington's massive Convention Center is practically brand new, and high-end hotel rooms are in the works for the Mount Vernon Square area and the land around the planned Nationals stadium, potentially adding an additional 2,000 rooms to the local market. Stories on the new National Harbor hotels do not mention concerns about over-capacity, but the potential for over-investment in hotel space seems to be there.
Washington's growth has continued to surprise skeptical planners, and it could be that we, too, are underestimating the area's ability to digest such a large, peripheral project. With a price tag of about $2 billion, we hope National Harbor proves our concerns unfounded.
Picture used is from NationalHarbor.com.
|
Instead of a new "transportation corridor," how about this...
1) Build a Metro station at this new National Harbor, and run a track across the new Wilson Bridge (which has lane space reserved for transit) to the King Street or Eisenhower Avenue Metro.
2) Designate as (the beginning of) the Purple Line the route from National Harbor to King/Eisenhower to Franconia-Springfield.
3) Designate as the Blue Line the route from Largo Town Center to Dulles.
4) Replace the portion of the Blue Line from Pentagon to Rosslyn via Arlington Cemetary with something cheaper. Light rail or dedicated bus lanes maybe. Or just shorter trains.
Interesting suggestions. That portion of the Blue Line would probably best be served by a two-car Metro train. All of the infrastructure is there to use the existing equipment and IMO it doesn't make sense to redo all the stations (gotta think about Rosslyn and Pentagon here, too) and/or rip up the tracks. Plus you'd be adding a new type of vehicle to the WMATA fleet, which introduces other issues.
The only drawback I can see is that riders boarding at Franconia or Van Dorn St. would HAVE to transfer to get anywhere in the District. That could be mitigated by a Franconia-King St. shuttle, I suppose. I reckon if the Purple Line is ever constructed (in any form), it will break the one-seat to Downtown paradigm anyway, so there's little sense to hold onto it.
I'm not sure I understand the point of a Franconia-King St shuttle. Even if transferring from Purple to Yellow to get downtown is an inconvenience, isn't transferring from a shuttle to Yellow an even greater inconvenience?
The main point of a F-K shuttle would be to service Van Dorn St. I'm not talking about a bus shuttle.. I'm thinking more along the lines of the S lines in NYC, so I think the inconvenience is the same either way.
Now what would really make this idea work would be some casinos baby!
The DC metro area can easily use 2,000 outlying hotel hotel rooms plus those being planned downtown.
When you combine citywide conventions with the city's strong leisure and business travel there are routinely situations where DC's inventory of suitable rooms is effectively sold out and what is available is astronomically priced. With the right mix of groups in town this can extend out into Northern Virginia.
The Gaylord property is not meant to service the city's need for convention rooms to any real extent. Covention center attendees *really* want to be downtown because that's where the CC is at and riding the shuttle bus sucks ass. Other group and leisure travelers/planners are more flexible.
The Gaylord approach is to develop properties that border urban areas and piggyback off of downtown's activities, while having their own wierd sort of destination appeal too. This company knows what they're doing; after all they run the Opryland Hotel, which does strong business despite the fact that there is nothing nearby but an outlet mall. They have successfully built this model in other locations. Only with more resort-type amenities and less outlet mall. Yee-haw!
Great idea to tie the development via an early stage Purple line to NVa. Dcist has already discussed the idea of breaking the yellow and blue lines (and Orange and Blue) via the Dulles line and the extension of the Yellow to the east side of the Red line.
I would think these are workable ideas that I hope WMATA and the developers would seriously conetemplate.
DC Transit Future is run by DDOT, not WMATA.
DC Transit Future is run by DDOT, not WMATA.