Time to re-boot Maryland's transit!

Governor Hogan held a conciliatory, short and mostly factual State of the State speech which was a relief compared to the hot air delivered the night before in Congress. Maybe Hogan's speech was most remarkable for what was not said, which, given that the speech lasted only 23 minutes, is a lot.

Wall to wall asphalt: More lanes for the DC beltway?

Notably, any talk about transportation was limited to mentioning asphalt when the Gov boasted that under his reign a third of all of Maryland's State roads had already been re-paved. It takes some guts to put such black-top euphoria into the achievement column in the year 2018 at a time when most of American State and local leaders have realized that nobody can pave his or her way out of traffic. Hogan and his DOT Secretary Rahn are pretty alone in thinking that building more lanes will solve congestion. To give this so-last-century idea a touch of innovation, Rahn likes to stress that he isn't just proposing any old lane addition, but HOT lanes, i.e. flexible price toll lanes which are also called Lexus lanes because they require very high tolls to be built in a private-public partnership as envisioned.  Some transportation experts calculated that tolls would amount to up to $45 per trip and that was exactly the amount that was recently charged on an existing toll lane on I-66 near DC.

Maryland is the third-worst state to drive in, a report by WalletHub says.
Maryland was brought down by poor performances in several of WalletHub’s categories, including rush-hour congestion, average commute time and miles driven per person. (source)

The Virginia Transportation Secretary helpfully explained that the exorbitant I-66 tolls are designed to keep people from driving alone in their cars.

 “Hooray, that’s what we want … Squeezing out the single drivers, that’s what the policy is.” (Aubrey Lane, VDOT Secretary)

I am pretty sure that is not how Hogan sees it. More alarming than his belief in pavement is his absence of any new plans or investments for transit and the fact that he didn't even mention transit in his speech. Somehow this administration thinks that it can get re-elected with only the Purple Line as its transit credential, a project the Gov reluctantly inherited from his predecessor and which he greatly de-funded. Pressed to talk about transit in the Baltimore region by legislators in a hearing of the  Environment and Transportation Committee on Thursday, Secretary Rahn was heard mumbling something about "looking at policies to continually assess and evaluate the performance of Link”, the bus reform which proved to be much less of a transit revolution than Hogan-Rahn wanted Baltimoreans to believe when  he initially announced it as a consolation price for the canned the Red Line. Rahn also likes to mention the millions spent on the Baltimore light rail overhaul and the new Baltimore Metro trains as prove that he isn't anti transit, both maintenance projects that long predate this administration and were simply unavoidable.

Wall to wall asphalt: 1/3 of the roads repaved in 3 years

$135 million for buses over six years versus $2.9 billion for the Red Line had to produce a dud, how could it not?  This particularly bad trade can only be sold as reasonable to the city haters in the deep red rural hinterlands of Hogan's home turf but not in a congested urban area that is suffering from a number of systemic constraints, particularly poor transit.

So here we are three years after the cancellation of the Red Line with a Purple Line that is limping along and there is still no long-term plan for any transit initiative in the entire State! That is especially irksome since the administration keeps collecting the higher gas taxes that were raised with the express purpose of funding three major State transit projects, the Red Line, the Purple Line and the Corridor Cities Transitway CCT, dollars now squandered for widening rural roads without traffic.

Building your way out of congestion?

Transportation is clearly Hogan's Achilles heel. His return of $900 million federal dollars promised for the Red Line without proper reasoning, the subsequent total lack of long-term transit planning, the naive hope that the Japanese would magically give Maryland a futuristic Maglev train that as a fancy toy goes from DC's Union Station to nowhere in particular in Baltimore, and his multi billion dollar beltway toll lane plans are all blunders that a densely populated highly urbanized State with a rich history in transportation can ill afford, especially if the State wants to remain competitive. The Governor has gotten away with his transportation dilettantism long enough. High time lawmakers put an end to the charade.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

HB 0372, Maryland Metro Funding Act
HB 0816, Bill to limit non-compete clauses in public private partnerships.

DOT website document: roads and more roads