Eye on Annapolis
What transportation issues we’re watching in the 2019 session of the Maryland General Assembly
Maryland’s 2019 legislative session is underway. Decisions happening between now and the end of session on April 8th hold implications for how people and goods move around the state and the Baltimore region. There are dozens of transportation-related bills being introduced, but what do we think are the two biggest issues at stake? Widening highways in the name of traffic relief, and cutting the Maryland Transit Administration’s budget.
Widening Highways in the name of Traffic Relief
In September 2017, Governor Larry Hogan announced a plan to widen three major Maryland highways: I-270, I-495 (the Capital Beltway), and I-295 (the Baltimore-Washington Parkway). As a first phase in that proposal, the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) is seeking private sector partners to construct four additional lanes on I-270 and I-495. Our concerns with widening highways include:
- Inequitable — it will disproportionately improve mobility for higher income people and those with private automobiles while furthering structural inequities that disadvantage some populations based on age, race, gender, ethnicity, income, location, or physical limitations.
- Opportunity cost — it commits resources that could otherwise be spent on solutions that produce better outcomes.
- Ineffective — widening highways has a poor track record for relieving traffic.
- Water pollution — adding more impervious road surface will increase stormwater runoff into streams, rivers and the Bay.
- Air pollution — it will increase tailpipe emissions, currently the largest source of air pollution in Maryland.
- Land consumption — it will result in conversion of more farmland and natural lands to land covered with asphalt and buildings.
We also want to avoid entering a bad deal for Maryland. There is no free lunch. A private entity may pay for the construction of new lanes now, but only because they believe they will recoup the investment at a profit through collection of toll revenues, payments from the State of Maryland, or a combination over the coming decades.
The private entity will have expensive attorneys prepare a contract that minimizes their risk and maximizes their profits. The contract might prohibit the state from building or maintaining a transit facility or road near the tolled lanes as citizens recently came to find out in Virginia. It might require the state to guarantee payments if the toll revenues do not meet anticipated levels. Or it might prove difficult to get out of if the private sector partner is unable to complete the project as Indiana has experienced.
A U.S. Federal Highway Administration publication warns:
“short-term fiscal limitations can give political decision makers a strong incentive to develop [Public Private Partnership] P3 projects for financing reasons. There have been many examples of poorly structured P3 and privately financed projects that were used to circumvent fiscal limitations while assuming high fiscal risks. Many of these projects were determined to be expensive to taxpayers in hindsight, as they merely qualified as financial leases without equitable risk transfer to the private sector.”
Marylanders should be concerned about any rush to enter a contract without the proper vetting.
Cutting the Maryland Transit Administration’s (MTA) Budget
MDOT plans to cut the MTA’s capital budget by more than half over the next six years. It has removed all projects from its development and evaluation pipeline that would expand transit capacity in greater Baltimore.
That is not what Marylanders want. According to a 2018 Goucher poll, 52% of Marylanders think “the state government spends too little” on public transportation.
It is not good stewardship of our assets. During the past year, the Metro subway underwent a month-long emergency shutdown because of degraded infrastructure. The Central Light Rail also experienced shutdowns for emergency repairs. An analysis of federally-reported data shows that MTA buses suffer mechanical breakdowns 2 to 5 times more often than peer transit agencies along the northeast corridor.
It is not meeting the challenge of climate change. In Maryland and nationally the transportation sector surpassed power generation as the number one source of carbon emissions.
It is widening the gaps between people who can take advantage of the opportunities our regional economy offers and people who face too many barriers. While a person with a car can reach roughly every job in greater Baltimore in an hour or less, a person using public transportation can only reach 9 percent of the jobs.
However, because the MTA is directly accountable to just the Secretary of Transportation and the Governor, the governance structure makes it difficult for the agency to give an independent and honest assessment if its budget needs are not being met.
The Central Maryland Transportation Alliance joins many partners in speaking out about the need to make wise choices about how we spend on transportation. That starts with avoiding bad deals to widen highways and increasing the funding for the MTA.
