Commuter Behavior Key to MetroWest

Arlington, which has encouraged dense building around its 11 Metro stations, is an urban county of 29 square miles. But Fairfax sprawls across 395 miles, with just five stations. Work and home are severed for most people, since not everyone can commute to an office on a train line.

"Just because you're living next to the Metro doesn't mean you can take the Metro," said Deborah Smith, who lives near the Vienna Metro station.

County supervisors acknowledge that they are seeking to fundamentally change the car-dependent mindset of every suburb outside the Capital Beltway. More traffic, however, is inevitable in Fairfax, which is expected to add 450,000 jobs by 2020.

"In the suburbs, you'll never totally pry people's fingers off their steering wheel," said Supervisor T. Dana Kauffman (D-Lee), chairman of the Metro board. "It becomes a question of minimizing the number of cars out there in the peak periods."

Even outside rush hour, MetroWest will generate thousands of car trips a day. That's a given. If it were built 30 years ago, the area could easy absorb more dwellings. Retrofitting a suburban landscape by dropping in a small city is a different story.

"In theory, it will work," said Lovelace, who lives a little more than a mile from the station. "But it relies on people giving up their automobile. . . . The concept that you can put all those people in a situation and they're going to act the way you want them to is not founded in experience and evidence."

Supporters of the project point to the self-selecting nature of would-be buyers and renters at MetroWest: federal government workers with jobs on the train line, retirees filling almost 400 age-restricted condos, single people who commute to the District or Arlington. And relatively few children.

Connolly acknowledges that his constituents are debating "whether we want transit-oriented development at all."

Philosophically, he said, he is in favor of it. But he said his board must make an educated guess about how much extra traffic the Vienna area can handle.

"It's a question of whether the concerns that have been raised can be addressed. We don't know that yet."