The completion date: 2003.
Nearly 12 years later, the Silver Spring Transit Center still isn’t finished. The initial $35 million price tag has more than tripled to $112 million. It has been delayed more than a dozen times and encountered all sorts of problems, from political infighting and bureaucratic entanglements to contaminated soil and problematic utility work.
The county has issued news releases to “celebrate” the start of the center three times in nine years.
Now, the opening once again is in limbo after construction workers found potential problems with the concrete flooring. And as the county considers suing the contractor, commuters are wondering how much longer they have to wait.
“I think many people are rightly concerned about all the delays,” said County Council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville). “I’m certainly concerned about the developments, or lack of development in this case, the lack of timely completion and the potentially very serious structural issues.”
When the transit center is built, cars will park on the third level, and buses will pick up and drop off passengers on the first and second floors. Three hiking and biking trails converge at the transit center, and bike racks will be located throughout. MARC and Metrorail lines are located to the southwest, while a hotel tower could appear to the northeast.
The transit center would serve as a capstone for a county effort to revitalize the once-blighted downtown Silver Spring, now transformed by the presence of Discovery Communications, the Fillmore, the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center and Veterans Plaza.
“The longer there’s a delay, the longer it’ll be hard to feel that Silver Spring is one community,” said Webb Smedley, a local transportation activist.
Decades in the making
The project has been in the works since the late 1970s. Designs were first sketched out in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2007 that the county Planning Board approved a final facility design.
The first official design, drafted by the Maryland Transit Administration, sought to renovate what was already there: a bus depot and parking lot at the corner of Colesville Road and Wayne Avenue.
In 1996, the Planning Board rejected the facility’s design, describing it as “unacceptable,” according to county documents. Board members said it should have been more ambitious and pedestrian friendly to help spur local redevelopment, according to state and planning officials.
So county officials raised federal and state funding to offer their own design.
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