Hogan’s idea to widen Washington-area highways to add toll lanes has hit barriers before

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s proposal to add toll lanes to three of the most congested highways in the Washington suburbs reaches beyond similar proposals that stalled over the years after being deemed too expensive or disruptive to adjacent communities.

Hogan’s $9 billion plan would add four toll lanes each to Maryland’s portion of the Capital Beltway (I-495) and to I-270 from the Beltway to Frederick. It would also widen the Baltimore-Washington Parkway by four toll lanes.

The project would be built using a public-private partnership in what Hogan (R) has said would be the largest such deal for highways in North America.

The success of Hogan’s plan hinges, in part, on whether the private companies can figure out what state planners haven’t been able to: how to add four cost-effective toll lanes without having to demolish dozens, and potentially hundreds, of homes and businesses.

“They’re putting a plan on the table, so I think the burden is on them to show how it would be done with the environmental and right-of-way questions we have,” Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) said.

Leggett added that he welcomes any attempt to ease gridlock in the region but questions the viability of Hogan’s proposal. “I just think it will be very difficult to accommodate all that,” he said.

A 2004 analysis found that four additional lanes could fit on Maryland’s portion of the Beltway if they were double-decked 80 feet in the air — an idea rejected as prohibitively expensive and impractical.

A 2009 look at the northern part of I-270 determined that adding four toll lanes would require razing up to 250 homes and 10 businesses — a possibility that contributed to Montgomery leaders calling for two less-disruptive, reversible lanes.

I like Larry Hogan but this proposal is foolish. Short explanation of why: go up to Urbana, jump off I-270, and drive back along 355/Wisconsin Avenue. The area is rapidly developing. It is still predominately unbuilt, but the corridor is in the loose diarrhea stage of suburban sprawl. There are subdivisions littered randomly in all directions across the fast-disappearing farms. There are enough office parks and shopping centers thrown in to give a flavor of the 30 mile strip of blight that will soon line the main roads all the way in. Enough of this has already been built that the major suburban roads are already in place, and they are already congested. When the area builds out fully, tripling or quadrupling in population to Annandale or Rockville densities, it will be an utter disaster. The idea that everyone is going to hop over to a widened 270 for a ride into DC is ludicrous. All that a widened 270 will be in 20 years is a wider parking lot.

If I had a big pot of transportation money and was told that I had to spend it on roads (not the smartest place to spend it, btw), I'd prioritize two things over widening lanes on the existing interstates. First, we need better lateral movement around the beltway. The inter-suburban commute is worse than the commute downtown. The existing road net was built to speed suburban commuters downtown; it's a classic hub and spokes design. But since DC is at maximum congestion already for cars, much of the recent growth has been, and most of the future growth will be, in emerging job hubs well outside the urban core. The action in DC is gentrification, but around the metro area as a whole, the real hot spots are the emerging edge cities. Trying to move from Germantown to Rockville, Silver Spring, College Park, Landover, etc. is worse than trying to get downtown.

The other thing I'd rank over widening 270 and the beltway would be creating more crossings so traffic can get across the dad-gummed interstates, which might as well be the Mississippi River. I've not seen any studies on it, but my guess is that a significant share of the theoretically avoidable congestion on 270 and the beltway (and I-66 and I-395 in Virginia) is intersuburban traffic that is forced onto the interstates because you can't get across them.

Ultimately, however, the homebuilders will throw up houses faster than the highway engineers can build new roads. All new arterial roads will go to capacity the moment they open. All they will do is encourage even more sprawl further out. Most people are simply going to have to live closer to their jobs. This is already happening. It drives gentrification in the city and inner ring suburbs. It is driving the development of the edge cities. The main thing, as these new areas build up, is to avoid the automobile monoculture of the 1950's-70's that created the problems we now face. Which is why, if we do spend a ton of money on new highway capacity, a first consideration should be to do no harm to the close-in neighborhoods which are now home to people who have made more sensible decisions about where to live. Don't destroy or degrade these neighborhoods. If your commute is too long, move there.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.