How Silver Spring’s transit center plan grew into a fiasco

[marmar]

from the WaPo:




At the low point in the boom-bust-boom history of Silver Spring, the biggest downtown in the Washington suburbs was in desperate straits. From the mid-1960s through the next decade, storefronts emptied out fast. Some morphed into low-rent adult bookstores or churches catering to immigrants. Crime spiked.

Even when Metro opened its first suburban station in Silver Spring in 1978, little changed. The subway was sparking development in the District, but in Silver Spring, the station sat alone, surrounded by body shops and vacant lots.

If Metro was going to be the game-changing investment that planners had promised, something more had to be done. Montgomery County hatched a plan: The Silver Spring Transit Center — a snazzy terminal that would link Metro, the MARC commuter train and the county’s bus system — would cost $26 million, but it would connect to a new residential-retail complex, fill in a crucial gap at the core of the business district and help lure pedestrians to new shops and arts facilities.

Today, 23 years after the county spent $8 million to buy the land for the transit center, two decades after the federal government provided the first $1.5 million to design it and more than six years after construction finally began, the Silver Spring Transit Center sits behind chain-link fencing, its new bus benches still shrink-wrapped. Although the facility is supposedly 95 percent finished, it is crippled by major structural flaws. Dangerous cracks in the building are warning signs that chunks of concrete could fall onto pedestrians, and all sides agree that complex lawsuits lie ahead for the worst building fiasco in county history. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/how-silver-springs-transit-center-plan-grew-into-a-fiasco/2013/05/20/7f2fb1c6-b986-11e2-aa9e-a02b765ff0ea_story.html?tid=pm_local_pop