PING!
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
Dont worry. The govt will find a way to do it anyhowl.
Am I reading this right? FOUR additional toll lanes in the Beltway? And the BW Parkway?? That’d double or more the size of those highways.
I’d want to hear more of the reasoning for such dramatic expansion, especially for toll lanes.
Widening roads does NOT relieve congestion. Longer off ramps and sympathetic traffic signals do.
Let me tell you why it’s opposed.
No, faithful Republican FRers, it’s not simply “liberals in MD”.
We already HAVE these kinds of “lanes”. They are NOT just “lanes”, they are full-throated separate roadways, requiring massive amounts of space and massive structural additions/modifications.
The I95 they mention just floored me when I first passed there a few years ago (apparently, I hadn’t ridden by White Marsh in a long time). What a huge waste of concrete - and, God forbid you accidentally go down the “wrong” lane? I can just imagine all the thru-travelers getting confused and ending up in the wrong part. Good Lord.
So, you’re not simply adding tolls and a nice lane - you’re adding major infrastructure, confusion, and deleting yet more land significantly.
The additional tolls are always a problem. But-—IMO, there is another problem that is bothering lots of voters.
NO ONE knows where the toll money actually goes. NO ONE is getting public information about this breakdown of those revenues & how that money is spent.
The same problem is applied to the Lottery money. Keep in mind that the Lottery jackpots are only 1/2 of the sales income from the tickets.
In California, 1/2 of the sales income from the California Lottery is supposed to go to schools. That Lottery started in 1986. 32 years later, I have NEVER seen ANY information about where that money goes-—ht gets given to ‘the schools’ & how it is spent.
When I ask others, it stops them in their tracks. NO ONE I have asked has ever heard ny such info, either.
I not against the Lotteries——BUT I believe that the public has the right to know WHERE that $$$$ is going-—along with toll $$$$.
\Comments???
It is a fool's game to try to cram more cars into DC and the inner ring suburbs. There is no place to put them. We can build faster funnels in the exurbs, but drivers will still hit the same congestion as they approach the urban core.
The solution is to live closer to your job. The suburbs have to accept densification, especially along the metro lines. DC itself has already cleared the mental hurdles on this. We have gentrification on steroids, and everything new is being built/rebuilt with multi-use neighborhoods and multi-modal transportation in mind. If people want to live in Urbana or Haymarket or Stafford County, fine. That's their prerogative. But they need to buy a clue, and start to ride the train.
I have no idea if Amazon will bring HQ2 to the DC area, but if it does, Bezos would be a perfect imbecile to build another suburban office park and add to the sprawl and congestion. If Amazon comes here, it should commit to the city. If it's not willing to do that, go somewhere else.
The cheapest thing to do is get rid of HOV.
Public transportation that few will use and where gangs of feral urban yutes will run amok robbing and assaulting at will, and without any response from local law enforcement. Stupid people get stupid solutions.
That would have been a nightmare.
Move some agencies out of DC to other areas of the country.
Detroit needs jobs!
You don't imagine that's one of the features of an ever-growing federal gummint, do you?
Suck it up, bureaucrats and lobbyists. You are the ones responsible for the horrendous traffic jams on the beltway and elsewhere.
It's certainly not the tourists.
You can pay the price, so do it.
(There is a solution, of course: move the nation's capital to a less crowded place, say, Emporia, Kansas. Or Columbia, Missouri. That'd fix it.)