> At $200m and 10 years though (and counting), I wish a subway system expansion would have been implemented. Nice thought, but not realistic. Firstly, $200 mi

> At $200m and 10 years though (and counting), I wish a subway system expansion would have been implemented. Nice thought, but not realistic. Firstly, $200 million for full metrorail construction is way low. The NoMA station cost over $100 million, and was an above-ground infill station that required no new track. That was just the cost to build a new station. The Potomac Yard station in Virginia is budgeted in the $210-$270 million range, and is also infill and above ground, but will require a slight track rerouting. An H Street station, if it were even possible (and I'm skeptical because the whole area is riddled with other rail infrastructure) would involve new underground track through newly bored tunnels, and a new underground station. I bet $200 million is off by at least a factor of two. Secondly, even if the city did want to spend the money on it, they wouldn't be able to. DC can't unilaterally spend money on Metro; all new construction has to be divided amongst eight different jurisdictions according to a legislatively pre-determined formula, and the WMATA board (which has representatives from all the jurisdictions on it) has to vote to approve it. This basically never happens for new construction in the city, because DC is a minority on the board and none of the suburban jurisdictions want to pay for core infrastructure, only extensions. DC has taken to replicating more and more of WMATA's services under its DOT umbrella just to avoid having to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare and mismanagement of the transit authority. The (wildly successful) Circulator bus system is an example of this, as it in some cases directly overlaps with WMATA bus service. The streetcar would have been another such attempt. Third: if by some miracle DC could get agreement on justifying new underground metrorail construction and pull the funding together for it, H St. would be nowhere near the top of the list of priorities. Metro has major rush-hour capacity issues that are in dire need of addressing, and a random spur out to H St. wouldn't help with any of them. New construction should go towards an additional Potomac crossing north of Rosslyn, and a separated Blue line running north of the current blue/orange/silver shared track. This has been proposed to run along M, and could conceivably eventually serve Georgetown, Logan circle, and Union station. (None of this is to say the streetcar project isn't a clusterfuck. It is. WMATA just isn't the answer.)