Report: Silver Spring Transit Center Plans Turn 16

This year marks an uncomfortable milestone for the as-yet-unopened Silver Spring Transit Center: Plans for the transit hub turn 16 years old. 

The transit center was scheduled to finally open this summer after years of delays, but when inspectors found cracks in the facility's foundation that led to an independent review of the $120 million structure, it was deemed unsafe and unusable without major repairs. The fixes should begin at the end of this summer. 

The Gazette newspaper archives feature a number of articles from the summer of 1997 when Doug Duncan, former Montgomery County executive, proposed a $20 million facility to better serve the Metrorail, MARC and Metrobus lines that fed into downtown Silver Spring. 

Action Committee for Transit, a Montgomery County advocacy group, said the actual announcement for the center occurred on April 23, 1997. 

“We need the transit center fixed, we need it fixed quickly, and we need it to be safe and durable so we can depend on it for the next 50 years,” Tina Slater, president of the group, said in a statement. “Silver Spring has already waited much too long for this essential facility.”

The group commemorated the anniversary Tuesday by joining 16-year-old Northwood High freshman Mariana Taitano in peppering the neighborhood with flyers about the center's tardiness. Photos of the Eiffel Tower, the Pentagon and the Empire State Building are accompanied by the phrase, "They were built in less time than the Silver Spring Transit Center." 

Haven't been following along? Get caught up on the Silver Spring Transit Center. 

The damaging report by independent firm KCE Engineering found issues with the center's concrete, girders, columns, support beams and, most disturbing for inspectors, an absence of support cabling on one level of the three-tiered facility.

The report also cited inadequcies in the transit center's original design and in the contractual, periodic inspection of the facility. All three companies named in the report—Parsons Brinckerhoff, the center's designer; Foulger-Pratt, the general contractor and Robert B. Balter Company, the inspectors—denied the report's findings about their work.