Two problems with your utopia. First, you will be illegally mugged. Second, you will be legally mugged by the DC govt. Apartments in the orange line corridor are $5000 for a reason.
My starting point is DC area traffic. The word "utopia" has no place in the discussion. Neither does the word "solutions." Traffic here is miserable, and it is only going to get worse. We need to be talking about mitigation and adaptation, and the primary adaptation will be people living closer to their jobs.
This is already happening via gentrification and the development of suburban job centers in the emerging edge cities. $5,000 apartments on the orange line corridor should be a clue. That's far too expensive for most folks -- but really, does it suggest to you that we need more affordable housing 30 miles out so that even more middle income people can spend four to six hours a day in their cars? Or does it suggest that we need to build a lot more functional equivalents of the orange line corridor, and that there is substantial pent-up consumer demand for closer-in living?
Some people will opt for cars and long commutes. Their choice. Fine with me. But as the sprawl and congestion spiral down to the seventh circle of hell, it makes sense to me to start building off ramps.
DC is full of extraordinary neighborhood renaissance stories. A common denominator is that these areas are being rebuilt for mixed use and intermodal transportation options. DC government now understands that the more people who can be enticed out of their cars, the better. And that means building neighborhoods that are walkable and bikeable, with a mix of jobs, residential, and retail, with good public transit, and with amenities to which people would rather walk than drive. Check out the waterfront, Nats Park and M St. SE, H Street NE, U Street, Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Bethesda, Del Ray, Old Town Alexandria, the Buzzard Point redevelopment (in a very early stage), etc., etc., etc. It's happening just about anywhere you look in the central core.
The big question is whether the emerging edge cities will look ahead and build some of this stuff in while it can be done relatively easily. I use Tyson's Corner as a great negative example. I believe Tyson's is still Virginia's largest office center. Professor Wikipedia says it's the 12th largest employment center in the U.S. Its daytime population is over 100,000 -- and 97 percent of them drive to work.
When you stop to think about it, that's insane. Tyson's is not the backside of the moon. It was originally nothing more than a crossroads on the border of McLean and Vienna. It became a strategic crossroad when the beltway was planned, and the rest is history. But there it sits: a massive office and retail complex in the middle of McLean and Vienna with Annandale, Falls Church, Arlington, and Fairfax not far away.
Draw a line one mile outside the boundary (a walking commute) and another five miles out (an easy bike commute), and you have an enormous stock of attractive middle and upper middle class housing. But Tyson's is so moated by expressways, and so pedestrian unfriendly within its footprint, that virtually no one finds it viable to do anything other than drive. Can you spell "bad planning?"
Fairfax County is now planning to "urbanize" Tysons, building around the four new Silver Line stops. In 20 years, Tyson's may be semi-habitable. The humanization of Crystal City and the success of the Ballston-Clarendon corridor are examples to keep in mind. But it will be a long, slow process. It would have been better to build initially with a more balanced plan. Which brings me back to the decisions that the emerging edge cities are making today.
The automobile commute works well in smaller cities. No disagreement there. But when congestion reaches the choking point, the idea that you can live 30 miles from your job and expect government to build you an uncongested expressway to work is no longer viable. The DC-Baltimore-et.al Combined Statistical Area -- which is what you have to look at in thinking about transportation -- is now the fourth largest in the country, behind New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. We have almost 10 million people. We're bigger than Dallas, Houston, Philly, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, etc.
Old ideas die hard, and a lot of people remember DC as the sleepy semi-southern town of their youth, now starting to grow up. That's long gone. We ain't playing the same game as Des Moines, Omaha, and Indianapolis. But I would suggest to Des Moines, Omaha, Indianapolis, and their peers that they take a good look at what happens if and when they get big -- and do some smart planning to preserve or create walkable, bikeable, closer-in neighborhoods for people who will very likely prefer them anyhow. It really is liberating not to live your life around a commute. Those who want to drive can still drive. And their commutes will be improved if we can get a lot of the people in the center city and inner ring suburbs out of their cars.
Again, I live in a neighborhood where over 50 percent of people do not drive to work. We have many job centers around the metro area where this pattern could be established if we did some reasonable planning to accommodate it. At a minimum, the exurban car lobby should not be allowed to smash these areas by driving poorly planned roads through them without adequate mitigation (e.g., tree buffers, sound walls, bike baths, plentiful crossing points so neighborhoods are not irreparably splintered, etc.).
A hundred years ago, DC was ringed by trolley line suburbs, the remnants of which still exist in scattered, and often very charming, historic districts in our suburban towns. That's probably a better model for the future than the impossible dream of building more expressways into the core.