Benefits of the Purple Line Expansion in College Park

Colleges are the perfect place for walkable neighborhoods, yet many colleges don’t focus on Transit Oriented Development. The Purple line going through the University of Maryland is a key expansion point for the D.C metro and will allow greater connections between D.C and the University of Maryland. These benefits don’t just stay within the community of the universities they expand to the entire community. Washington D.C grew by 13% from 2010 and 2020 and those additional people could put a strain on the road infrastructure of D.C.  While the Purple Line can seem like a failed government project over transit as it has been proposed for decades and construction had started in 2017 that is not the case. Contractor issues and the Covid-19 pandemic have delayed construction and pushed the competition date to 2027 making the entire project taking a decade.While there has been opposition to the purple line it will have net positive benefits for the Maryland suburbs and college park residents and students.

College Park is not the first college town within a major metro area to get a new metro line and other cities which have gotten metro lines have benefited. Tempe is a boom town suburb within the Phoenix metro area which is home to Arizona State with approximately 60k students. Tempe created its own streetcar which primarily serves the college areas near Tempe and last year had 800k riders within 3 years of opening the system. Tempe as a whole had 6.7 million riders continuing an increase in ridership which was outpacing population growth similar to the D.C metro.  Having a new transit system that gains ridership which is over 12x more than the population of university students can have important impacts on congestion across the city. A 2009 Study showed that when transit ceased in an area average highway delays increased 47% and as D.C and Phoenix both primarily rely on highways for means of transportation adding transit can reduce congestion within D.C highways.

Similarly to how Tempe benefited from transit the Purple Line in will reduce congestion in College Park. While Maryland already has a few metro lines along with Bus Lines; the new purple line will add 21 new metro stations, 5 of which are located around the University of Maryland’s campus. The University admin is even promoting the new rail system saying that “ The Purple Line will provide more accessible and reliable transportation for students, faculty, and staff” . Studies show that people prefer rail transit by 75% compared to buses when the service is comparable. While people in Maryland can get around in buses, they currently they cannot connect to the rest of D.C and Maryland via rail and people will now be able to get around via rail because the purple line will connect people around the D.C suburbs within Maryland.