Category: Traffic Studies

This Wednesday, July 19, the COG Transportation Planning Board (TPB), will finalize the list of projects in their long-term study (details below). The public is invited to testify and your input is crucial, either in person or via email (using the button below).

What TPB is voting on

In light of studies showing our current long-range plans do not have enough capacity to handle future travel needs for our region, and if we don’t add major new transit and road capacity, congestion gets much worse, TPB is studying 10 major projects to see what impacts they would have, including two projects SMTA has long supported (because previous studies show they would be highly effective):

  • Regional Express Travel Network * Express toll lanes network (free to HOV and transit) with added lanes where feasible on existing limited access highways (including remaining portion of the Capital Beltway, I-270, Dulles Toll Road, U.S. 50); includes expanded American Legion Bridge.
  • Additional Northern Bridge Crossing / Corridor * New northern bridge crossing of Potomac River, as a multimodal corridor

Key Talking Points

We are urging TPB to support of the resolution as drafted by TPB staff and their Long-Range Planning Task Force. The key issue is whether or not remove any reference to new bridge crossings in this long-term study.

  • The only purpose of TPB Long-Range Planning Task Force was to look at major new projects like a new bridge, that are not in current plans. To take this out would be to abdicate TPB’s core responsibility to make sure the region has the facts and has looked at all options.
  • There are several potential bridge routes that have NO impact on the Agricultural Reserve that should be studied – we won’t know if this is viable or not until we look at the facts
  • Both I-270 express lanes AND a bridge are crucial – it’s not one or the other – and since I-270 is already in the plan, the only question is to study a bridge crossing or not
  • Previous studies show a new bridge could divert from 40,000 to 105,000 trips a day OFF the American Legion Bridge, which is by far the region’s worst traffic choke point. How could TPB justify a long-term study that did not include this?
  • A new bridge could save commuters 67,000 hours per day
  • Why are bridge opponents so afraid of a study? Regional leaders need to ask them why they don’t want the public to have the facts.

How to testify

  • In Person: Show up at the Council of Governments between 11:15 and 11:30am, Wednesday, July 19th (you need to be there early to sign up, just ask for the public comment list. Each speaker gets 3 minutes and several of us will be there to assist you). The office is walking distance from Union Station and there is plenty of parking in nearby garages. Here is the address: 777 North Capitol Street NE, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20002
  • Written Comments: If you are sending comments, it is preferable to send them via this form/link or by email at least the day before and the staff will distribute them to the TPB members. TRY TO DO THIS TODAY. Your comments do not have to be long, but use any of the talking points above, or your own words to clearly state why the region needs to study all options for traffic relief.

14317513_10154549555773781_4197299944284408040_nArea leaders, including U.S. Representatives John Delaney and Chris Van Hollen, and a host of local and state officials from Montgomery and Frederick Counties, gathered today to launch a new coalition effort to re-start two long-delayed project studies that hold great promise for unlocking the severe traffic nightmare that is I-270 during both rush-hours. Congressman Delaney is the group’s Honorary Chair and played a key role in its creation.

The bipartisan group of business, civic and elected leaders will press for multimodal solutions, including new express-toll lanes and regional bus-rapid-transit (BRT) using those new lanes, with the current general-purpose lanes remaining free of charge. Two project studies, the I-270/US 15 Multimodal Corridor Study and the Western Mobility Study have been on hold for decades and would be necessary to complete before any long-term construction projects to add significant new lane capacity could begin.  The Fix270Now coalition is urging leaders in both parties to make restarting those project studies a top priority, and to include a multimodal express-toll and BRT alternative, running from the Virginia side of the American Legion Bridge, up the 270 Spur and the entire I-270 corridor, all the way to Frederick.

In the short term, the coalition is supporting efforts by Governor Larry Hogan to upgrade key interchanges and provide an additional $100 million to explore innovative congestion management strategies.

In the long-run, studies show the addition of new toll lanes integrated with a regional BRT system that includes the long-planned Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT) would improve peak-hours speeds for outbound travelers in the afternoon rush-hour by up to 87%, and for inbound morning rush-hour travelers by up to 70%.

Maryland cannot afford further delay on proven steps to keep traffic in the state’s number-one job-creation corridor moving.  SMTA is strongly supporting this effort, as both I-270 and the American Legion Bridge are among our top-priority projects that area transportation experts identified as urgent investment priorities to support our region’s economy and protect our quality-of-life. Please take a moment to add your support for this important effort by using the “sign-up” button at Fix270Now.org. Let’s get Maryland moving!

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Morning rush-hour conditions created the perfect backdrop for the launching of Fix270Now.

The Baltimore Sun reports today that Governor Hogan, after riding some of Japan’s most advanced maglev (Magnetic Levitation) train systems, some of which can exceed 300 mph, he will seek $28 million in grants to study bringing this technology to the Baltimore-Washington corridor.

Here is a link to the Baltimore Sun article:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bs-md-hogan-maglev-20150604-story.html

Various proposals have been put forward to introduce Maglev technology into the United States, and particularly the crowded Northeast corridor, as a way to provide more efficient city-to-city service. Cost estimates for a Maglev line from DC to Baltimore run into the billions, perhaps as much as $10 billion for construction, although operating costs for Maglev tend to be much lower than other transit modes because they can be more fully automated and have much few moving parts (wheels, brakes, bearings, etc.) that require extensive ongoing maintenance with heavy and light rail systems.

Moving forward with a study, as the Governor apparently wants to do, will answer a lot more questions about the practicality of such a system, but this is not anything that will likely be implemented soon, and much more immediate priorities for the DC region remain unfunded — a topic that will be the focus of SMTA’s upcoming Transportation Summit on June 12th.

Stay tuned.  Maglev may be a topic we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the future.

In the long debate over the InterCounty Connector (ICC), the project’s expected time-savings were often challenged by project opponents.  Turns out, as with most of their claims, the opponents were dead wrong.

A new study confirms travel time savings in this corridor as a result of the ICC that are right in line with the projections published in the Environmental Impact Statement documents and often cited by Maryland transportation officials and advocates in support of its construction.  How big are the time savings, now that the road is open?  Here is one of the tables from the report. See for yourself.

ICC Time Savings – Performing Even Better Than Advertised

time-savings-capture

Earlier studies released in 2013 noted significant numbers of trips were diverted off local roads once the ICC opened, and travel times and congestion levels on those surrounding roads had also dropped considerably; and overall usage of the ICC increased 40% in 2012 to over 30,000 trips a day, and has been steadily increasing every month since then, often by more than 2% per month. Weekday trips on the ICC are now comfortably meeting the projections for this facility, and it is having the desired impact on reducing congestion levels and improving travel times throughout the whole area.

For more information, here is a link to the study information.

SMTA Teams Prepare for "ICC Challenge"

Today the long-awaited Inter County Connector opened to the public, performing exactly as traffic models predicted according to an informal “challenge” SMTA members offered to the media.

In today’s ICC Challenge, SMTA Chair Doug Duncan and several Board members invited local media outlets to join us as we split into teams to travel from Gaithersburg to Laurel, with some taking the new ICC, some traveling south on I-270 to the Beltway then out I-95, and some taking parallel local roads all the way across (Muncaster Mill, Norbeck, Routes 28/198).

The results (travel times in minutes):

  • 270-Beltway-95:  51 Minutes
  • Local roads (28/198 etc.):  45 Minutes
  • ICC (following the 55 mph posted speed exactly):  27 Minutes 

Despite the poor weather, we succeeded in doing something no one has been able to do in most of our lifetimes:  travel from Gaithersburg to Laurel in under a half-hour.  If anything, the differences in our test were understated due to the lower rush hour traffic volumes this holiday week, and because our unscientific “challenge” was run against the heavier east-to-west flows in the morning rush.  The Beltway trip, in particular, would have been well over an hour had we gone the other way (westbound traffic on I-495 was stop-and-go most of the way, while the eastbound traffic our Beltway team experienced was unusually light).   Even with all this, the real-world results still were right in line with projections.

Traffic modeling studies have always shown the ICC would cut travel times in this heavily congested corridor by nearly 50%, and the real world experience we saw today certainly confirms those findings.  It would appear those who claimed the ICC would make no difference have some explaining to do.

As it turns out, we can “build our way” out of congestion, just as we did with the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, if we are smart about adding the right kind of road and transit capacity where it is needed most, and listen to what the study data show works best when it comes to providing real traffic relief. 

Facts on the ground are powerful things.

The SMTA Board was briefed recently on two efforts to expand bus-rapid-transit service, also known as “BRT” (or the more appealing acronym “RTV” for “Rapid-Transit-Vehicle”).   RTV systems are seen as a cost-effective alternative to either single-occupancy-vehicle automobile travel or more expensive fixed-rail transit systems. 

The first is being pursued in Montgomery County by County Executive Ike Leggett’s Transit Implementation Task Force, which is looking at a county-wide system covering as many as 18 routes.  The system under consideration would be the region’s first “gold” level RTV system, meaning its vehicles would move in their own dedicated lanes and provide a much higher level of service and shorter travel times than traditional bus systems.

The second is currently under study by metropolitan Washington’s Transportation Planning Board.  New modeling data presented this week shows significant traffic relief — a 12% reduction in travel delays — can be achieved through a scaled-down combination of new toll lanes on major highways, conversion of some existing lanes to toll lanes, a network of regional bus-rapid-transit lines using those managed lanes, and more focused development around transit stations.  The study also conclusively shows that transit-oriented land-use changes, by themselves, do nothing to relieve congestion, but in combination with new lane capacity and transit service, yield significant positive results.  The best part of all, the revenue from these new toll lanes more than pays for the construction and operating costs of the entire system, including the new lanes and RTV transit system.  You heard that right, a self-financing project that cuts congestion delays in the entire region by 12%.  This ought to be one of THE top priorities for local jurisdictions in the Washington region.

The latest rankings by the Texas Transportation Institute place the Washington DC region at the top of the list, among all major metropolitan areas in the United States, in average travel delays.  Last year, we were tied with Chicago for first place, with an average of 70 hours wasted by each of us from sitting in traffic delays.  This year, the amount of time we waste in traffic has grown to a whopping 74 hours a year, nearly two full work weeks.

When you add up all the lost productivity, tons of wasted fuel, and other costs, each of us is wasting more than $1,400 per year, simply due to congestion.   Just for comparision, each of us would pay about $50 extra per year from a 10-cent increase in the gas tax, which could be used to fund a long list of projects that we know will cut travel times and congestion costs as much as 25%.  I would rather spend $50 to save $350, not to mention all that lost time. 

It is hard to see why state and local leaders are not making transportation investments a more urgent priority.  Voters in our region continue to rank traffic congestion as their number-one priority, yet elected officials continue to ignore transportation almost entirely. 

This has to change.  The Maryland legislature needs to act and it needs to act this year.  At least $800 million per year in new transportation funding has been recommended by the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Commission, along with new protections against diverting scarce transportation dollars for other uses.

We know exactly what we need to do to reduce congestion in our region.  It starts with building the new transit and road capacity we need to reduce delays and get people back to work.  All that’s missing is the political will among our elected representatives to make this a priority.  Maryland will not be able to sustain any level of economic recovery unless we take on this issue and invest in our infrastructure now.

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In the Metro section in Sunday’s Washington Post, transportation reporter Robert Thompson invited the two groups to “define the problem, propose solutions and tell us how we would know if their ideas worked.”  While there were commonalities in the solutions proposed, only SMTA had a realistic answer to addressing all modes of transportation and measurably reducing congestion, which continues to be the top threat to our economy and quality of life.  Here’s a brief summary:
  
SMTA Lays Out Balanced List of Transportation Priorities:  Citing the need for comprehensive solutions to our traffic problems in the Washington area, SMTA President Richard Parsons defines our top transportation problem as “too much traffic congestion.”  He cites years of traffic studies which show the primary cause is the lack of suburb-to-suburb transit and road capacity connecting our major activity centers in the region.  For solutions, most transportation experts recommend a combination of:  Investing in Metro reliability, new transit lines (Purple Line, Corridor Cities Transitway, regional bus-rapid-transit network), new highway and bridge capacity (including a regional network of high-occupancy-toll lanes on the Beltway and other key corridors), and more sustainable “transit-oriented-development” to concentrate future jobs and housing and reduce the need for future auto trips.  Studies show using all the tools in our toolbox would significantly reduce congestion, make travel times both shorter and more predictable for commuters, and keep our region more liveable, sustainable and economically vibrant.  One of the key problems, Parsons notes, is that “we’ve clouded the debate, allowing popular myths and wishful thinking to supersede sound research and expert analysis.” View the entire article here.     
 
Smart Growth Coalition Offers Familiar “Wishful Thinking” Approach that Won’t Reduce Congestion:  Coalition for Smarter Growth President Stewart Schwartz blames congestion on “bad land-use planning and poor location decisions by major employers.”  For solutions, he lays out a familiar list of land-use changes, most of which are good ideas, but are either already being done in Maryland (e.g. concentrating new development near metro stations), or too vague and unrealistic, like shifting employment from the 270 corridor to the east.  He offers no specifics on how these might impact future congestion levels.  Recent data from the Transportation Planning Board indicate that smart-growth land-use changes alone, without new transportation capacity, actually makes traffic congestion slightly worse.  Schwartz does cite the need for new transit capacity, which is a good thing.  However, transit only works for those relatively few commuters who can use it, and does nothing to address all the other non-commuting trips for which we also need to plan (interstate traffic, shipping and freight deliveries, errands, business-to-business travel, etc.), and which make up most of our daily trips.  By ignoring the mode of travel that accounts for roughly 90% of all daily trips in our State and region — our heavily congested roads — such prescriptions are simply not realistic and will have no impact on congestion in our lifetimes.   

One of our key goals at SMTA  is to raise the level of the debate over transportation policy in our region, to focus more on the factual issues, less on politics or ideology.  

This is why we were pleased to participate in the recent survey of regional transportation experts released by the 2030 Group.  A recent article in Patch.com  reported on this effort.  

NewsChannel 8’s “News Talk with Bruce DePuyt” also did a follow-up piece today, with both SMTA and anti-road activists represented, in what turned out to be a lively debate.  The show illustrated areas of agreement and stark differences of opinion between those of us who seek to have multi-billion-dollar investments in transportation guided by solid planning, engineering and factual analysis,  and those who prefer to rely upon blind ideology and wishful thinking. 

Facts are stubborn things, however, and by focussing on the facts we hope to help bring the entire commnity together around a set of solutions that are realistic and can work, regardless of whether they are roads or transit, or something else entirely.   We welcome your continued input on this topic as we move forward. 

Click here for more on the key findings of the 2030 Group’s survey of regional transportation experts on regional transportation priorities.

We will also continue to press for increased investement in all modes of transportation, as no amount of discussion about priorities will accomplish anything without investing the necessary resources to get any of them built.  Maryland legislators, are you listening? 

Today the 2030 Group released a new study that was conducted jointly by SMTA and the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, to explore how the region sets transportation priorities and what leading experts in the field feel those priorities should be.   The survey was conducted over the past several months through telephone surveys and focus groups with over 40 top transportation professionals from Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

 Summary of the Key Findings:

1.      The nation’s most congested region lacks a well-defined short-list of transportation investments that would have the greatest potential to reduce congestion/improve mobility over the next 20 years.

2.      Among transportation professionals, significant consensus exists as to highway and public transit investments that would be the most productive. 

3.      The top-ten projects are listed in the report, including continued investment in Metro System Maintenance and Operations, New Potomac Bridges, and multi-modal projects to add capacity in several key transportation corridors.

4.      The prioritization process should focus heavily on highway and transit investments that do the most to reduce travel times/delays, reduce congestion, and improve transportation network safety and reliability.

5.      Meeting the region’s transportation challenges requires not only selecting/advancing the right priorities, but a new process that is more regional and professional and less parochial, political and ideologically driven.

The number-one priority identified by regional experts:  Invest in current Metro system operations, core capacity and maintenance.  Multi-modal investments to area highways, bridges and new transit lines to better connect regional activity centers and key economic corridors together throughout the region rounded out most of the remaining  top-10 priorities, along with better land-use policies to encourage more transit-oriented development.

This independent study was sponsored by the 2030 Group, an association of business and community leaders working towards greater regional cooperation on long-term planning and economic issues.