News and notes from Reston (tm).

Friday, January 7, 2011

Wiehle Park and Ride Closure Scheduled For Spring Delayed Until... Spring, and What $1.46 Million Gets You in Parking These Days

General Contractor - Gaithersburg, MD - Building a new garage will make room for a boat, or give you the space you need for the workshop you've always wanted.jpegFairfax Connector announced yesterday that the Reston East park and ride lot on Wiehle Avenue will close completely sometime in "Spring 2011," as work begins on the awesome three-car multilevel parking garage for the Wiehle Avenue Metro station. The lot was initially scheduled to close completely by Feb. 27, but the contractors working on the sadly rectangular garage apparently haven't found enough of those orange cones with the blinking lights on top, so they're going to have to stand around somewhere else for a while, maybe install a fanciful bollard or two, etc., until they come in from the manufacturer, but they'll give us a call just as soon as they do, and hey, whaddya want them to do, drive to the bollard factory and fabricate them themselves? Ah, contractors. Right?

Anyhoo, several bus routes have already been shifted to the Reston North lot, which isn't actually in North Reston, in anticipation of the closure, and last month the Board of Supervisors formally approved a lease agreement with Boston Properties that will transform a parcel of property on Sunset Hills Road just south of the Fake Downtown gritty urban core from a vacant parking lot into an interim parking lot, all for the low low price of $1.46 million. That seems pretty steep to fix up and rent a surface parking lot that will be used for a couple of years and then torn down to build a Cheesecake Factory or something, but when you realize that $45,000 of that is allocated to electrical costs, it starts to look like a bargain.

temp parking.jpg
This is what $1.46 million gets you these days, in case you were wondering.

A public meeting will be held to discuss the closure at 7pm Feb. 2, at the North County Government Center.

7 comments:

  1. This new parking facility is right next door to the Offices of the Guys Who Can't Tell The Difference Between Nigerian Yellow Cake Uranium And IHOP Buckwheat Pancakes. Remember to dress appropriately. Tin foil helmets are always fashionable with our without antennas.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow. Boston Properties made out like bandits on this "lease," just like Comstock pretty much got everything it wanted in its "private-public venture" to build the parking garage at Wiehle. Is Fairfax County actively engaging in corporate welfare, or do its negotiators just have really crappy poker faces?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Aw darn! No more runway for my radio control plane videos over RestonTown Center

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEXP_=LYnHK&feature=youtube_gdata_player

    ReplyDelete
  4. From the Uplands of RestonJanuary 7, 2011 at 3:15 PM

    I liked those RCP videos from up, up the long, delirious, burning blue over Democratic Republic of DRB. Thanks for posting those.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I never knew how many people at Reston East were taking those express buses to Pentagon / Crystal City until they moved the buses to Reston North. Now it's actually possible to park at Reston East after 9am, yaaay! For another couple of weeks, anyway...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Another question - does it REALLY take THREE YEARS to build a parking garage? Really? Back in the day, they built the Empire State Building and the Pentagon a lot faster than that. You would think building that garage even before the metro was in operation would make sense...

    ReplyDelete
  7. From the Uplands of RestonJanuary 8, 2011 at 12:07 PM

    Efficient construction gets in the way of the kickbacks, political patronage, and sweet union contracts due our Democratic overlords. You thought it was about stewardship and the mass public? Fool.
    Complain to Hudgens. I dare you.

    ReplyDelete

(If you don't see comments for some reason, click here).