Great article on a $10 billion proposal to remake the station and area around Washington DC's Union Station.
QuoteThis new Union Station would go well beyond the ambitions of Daniel Burnham's original Beaux-Arts masterpiece. Its footprint would span 10 square blocks — two blocks east to west, five blocks north to south, from the foot of Capitol Hill to K Street. And to accommodate the additional parking, the underground concourses, the new bus and Metro stations and new tracks for high-speed rail, the complex would extend five levels underground.
Directly above the tracks, a whole new neighborhood of offices, hotels, residences and shops would be constructed around an elevated plaza bisected by the new H Street streetcar. Along the western edge of the project, an elevated bike and walking path, planted in the manner of New York's High Line, would run north to Silver Spring. Along the east, perhaps an open-air market serving both commuters and nearby residents of Capitol Hill.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2014/09/12/reimagining-union-station-2/
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Waste of money! Amtrak could get a whole lot of things done with 10 billion dollars!
Amtrak owns the NEC, and with it the Union Station, along with USDOT and some commuter carriers. 100,000 person trips daily make it the busiest place in DC. The air rights for the new development over the tracks brought in a cool $10M. The new source of revenue from all of the surrounding buildings on NEC land will go a long way toward helping Amtrak's bottom line.
Quote from: SightseerLounge on September 14, 2014, 07:40:59 PM
Waste of money! Amtrak could get a whole lot of things done with 10 billion dollars!
QuoteDesign aside, the most significant hurdle to the Union Station master plan is its price tag.
It starts with an estimated $6.5 billion for expanding and improving the station, which includes the tracks, the renovated and expanded passenger concourses, the new train shed, demolition of the old parking garage and construction of 3,500 new spaces underground.
Doubling the commuter traffic into Union Station will also require upgrading and expanding the commuter station at L'Enfant Plaza, rebuilding and doubling the track capacity on the century-old Long Bridge over the Potomac, and adding track and storage capacity in Maryland and Virginia. Figure another $1 billion for those.
Above the tracks, Akridge plans to spend $1.5 billion in private funds to develop the hotels, offices, shops and residences of what it calls Burnham Place, designed by Washington architect Shalom Baranes. The city has already approved replacing the bridge over H Street — a key component of the Union Station project — at an estimated cost of nearly $200 million.
And below the tracks, Metro envisions an enlarged "superstation," part of a new "inner loop" of stations that by 2040 would connect Union Station to the Blue, Orange and Silver lines. The existing Red Line station, already the busiest in the Metro system, also needs more capacity, as well as better connections to the street and train station. Metro has not released any cost estimates for what it wants to do at Union Station, but it's a safe bet that these add another $1 billion to the project.
Add it all up and it comes to at least $10 billion in public and private investment. And that doesn't include the additional billions it would cost for a new set of underground tracks and platforms for intercity high-speed rail, the fourth and final phase of the station redevelopment master plan.