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A 21-minute drive from the White House. A 27-minute drive to Dulles. A 47-minute drive to the training academy at Quantico.

FBI headquarters staff will have an easier time getting to these key locations and others if the federal government moves the agency’s headquarters to Springfield, according to a transportation analysis released Thursday by Virginia and Fairfax County officials.

The numbers suggest that it will take 28 minutes on average to drive to Springfield from 20 locations around the region in the year 2025. That’s less than it will take to get to the same locations from two other sites being considered for the FBI, in Greenbelt (37 minutes) and Landover (36 minutes).

The data also show that traveling by bus and rail will also be quicker getting to Springfield, at 67 minutes, when compared with Greenbelt (69 minutes) and Landover (90 minutes).

In the now three-year-old competition to land the FBI, the Springfield travel analysis rebuts data that Maryland officials presented last year suggesting that more headquarters employees live in that state than in Virginia or the District. That report estimated that 43 percent of headquarters workers lived in Maryland, versus 33 percent in Virginia and 17 percent in DC.

Both arguments rely on some guesswork because the FBI — though it is clamoring to get out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue — has not released information publicly about where its employees live or how they get to work. A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment.

With its analysis, backers of the Springfield site argue that it isn’t so much what state the employees live in but how easy it will be for them to get to work.

“We’ve long debated whether Maryland or Virginia had the highest number of FBI employees,” said Fairfax Supervisor Jeff C. McKay (D-Lee) in a press release. “But this analysis sheds a new light on that argument. It’s actually shorter for many of the agency’s employees, even those living in Maryland, to get to Springfield.”

To determine travel times Fairfax officials used live traffic data combined with travel time estimates from Google and Metro. They used land use forecasts from the Metropolitan Council of Governments to chart how travel would be affected by growth a decade from now, by which time a new headquarters is expected to be open and operating.

Virginia officials compiled the data on 20 heavily populated areas or important FBI locations. The selected locations are slightly skewed, with nine in Virginia, eight in Maryland and three in the District.

Fairfax County Board Chairman Sharon Bulova (D) said in the release that the savings amounted to an average of between three and four hours less commuting over the course of a month, “meaning more productivity and less stress” for FBI employees .

The Springfield traffic analysis also marks a renewed effort in recent weeks from the commonwealth to try to land the FBI, something leaders in Maryland and Prince George’s County have been regularly discussing since the General Services Administration, which is managing the search for the federal government, began the process in earnest more than two years ago.

The GSA is completing environmental analyses of the three sites and has sought interest from private developers interested in acquiring the Hoover Building in exchange for constructing a new headquarters at one of the three sites.

It was expected that the government would select a development partner and site by the end of this summer, but that timeline has been delayed. Last month President Obama nominated Denise Rother Turner to be the next GSA administrator. Turner has been serving as acting administrator after Dan Tangherlini left the post in February.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, along with Reps. Don Beyer, Barbara Comstock and Gerry Connolly, plus Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, issued statements saying the transportation data supported Springfield as the best choice.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/digger/wp/2015/06/04/fairfax-argues-springfield-is-most-convenient-for-fbi-workers/