What Do a Rail-Trail and a Grocery Store Have in Common?

Stephen Miller (RTC) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:33:00 GMT

Last week, the Safeway grocery store at the Rhode Island Avenue Shopping Center in Washington, D.C., closed its doors. Although the store location was walkable from the Edgewood neighborhood and close to a Metro station, the neighborhood is bisected by a traffic-choked road and a rail line, leaving the shopping center cut off from many potential customers arriving on foot and by Metro. Many elderly residents of the Edgewood Terrace complex had used the Safeway but now must negotiate narrow sidewalks on busy Rhode Island Avenue to access a different supermarket instead.

At NRDC Switchboard, Kaid Benfield took a look at this closing as a case where a potentially transit-oriented neighborhood has the right ingredients but an insufficient connection between development and transit, with the result hurting both businesses and residents:

Craig Muckle, an official for the Safeway chain, told Washington Post writer Hamil R. Harris that the Edgewood Safeway had been unprofitable for a decade: "While we are closer to the Metro, the Giant is more convenient for people coming off the Metro, and it is located in a plaza that is frankly more vibrant."

In addition to the Metro, the rail corridor bisecting the neighborhood is home to the Metropolitan Branch Trail. With the trail comes an opportunity to better connect the neighborhood with its Metro station. The Edgewood section of the trail is being completed this spring, and plans are already under way for a pedestrian bridge between the trail at the shopping center and the Metro faregates. Students of nearby schools and residents of Edgewood Terrace will no longer have to risk walking alongside speeding traffic on Rhode Island Avenue, or jumping a fence to cross active CSX tracks illegally. Along with a mural painted last summer (the city's largest), these new connections provide Edgewood an opportunity for transit- and trail-oriented development.

Rendering of pedestrian bridge concept by The Louis Berger Group

RTC TrailBlog : metropolitan branch, economic impact

What Do a Rail-Trail and a Grocery Store Have in Common?