A rendering of Union Station by the Federal Railroad Administration

Union Station needs a makeover, not only to upgrade its facilities, but also to prepare for expected growth. However, a number of local leaders including DC Councilmember Charles Allen and the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission say that the station is on track to have too much parking, a move which would stifle its function and role in a larger city.

This issue came to a head during a recent National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) meeting which reviewed progress on an environmental review underway for future expansion of the station. You can watch the entire meeting here.

The current station has 2,194 parking spaces (or 2,220 as reported at the meeting) in a large parking garage above the tracks accessible from Columbus Circle and H Street NE. Right now, these serve, in part, people driving and parking to take Amtrak or to shop in the mall which occupies most of the historic station. There are also about 1,300-1,400 people who purchase monthly passes to the garage.

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is leading a process with federal, state, and local agencies to envision a future for the station. Among other things, the train platforms need to be wider in order to accommodate more people coming by train — which means tearing down the entire parking garage, which sits above the tracks. But how big should the new garage be, and where should it be located?

Over the course of the current process to make an Environmental Impact Statement for the station expansion project, FRA is now proposing 1,575 spaces. But many local leaders say that’s still way too many.

In decades past, the area north of Union Station was fairly unused. Now, it’s the bustling NoMa neighborhood, and developer Akridge has won the rights to build offices and residences atop a substantial portion of the rail yard. They and the city agree on a vision of H Street as an active urban street rather than just a back door to the station and its garage. But too many cars coming and going from the station would, residents and leaders say, choke the roads in NoMa and Capitol Hill with cars and interfere with creating a better place. And a 10-story, above-ground garage would isolate the station from the surrounding area.

Leaders say there are too many spaces

In a letter, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6C (which includes Union Station) wrote,

We have grave concerns that the Action Alternatives developed by the FRA to date in the EIS process would significantly and needlessly harm the station and the surrounding neighborhoods. We do not see any Action Alternative to date that meets the goal of a successful integration of the expanded station with either the adjacent neighborhoods or the planned development of the Railroad Air Rights known as the Burnham Place project.

Union Station is a multimodal transportation hub located in the center of the District in a vibrant and growing neighborhood, yet the Action Alternatives to date prioritize private automobile usage and parking over mass transit, walking and biking. These alternatives are contrary to the proposed DC Comp Plan.

We believe there is little need to accommodate private parking at the station, especially where doing so would sacrifice the opportunity for the development of vibrant public spaces, as would occur if a massive above-ground parking garage were constructed.

Furthermore, we believe the Action Alternatives to date include poorly planned station access and circulation for private cars, for-hire vehicles, and local and intercity buses. As currently envisioned, the expanded Union Station would be surrounded by a snarl of cars and buses, creating a barrier to access for the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods and leading to an increase in traffic on the narrow streets of the Capitol Hill historic district.

Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen added in a letter,

“I believe this federally-produced plan would create significant adverse effects for the District of Columbia as well as the surrounding Capitol Hill, Near Northeast, and NoMA neighborhoods in Ward 6. The expansion of Union Station represents a once-in-a-century opportunity for one of the busiest transit hubs in the region, and the largest within the District, that will shape movement in and out of our city for generations to come. The plans released fall well short of capturing the extraordinary potential associated with this important project.”

David Tuchmann of Akridge said in testimony to NCPC,

The 1,575-space garage proposed is based on 1980s-style planning where abundant car parking is essential to support rail travel and shopping downtown. Passengers are rapidly shifting their preferences for how they travel to rail stations and airports as Uber, Lyft and transit replace private car trips.

Amtrak has stated that they do not require parking at the station to serve their passengers. … No other center city passenger rail station in the United States is being planned or built to include customer parking: Denver, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago all include no parking for any uses in their new stations and plans, and Philadelphia and Boston both have fewer than 400 spaces planned.

Why so much parking in the first place?

During the NCPC meeting Beverley Swaim-Staley, president and CEO of the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, the project’s lead proponent, said the proposal is based on “concerns about impacts to K Street, the need to ensure that cars, either individual taxis or shared ride, are not in the neighborhoods, parking in the neighborhoods are circulating in the neighborhoods that buses also are not parking, are impacting neighborhoods, streets that we’re dealing with increased congestion.”

To some extent, this repeats a common debate in urban planning: if people may be driving to something like a train station, how much should planners assume they will do that no matter what, and make lots of space for the cars in the project so that the traffic and loading and unloading don’t just go to the adjacent neighborhood? Or, does the very decision to make space for car uses encourage people to drive, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy?

It’s a question of how much to weight the concept of induced demand, or “if you build it, they will come,” as some speakers pointed out.

At the hearing, DC Council Chairman (and NCPC Commissioner) Phil Mendelson calculated that at 80% average utilization of the 2,200 spaces (a number which was reported at the hearing), minus the monthly parkers, “that leaves 386 that are used on a daily basis.” (that is, by non-monthly pass holders)

Drew Morrison, a transportation planner with VHB, a planning and engineering firm that worked on the EIS, spoke to commission members about how the FRA arrived at their current number of parking spaces.

“What we have done through the EIS process in order to estimate the future demand of the parking facility is try to understand how growth in the program at the facility is going to drive future demand,” he said, adding that the 2012 vision estimated about 5,000 parking spaces, their initial projections suggested 2,700 based on extending current patterns, and then over several drafts and feedback winnowed it down to the current 1,575.

Morrison said an Amtrak survey found that 8% of Amtrak’s 16,000 daily passengers reported they are using the garage, for an average of two days, meaning some from one day overlap the next. Mendelson was skeptical, mainly because of that large number of monthly users. Morrison agreed that the station is not planning the garage around monthly users, but commissioner Thomas Gallas of Maryland said, “I think you shocked all of us when you said it doesn’t include the monthly contract parking, because now it asks us to, even more, yearn for information about what it does include.”

Another factor, as some like commissioner Beth White pointed out, was the revenue associated with the parking. Union Station earns 70% of its revenue from its parking garage, though Tuchmann said that airports are already seeing a 7-8% reduction in their parking revenue from people taking more ride-hailing instead of parking, and so Union Station may not be able to count on the revenue either way.

White also questioned the draft including about 600 spaces for retail (the mall in the station). Mendelson questioned how many people are really going to be driving to the station to go to those shops when there are so many other places like Union Market, the Wharf, U Street, and others on the way; when those shops were established in the 1980s, things were quite different.

Also, where should the parking go?

The EIS recommends the parking garage be above the ground, as the current one is. Tuchmann instead argued it should be below ground to avoid interfering with pedestrian and visual integration between the station and the surrounding area.

He added that the vehicle use which would most affect the neighborhood is when people drive to pick up friends and family, since if the train is late, people will need somewhere to put their car temporarily. Therefore, he sees an underground parking garage of about 100-200 spaces, functioning similarly to an airport cell phone lot, as a useful piece of the station — not a nearly 1,600-space elevated one.

Plus, a smaller garage could fit in many more locations within the overall station footprint than a very large one, he said.

Morrison, however, said that they chose above-ground parking to save time and money. Anything below grade would be partly or wholly below active tracks, making it costly and take more time (and thus disruptive to the surrounding area).

NCPC recommends less parking and more communication

The NCPC staff were not ready to support the parking garage at its current size, and recommended the FRA “right-size” the garage as part of a next step.

Andrew Trueblood, the DC planning director and member of NCPC, said that the part of the plan around improving train operations and the station interior worked well, but that the EIS seemed to treat issues of circulation and local transportation as “secondary” and that after designing for the infrastructure, FRA seemed to “jam in” the other elements.

Trueblood said his agency wouldn’t support calculating the need for parking just by taking the number of people riding the train and applying the 8% number; instead, they’d want to determine “how little do we need to provide, for what reasons, [and] what are the uses for?” He said, “Long term parking in the middle of the city seems not a good use of our resources.”

Commissioner Peter May of the National Park Service and District appointee Arrington Dixon, in addition to agreeing with criticism of the car parking numbers, also argued that Union Station has a problem with having adequate bike parking, and hoped the plans would do enough to meet that need.

On car parking, in the official resolution, NCPC requested that the FRA “substantially reduce the number of parking spaces, and that the applicant, private development partner, and staff work with the District Office of Planning and the District Department of Transportation to evaluate and confirm the appropriate amount of parking given the mix of uses, traffic and urban design impacts, and transit-oriented nature of the project prior to the next stage of review.”

The FRA is supposed to release a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, a robust document explaining the preferred alternative and its impact on its environment, in the spring. Will the plan include less parking than previous iterations? Will it alleviate the concerns of residents and officials? We will be following this story to see what happens next.