How Metro Shapes D.C.

Socially, the story is more complicated, exposing the downsides of the system's success. Metro construction destroyed many neighborhood businesses, and now Metro access threatens to make the areas so desirable that high rents will displace longtime residents as surely as bulldozers would have.

In the suburbs, Metro's achievements are also mixed. The Arlington and Montgomery county boards were particularly farsighted in seizing the opportunity to shape their communities. They carefully selected transit routes that would steer development to favored corridors, enacted zoning laws to encourage density near stations, and faced down opposition by not-in-my-back-yard opponents.

The results are mixed-use places such as Ballston and Bethesda, areas where cars, although not banned, are optional. Unfortunately, not all suburban counties were so attentive. Twice -- in the 1960s and again in the 1970s -- Fairfax County missed chances to route rail through Tysons Corner, and only now are such plans again being considered. Rail can transform a place, but only when combined with careful and insistent planning.

Even as it shapes the surface, Metro has itself become one of the region's grand public spaces, bringing together black and white, rich and poor, young and old, urban and suburban, local and tourist to mingle in the stations and on the trains. And to do so in not purely utilitarian surroundings, reflected in Harry Weese's grand vaults and the trains' carpeted interiors.

None of this was cheap; Metro cost about $20 billion in 2001 dollars. But its creators were not looking for the cheapest transportation solution. Rather, they hoped to use transit to build a better Washington. Nor was the process fast. The construction cranes just now appearing alongside some of Metro's first stations show that it can take decades for rail to bring the kind of development planners wish for.

Nonetheless, today's Washingtonians are the beneficiaries of a vision that was fought for and put into motion a generation ago. If they are grateful, they will repay the favor by laying more groundwork for the next generation.

zschrag@gmu.edu

Zachary M. Schrag is an assistant professor of history at George Mason University and author of "The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro" (Johns Hopkins University Press).