The D.C. Council approved hundreds of millions of dollars for Metro upgrades addressing challenges getting fans to and from the new Washington Commanders football stadium.
Metro will be a huge piece of the development at the old RFK Stadium site, and the D.C. Council just voted in favor of $300 million to renovate and add capacity to the Stadium-Armory station, which could serve more than 30,000 fans before and after games.
The station needs work.
It has one elevator for the entire station, which is all the way at the opposite end of the platform from the new stadium.
The stadium-side entrance only has three escalators. They must blow out an entire wall and put in new escalators, possibly a new entrance.
The whole station must change.
Council approved another $5 million to dramatically change the H Street corridor, once again. This time for the so-called Gold Line – a plan for fast-moving buses that will connect Union Station to the stadium.
“A center-run bus rapid transit,” D.C. Councilmember Charles Allen said this week. “If we want to go make the same mistakes and put the bus just right there with streetcar track, we could do that. I wouldn’t recommend it, ‘cause that’s not going to be a great use of our tax dollars. But, as some of my ANC commissioners and businesses on H Street said, if we’re going to do this thing, let’s do this. It’s not worth it to mess it up.”
The $5 million the Council approved for the Gold Line is for studying it, not building it. The potential cost overruns don’t appear to have been discussed.
A sports economist told the News4 I-Team if this $300 million plus for transit upgrades could be better used for improvements in other places not tied to a football stadium, this could all turn out to be one big misallocation of taxpayer money.
Metro said it appreciates the D.C. Council approving the funding and looks forward to getting fans to and from the RFK complex.