This is essentially what happened in northern Virginia, where Metro’s western Orange Line extension took the new subway through an area that had originally developed around streetcars. By any measure, that investment has paid off. Indeed, over the last decade, a full 70 percent of the population growth in Arlington County occurred in less than 6 percent of the county’s land area, that being the census blocks in closest proximity to the five Orange Line Metro stops. Now 40 percent of the residents in these census blocks use transit to get to work.14
