Posted on 11/27/2017 12:57:04 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
ROCKVILLE, Md. — A month after Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan introduced it, Maryland’s Secretary of Transportation Pete Rahn went in front of Montgomery County leaders to lay out a $9 billion project that aims to ease congestion on Interstate 270, the Capital Beltway and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.
Rahn believes construction of the project can begin in fewer than five years.
“We have to recognize we have problem. It’s a multifaceted problem, and we have to come up with multifaceted solutions,” Rahn told members of the Montgomery County Council’s Transportation, Infrastructure, Energy, and Environment committee Thursday.
Packed roads cost drivers time, as well. The state found the Beltway sees 10 hours of congestion on average each day during the workweek, and I-270 and MD 295 both see seven hours of heavy traffic daily.
“If we can address this problem in a substantial way, it will mean people will have more time,” said Rahn.
The state’s plan includes adding express lanes to all three highways. On the Beltway, a public-private partnership will be formed to build the express lanes quickly from the American Legion Bridge to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and on I-270 between I-70 and the Beltway.
Before any expansion can move forward with MD 295, the state must take highway — which has in the past been offered to Maryland, most recently in 1973 — and Rahns’ hope is the offer may end up on the table again.
Some council members had questions about how many lanes will be added and what tolls will cost drivers. Rahn said the state doesn’t have those answers yet. “I don’t know what it is going to take,” he said.
Rahn said as they reach out to organizations in the private sector, they hope for innovative ideas on how to make these transformations a reality.
The announcement of the project was news to Montgomery County leaders, but Rahn said the state will be working closer with local government as the project progresses.
“At the beginning of this process we were obviously surprised and not consulted previously, but OK, that’s water under the bridge,” County Council President Roger Berliner said.
Rahn said the state is going the public-private route because Maryland’s current budget can pay for or maintain such an expansion project and many members support that decision.
“The cost is so high that they’re going to have to be creative about it, and the private sector has money to devote it,” said Nancy Floreen, a member of the Montgomery County Council.
Rahn said he believes the projects will create jobs because a huge percentage of the people who will help build the expansion project and maintain the lanes will be from this region.
Several members of the council committee raised questions about the impact on areas which surround the roads to be expanded, including homes and parks. Rahn said he plans make it clear to private sector bidders that they want to limit the impact on surrounding communities.
There were concerns expressed about whether or not the American Legion Bridge would be included in the expansion project, and Rahn confirmed that it would be.
Currently, the state has put out requests for information from private industry, and next year it plans to ask for project proposals from those interested in building and operating the new lanes.
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
By: Andrew Metcalf
Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete Rahn on Thursday revealed more information about Gov. Larry Hogan’s proposal to add capacity to congested highways in Montgomery County.
Rahn said the state is pushing to add four toll lanes to the entire Capital Beltway and Interstate 270 through a public-private partnership that ideally won’t cost the state any money. He said the private partner would be tasked with figuring out how to pay for an estimated $7.6 billion project to add the lanes to the two highways through toll revenue.
A third piece of the estimated overall $9 billion plan calls for taking over the Baltimore-Washington Parkway from the federal government and adding lanes to it.
Rahn told Montgomery County Council members during a Transportation Committee meeting in Rockville that the plan would include improvements to the American Legion Bridge. He said the bridge would be fixed, but didn’t have details about how capacity could be added to the Potomac River crossing that connects Montgomery County with Virginia.
“We’re having conversations with Virginia, so our systems could link in a very smooth way,” Rahn said. “So that people using express lanes in Maryland can continue into Virginia.”
He later added, “Whatever we do with the Legion Bridge, it’s going to have to carry whatever traffic is generated on each side.”
The bridge is a notorious traffic choke point for Beltway commuters and travelers.
When Hogan first announced the highway widening proposal, he did not directly address improvements to the bridge. Montgomery County council members later expressed concern that the additional highway lanes would be less useful if the choke point remained.
After Rahn acknowledged the planned improvements, Council President Roger Berliner said he was “heartened.”
Council members pressed Rahn to consider adding a transit component as part of the plans. But he didn’t seem receptive.
“When we start talking rail, you’re talking exponentially more expensive,” Rahn said. He said transit buses could use the toll lanes at no cost.
He noted that the state has made significant transit investments—most notably in the Purple Line—in the last several years.
“The highways have gotten worse over that same period of time,” Rahn said. “It’s time to do something about the highways.”
He said the state will seek a proposal that limits the taking of properties near the highways and protects Holy Cross Hospital, Rock Creek and Sligo parks, which border the Beltway. However, he believes that even with these constraints, four lanes can be added to both major highways.
Berliner asked Rahn if the state would consider two reversible lanes on I-270 to handle rush-hour traffic typically seen on the highway. Commuters traditionally pack the southbound lanes in the morning and northbound lanes in the evening. The council has backed reversible lanes as a transit solution on the highway for several years.
Rahn said he doesn’t believe the reversible lanes are long-term solution because the state expects the I-270 corridor to grow significantly as the biomedical industry expands.
“What 270 looks like today is not what 270 is going to look like in 10 or even 20 years,” Rahn said.
Another new detail that emerged Thursday is that the state suspects that some parts of the project might not pay for themselves.
Rahn described it as “gap funding”: A private partner concludes there’s too much risk to pay for a particularly expensive part of a project and seeks subsidies from the state to cover the gap—in this case, projected toll revenue. He noted that Virginia had to pay about $700 million in state funds for express lanes on its portion of the Beltway.
“We suspect there are places within [the Beltway] that gap funding might be needed,” Rahn said. However, he added that the state might cover these funds through payments on more profitable sections of the project.
He noted that the state expects to find several private partners to build different portions of the massive project.
Ben Ross, a transit advocate and member of the Action Committee for Transit who attended the meeting, said the gap funding comments concerned him.
“I think the big news is he has backed off the governor’s promise that it will pay for itself,” Ross said. “Now he just says some of it won’t pay for itself and we hope the other part will be so profitable that it will make up for it.”
Ross said he remains concerned that tolls on the new lanes will be in excess of $40.
Rahn said during the meeting he did not know how much the tolls would be.
“If the [private partner] tries to charge too much, people won’t use it,” Rahn said. “If they charge too little, they won’t recover their investment. That has limited the level of tolls to a market-driven level. I don’t know what that level is here.”
The state estimated the $7.6 billion cost of adding four lanes to both highways by using a lane calculation of $100 million per lane mile, according to Rahn.
Action Committee for Transit has partnered with organizations to oppose the widening of the Beltway and is circulating a petition that had 200 signatures as of Thursday. Ross said he remains concerned high tolls will lead to only wealthy vehicle owners using the new lanes and taxpayers having to make up the difference.
Rahn noted Thursday that the current lanes on the highway will remain free, while the toll lanes should help reduce congestion on the free lanes. He described the public-private partnership as the “big kahuna” internationally because it’s one of the largest being proposed in the world.
“There’s a huge amount of interest in this,” Rahn said. He added that he hopes that interest will translate into unique proposals to build the four lanes. The state is purposely keeping its requests for information—the initial step in the process—vague to generate new ideas, according to Rahn.
The timeline remains unclear. The state has issued a request for information and has asked interested companies to respond by Dec. 20.
After that, Rahn said, the still will take the ideas and draft a formal request for proposals (RFP). The state hopes the RFP will elicit detailed bids from companies on how they plan to add the toll lanes to the highways and on project cost estimates.
He said the state expects responses to its RFP within the next two years and construction could begin within the next five years—before Hogan would be required to step down due to term limits if he were to win a second term in the 2018 election.
Wow, a big project is in the works.
I sometimes wonder if we can build enough roads in congested places such as Washington, DC area.
I also wonder if shifting when people start work would help.And if incentives towards that end could happen.
For example, rush hour is not a problem on days such as Veteran’s Day, or Columbus Day, days on which the government is closed, but most private sector workers still go to work. The government workers, and some private sector workers, being off the road, takes enough traffic off the road, so that the rest of the traffic will flow smoothly.
More telecommuting would help, too.
Cutting the federal workforce by 50% would be a good start.
No, we can’t build enough roads to solve the problem in the DC area. Developers are throwing up housing much faster than the roadbuilders can build roads — even assuming that there are good places to put the new roads/added lanes, which is a nonsensical assumption. People are going to have to live closer to their jobs, or along bus or commuter rail routes. This is already happening with gentrification and through the development of major suburban job centers. The biggest question ishow the latter will develop — mixed use, mixed income, walkable/bikeable neighborhoods to allow a significant number of people to uncouple from the car ... or car-centric places that just push gridlock even further out.
I haven’t spent much time in Washington DC area, but understand it has very high housing costs. Which in turn makes it difficult for many low or moderate income employees to live near work, if their jobs are in a suburban office e park in an upscale area.
I can’t speak to that in that area, but know that’s a big problem in other cities
And shipping federal jobs outside the area to other state offices. It would do careerists good to go an meet some real people outside the Beltway on occasion.
That’s pretty much the deal. Grew up in Monkey County in the 60’s and 70’s, still fairly rural. Frederick was “the boonies”, now folks commute to and from to DC in huge numbers.
The traffic was terrible when I left for good in ‘92.
My commute now is 8 miles of rural road.
$9,000,000,000.00 can fund a lot of early buyouts for the government “workers”...then, don’t fill the positions. No one will notice (except the taxpayers).
“And shipping federal jobs outside the area to other state offices”
That idea I love!!! It makes total sense but the Feds would never go for it. Have our Feds work from 9p.m. to 5 a.m.!!! That would work too. LOL!
I’d would like to see tax breaks insentives for corporations (biomedical industry) locating further north post Frederick. (Marriot moving to downtown Bethesda from northern Bethesda is absolutely F.U.B.A.R.)
Reversible lanes on a highway where one side is doing 20 and the other side 70?? Has that ever been done? How would they do it?
Widening lanes! There are homes and businesses right up against 270.
I live in and drive in this mess.
Smart growth has been abandoned for the cha-ching of tax payer dollars. We have our own mini-swamp.
I was stationed in DC at the end of 1992 and purchased a home in Stafford County which is about 35 miles from DC. I was able to purchase a new 3700 sq/ft house (another 1800 sq/ft with basement) with a half acre of land for a bit over $150K. Stafford was very rural and a beautiful area with low taxes and excellent schools with less than 50K people..
Since that time we now have had the northern invasion, have 150K people, and a realtor friend of mine told me recently he could get over $625K for my house. There are still many inexpensive areas in this county but the area where I live (within two miles of I-95) it is not cheap to live.
I live and drive in this mess too. Unbelievable some days. And there are still areas I will do anything possible to avoid, one of them being 270. A zoo up there.
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