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exist elsewhere."

With offices, shops and housing near Metro, the station becomes as much destination as origin. Trains are full coming and going.

That's not the case for most suburban Metro stations. "Most of the trains leave most of the stations most of the time essentially empty," said Ed Risse, a Vienna-based consultant who has closely studied the link between urban development and public transit systems such as Metro. "In the morning, it's crowded and uncomfortable. But going in at midday and out in the morning, there are huge amounts of unused capacity. Looking ahead to the next 30 years, we need to much more efficiently use that capacity."

Other Approaches

Fairfax County, meanwhile, largely squashed attempts to develop commercial and retail property around its Orange Line Metro stations. Risse worked on five different projects to develop land around the Vienna Metro station - they all failed to win approval. County supervisors said they recognize that some development may be healthy at some stations and have approved a new zoning category that allows higher-density projects near Metro.

But Risse said the county is far from ready to embrace "transit villages."

"If you undertake transit-related development at Vienna or any of those stations, it's a long, acrimonious process," he said. "There are vocal people who want to drive to the station, park and use it. A larger group wants others to drive to the station so they can keep driving. And the third group lives near the station and doesn't want anything built there."

By contrast, Prince George's County has struggled to lure developers to its Metro stations. Most of its larger employers near Metro stations are federal agencies. Many of its stations are hard to reach by foot and are surrounded by large parking lots or garages.

"Prince George's took a $10 billion investment and put it on the shelf," Schwartz said. "The bottom line is, today there are four spurs of the Metro system in Prince George's - more than any other jurisdiction - and very little development."

Prince George's planners forecast little additional development 25 years from now. Using projections made by local counties, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments created a map that predicts regional development by 2025. It shows that Prince George's officials expect few projects to be built around their Metro stations.

Metro was one of the first transit agencies in the country to sell or lease land it owns near stations. To date, Metro has approved about 40 such projects, of which 27 have been built and generate about $6 million in annual revenue for the agency. Metro has identified about 400 additional acres it wants to develop.

Roads and Rails

Critics, such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, say Metro could be more aggressive in developing projects around its stations and that too much land is devoted to parking and roads. The environmental group says Metro should instead develop shops, offices and restaurants so people would ride the trains to - as well as from - the station, to invigorate the community. But Metro General Manager Richard A. White said the system has historically stayed out of local affairs.

Meanwhile, the road network carries the load that Metro can't. The high-tech corridor of Northern Virginia, the biotech community in Montgomery County and the Navy's expanding air station in Southern Maryland are fed by congested highways or the overwhelmed Capital Beltway.

While 40 percent of the region rides mass transit into the core of Washington, the remaining 60 percent travel by automobile. And when you consider the total number of daily trips taken throughout the Washington region - including outer suburbs far from Metro - the percentage carried by transit drops to about 5 percent.

"There's just a limited number of people who can use it," said Bob Chase, of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance. "If you live in Ballston and work in Farragut Square, fine. But that's not a lot of people."

Still, the subway has a strong public image. In a recent poll of riders and non-riders conducted by Metro, 69 percent said they felt positively or very positively about Metro.

"Most people are for mass transit because they believe everyone else can use it," Chase said. "They're driving down the road and they're thinking, 'Gee, if we only had transit, everyone else would ride it and get out of my way.'‚"

Even as they celebrated the completion of the original system, Metro officials were working on three

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