Silver Spring Transit Center Plods Along

So what exactly is the deal with the Paul Sarbanes Transit Center in Silver Spring? More than a year after groundbreaking, we have a big muddy hole in the ground, with lush grass growing up the sides. Every now and then, you see a back hoe pawing listlessly, moving a little bit of dirt from here to there. Not a lot of progress for one year's work. If you do some serious Googling, you find that the construction company had to move a lot of utility lines that they hadn't planned on. Thus, the delay. Apparently, they have been very busy all this time, but all the activity has been underground. And things are "really going to pop" very soon, according to a recent article in the Silver Spring Gazette. We'll see. In the meantime, here are some useful and not-so-useful links, plus a few pictures that I took from the Metro platform on October 26, 2009, around 9AM.

Montgomery County's project web page, last updated March 16, 2009

Silver Spring Transit Center, a one-entry, one-photo blog, last updated March 8, 2009
Silver Spring Downtown, a local civic-pride-type website states: "Construction on improvements for the area for temporary bus operations during construction will start in the Fall of 2006. Construction on the Transit Center project will start in June of 2007." Note the use of the future tense. Actual groundbreaking date: September 2008.
More recently, someone with a username of obs3rv3r posted a YouTube video showing weekly photos spanning June to September 2009. Just so you can see how truly slowly this thing is moving.
The Silver Spring Gazette has the most recent, and by far the most helpful information. Their article is dated Oct. 21, 2009. The adjective they use is "plodding".