The Crystal City Metro station in Arlington, Virginia has had one entrance for its entire existence. That bottleneck has grown harder to ignore as Amazon's sprawling HQ2 campus fills in around it, and now a $10.25 million federal grant is funding a second way in.
The money, drawn from the federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program, will pay for a new entrance at the northwest corner of Crystal Drive and 18th Street South: street-level elevators and stairs, fare gates, a fare payment area, and an underground passageway connecting to a new mezzanine at the train platform. The grant flows through the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation.
The station sits on WMATA's Blue and Yellow lines and was already one of the busiest in Northern Virginia before Amazon arrived, drawing Pentagon workers, hotel visitors, and residents of one of the region's densest corridors. Daily ridership ran roughly 10,000 to 12,000 before the pandemic. With Amazon's offices continuing to fill and Virginia Tech's Innovation Campus under construction nearby, county planners project the area's daily population could roughly double.
The transit strain was predictable. When Virginia agreed in 2018 to provide $195 million in infrastructure incentives to land Amazon's second headquarters, improved Metro access was explicitly part of the deal. The Crystal City east entrance has appeared in Arlington's National Landing planning documents since at least 2019 and 2020. Getting the money in place has taken longer.
Building a second entrance to an existing underground station is among the more complex and expensive things a transit agency can do. It requires tunneling and tying into infrastructure that was never designed for a second connection, which is why WMATA has studied second entrances at multiple stations over the years and built very few. The nearby Potomac Yard station, which opened in 2023 as an entirely new facility, cost approximately $370 million, giving some sense of the scale involved in underground rail work in the region.
Amazon's expansion has not moved in a straight line. The company paused construction on its Phase 2 headquarters tower in 2023 amid broader tech sector layoffs, raising questions about how quickly the promised 25,000 jobs will materialize. That uncertainty hangs over the transit math: the station improvements are designed for a build-out that is still in progress.
The grant was posted in April 2026. Construction timelines have not been publicly announced, and Arlington County has not said when the new entrance is expected to open.
