A friend and I were to meet two weeks ago at Camden Yards to watch a Baltimore Orioles baseball game. An hour before game time, it was pouring with a forecast for steady showers until midnight. I was still driving back from Newport News, trying to make the game by at least the third inning. My friend left eastern Loudoun County at 4:00 for the 7:30 game. He just made it just in time to wait 30 minutes before the game was called – after the brave souls who showed up spent their dinner money at the park. I won’t miss rooting for Pete Angelos’s team.
Baseball will always be my favorite sport – at least to watch. If the Montreal Expos move to Northern Virginia, I’m sure I’ll slog out to watch a lot more than I do the O’s.
But slog out is what I’ll precisely do. I live just outside the Beltway in central Fairfax County. Yesterday, the Northern Virginia group trying to get the Expos to relocate here presented their vision of the stadium and surrounding development in Loudoun County. The spot is just inside the Loudoun/Fairfax border.
Loudoun officials were in attendance touting the benefits to the county. But as Washington Post’s columnist Marc Fisher noted this morning, “Not a soul from the Fairfax County government was at yesterday’s announcement, even though a good slugger could hit a baseball from the stadium site across the county line into Fairfax.”
Why not?
The potential impact on Northern Virginia’s clogged roads remained unclear. [Vice president of transportation consultant Transcore James E.] Curren’s analysis showed that a typical 40-minute commute at 5:30 p.m. from Tysons Corner to Ashburn along the Dulles Toll Road would increase by two to four minutes on a game night, he said. The key congestion challenge, he said, is having enough entrances to the stadium to keep fans’ cars from plugging roads outside the development.
Unclear impact? Fairfax County officials were clearly not there because Loudoun County will get all the financial benefits and Fairfax will get all the traffic headaches.
Project developers have pledged tens of millions in road improvements, including a new interchange with the Dulles Toll Road, an interchange at what is now Innovation Drive and Route 28, and a link between the stadium and the Dulles Greenway. A Smart Tag, an electronic card similar to the EZPass, could be used to pay parking fees to streamline entrance to the park, the developers said. A shuttle service from a Metro station could serve as a stopgap pending a planned Metro extension to Dulles, they said.
Metro to Dulles? Not in my lifetime the ways things are going. I love baseball, but I’m not sure if, having nothing but “pledges,” I’ll be attending too many games. Rt. 28, along which the stadium will be built, is already a parking lot heading south during rush hour. It will see more cars added in that direction and probably enough in the other direction to clog it, too.
Meanwhile, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner said he supports the Loudoun County effort. “My first choice would be a Virginia site, my second choice would be the district, but I do think the national capital area deserves a team,” Warner said.
As Norfolk also has a bid in and the Governor thinks the capital area should get a team, where does that leave Norfolk? Hmmmm.