Tag: transit

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.

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley has announced a new mixed-use development near the largely underutilized (from a land-use-planning standpoint) New Carrollton Metro station for the new headquarters for the State Department of Housing and Community Development.   See the Washington Post Story today for details. 

This is good news for Prince George’s County.  It is also a good example of sound, transit-oriented development to bring more jobs to parts of the region that need more employment opportunities, already have a large supply of workforce housing nearby, and that are near current or planned transit centers.  The proposed new development will include a mix of retail, housing and commercial office space, all of which will help to minimize the need to drive everywhere.  

Adding density where it is needed most — near our Metro stations — is one of the long-term strategies that the entire region is pursuing to varying degrees.  While this is no panacea for the region’s traffic problems, and in the real world will only make a small dent in the future growth of travel demand, it is a small step in the right direction and worthy of support.  

Congratulations to Prince George’s County and the Governor for getting this one right.

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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.   

This week, House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) presented his outline for the new transportation bill that sets transportation policies for both highway and transit funding for the next six years.

From early reports, the new transportation funding bill will not contain sufficient funding to meet the needs that have been identified, especially in the nation’s heavily congested urban corridors (including the Nation’s Capital).  This could mean a critical loss of funding for key projects in our region, including the Purple Line and CCT, as reported in Robert McCartney’s column in today’s Washington Post. 

On the positive side, it eliminates Congressional earmarks, streamlines decision-making, and realigns priorities so that more transportation revenues from the federal gas tax and other sources will be put to work on the most effective transportation projects, without the kind of politically-inspired diversions to non-transportation purposes we’ve seen in the past. 

The big question is, what will the Senate bill look like, and will it restore sufficient funding to keep key local projects on track?  Transportation infrastructure investment in our nation and the DC region is at a historic low-point, just when our economy needs stimulus and job creation the most. 

This is the first time in our history, when faced with a severe economic recession or depression, that we haven’t  launched a major public works and infrastructure improvement program to help get us out of it.  Last year’s stimulus package contained only a pittance, most of which did not go to transportation capacity improvements.  Why not?  That’s a question only our elected representatives can answer.  Investing in infrastructure has worked every time in the past to provide long-term growth and economic recovery. 

This time, we all know the need is there, but our political leaders in both parties have gone AWOL.

A federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) performance audit, released yesterday, faults the Metro Board of Directors for micro-management and lack of strategic focus, among other failings, according to an excellent article in today’s Washington Post by Dana Hedgpeth.

The Metro Board has been called to task by GAO for getting involved in decisions no Board of Directors should ever be involved in — the hiring and firing of individual employees (other than the General Manager) and other minor personnel policies, “excessive contact” with mid-level managers, and such operational minutae as picking out seat colors and station tiles.  As anyone who has ever run an effective non-profit organization knows, these are not the kind of decisions any Board should make.  This is why you hire a General Manager who then manages his or her professional staff without any interference from the Board. 

A Board of Directors should stay focused on its proper role:  Setting policy and overall strategic direction, providing resources and financial oversight,  and hiring and overseeing the performance of a General Manager.   That’s it. 

According to GAO, if Metro’s Board did a better job of staying out of the weeds, it would be more effective in keeping its strategic focus where it should be:  On key issues like safety, repairs and maintenance, and customer service.  If the new Board takes this feedback seriously, and lets General Manager Richard Sarles do his job, perhaps we can see better results and more accountability in the system in the future.

A new report by the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy sheds important new light on the growing worldwide trend away from light-rail-transit and toward new bus-rapid-transit (or BRT) systems.  BRT generally offers lower levels of capital investment and more flexibility in its operations than most fixed rail systems. 

What’s been missing so far, however, is any way to clearly evaluate what is and isn’t “true BRT” and the design attributes that are most important in identifying it.  There is a world of difference, both in perception and reality, between running a bunch more smelly old busses on the same old routes and calling it “BRT” (which it is not), and investing in a true BRT system with the attributes cited in the report, which together provide an entirely new type of efficient and attractive mass transit experience.    While the metrics in the report may not be perfect, they are a good place to start.

Cities around the world are figuring this out, and the U.S. is pretty far behind.  This is another of the report’s key findings.  However, both the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and Montgomery County are taking a hard look at “BRT” at the regional and local levels (and yes, we have to come up with a better name for it – BRT doesn’t really cut it) .      

It is too early to tell exactly what impact BRT can have in meeting our transportation needs in the Washington area, but the early indications seem promising.

This week the University of Maryland announced they have reached agreement with the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) and are no longer opposing the proposed routes for the Purple Line that run right through the College Park campus.  Supporters of the Purple Line may take heart in this welcome development, which removes one of the last major sticking points in determining the alignment between Bethesda and New Carrollton for this nearly $2 billion light-rail transit project.

The University of Maryland deserves credit for recognizing the value of direct access to a major regional transit line, which means thousands of students from Montgomery County will have another option to get there other than wasting their time sitting on the Beltway.  This is especially good news for evening students at University of Maryland University College. 

The original Green Line Metro station was also supposed to be located on the College Park campus, but in one of the more short-sighted decisions in our local transportation history, it was placed about a mile away, meaning hardly anyone found it convenient enough to use.  Now, with the Purple Line alignment coming directly onto the campus, perhaps MTA could look into relocating the Green Line station as well so there is one central access and transfer point. 

The Purple Line is now one step closer as a result of this wise decision.

The preliminary report on Montgomery County’s proposed Bus-Rapid-Transit (BRT) study is posted on-line, but in a recent email from the County, it was disclosed that due to a traffic model coding error, some of the results will need to be recalculated. 

The net effect was that ridership figures across much of the system were overstated.  County officials noted that the cost figures would likely be revised downward as well, as fewer BRT vehicles would be needed once the lower ridership numbers were adopted. 

Read the preliminary report here.

This week the Montgomery County Council was briefed on the summary findings of a new report, due to be released soon, on the feasibility of building a new countywide rapid-transit system, using bus-rapid-transit (BRT) technology. 

The proposed system would divert an estimated 85,000 drivers per day off existing roads, and cost roughly $2.5 billion to build, and another $144 to $173 million annually to operate.    

Look for more detailed coverage here when the entire report is released.  See our News Page for recent coverage in the Gazette.

Last month, the Rockville City Council abruptly reversed itself on the Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT), asking the State of Maryland to re-route the CCT alignment away from King Farm, one of the major communities it was designed to serve.  The State is now in the final stages of identifying it’s “Preferred Local Alternative” for the long-awaited transit line extending from Shady Grove Metro Station north to Clarksburg.  Supporters of the CCT are asking the State to continue with current plans and retain the alignment through King Farm, which was designed around the CCT as a “transit-oriented development” (or TOD) from its inception, with the full support of the City.  Without the CCT on the alignment that was envisioned in County master plans, the fear is that traffic conditions on surrounding roads, access to jobs and housing for King Farm residents and neighbors, and King Farm property values would all be negatively impacted.

The CCT will add tremendous value to King Farm by providing convenient transit access to destinations up and down the heavily traveled I-270 corridor, and it was a big part of the reason King Farm is there at all.  This is what transit-oriented suburban development was supposed to be all about.  Rockville would be better served by retaining the current alignment and the more sustainable development patterns that can be achieved through transit-oriented development, in King Farm and elsewhere.