Seen Manasas VA recently. It's horrible. Don't go there. It used to be rural outside the beltway. The Beltway has devoured it whole and is spitting out the detritus into the ugliest mess you have ever seen in your life. It is a suburban hell.
Agreed. I've lived in DC for 40 years. I came to work on the Hill and have always lived on the Hill. My views are very much colored by living through the post-Marion Barry DC renaissance, of which Capitol Hill gentrification was one of the iconic success stories. But the rolling disaster of suburban gridlock is appalling. There are great neighborhoods all over the metro area. People need to get serious about living closer to their jobs. And if you live somewhere like Manassas, take the train.
I'm not knocking suburban neighborhoods per se. Many of them are wonderful. But the moment you get out on a main road, it's a disaster. There is simply no way to build enough new roads, or to add enough lanes to existing roads. It's a physical impossibility. Densification is a reality whether the car nuts want to hear it or not, and a first corollary to densification ought to be a planning focus on walkable, bikeable neighborhoods to allow people to minimize use of their cars.
On the Hill, over 60 percent of people do not drive to work. Kids walk home from school (usually starting in 5th grade). High school kids attend school all over the city and inner ring suburbs, and they mostly get themselves home. People walk to the parks, walk to Eastern Market, walk to H Street and 8th Street for restaurants and bars, etc. It's how city neighborhoods are supposed to work, and historically did before most people bought into car culture. The question is to what degree this can be replicated in other parts of the city (a lot) and in denser suburbs as well (tbd).
Take Tyson's as an extreme example. The daytime population is over 100,000. Fewer than 20,000 people live there, and that's counting the Tyson's "metro area," which includes big chunks of Vienna and McLean. But virtually everyone drives everywhere; the typical Tyson's person would get into his car to cross the street -- and given the barrier roads, he might have to. If I recall correctly (I'm not going to go hunting for the statistic now), 97 percent of Tyson's workers commute by car, despite the availability of bus and metro, and despite the presence of a lot of housing with a one mile (walkable), five mile (faster to bike than to drive), and ten mile (easily bikeable for young adults) radius. And even if you tried to bike or walk, the spaghetti bowl mess of roads would make it unpleasant and unnecessarily cumbersome. This is the product of 50 years of development by people who worshipped the car and never stopped to consider the problems of overbuilding.
But think of Tyson's if 50 percent of the people working there got out of their cars. Over time, this can be done. Look at Crystal City, which has become attractive, or the Ballston-Clarendon corridor. Fairfax County now wants to "urbanize" Tysons, and this is all to the good, but if Fairfax had done some very simple things from the start, retrofitting would be far faster and cheaper than it is going to be. 100,000 people is much too big to be a shopping center/office park. It needs to be a town. Unfortunately, it wasn't built as one, and it was planned in ways that make turning it into a town unnecessarily hard.