Tag: washington

It has been a long time coming, but perhaps it was worth the wait.  Tonight, Maryland’s three top State leaders:  Governor Martin O’Malley, State Senate President Thomas V. “Mike” Miller, and House Speaker Michael Busch put forward a bold new funding package to support Maryland’s decaying transportation network.

It could not have come at a better time. 

With tens of thousands of jobs in Maryland’s ailing construction industry literally hanging in the balance, and recent studies once again putting the national capital area at the top of America’s most severely congested communities, we are finally seeing signs that State leaders have come up with a plan that is big enough, bold enough, and smart enough to get the job done. 

The legislature will have lots to say in the coming days as this proposal moves through the committees and to the floor, but what was introduced today would do several things:

  1. Provide over $800 million a year in new transportation funds when fully phased in — enough to fill most of the shortfall identified by the recent Blue Ribbon Commission — and enough to fund the Purple Line, Baltimore’s Red Line, the Corridor Cities Transitway, Watkins Mill interchange, improvements to I-270, and hundreds of bridges, roads and transit improvements around the state.
  2. Put some 44,000 Marylanders back to work in the construction trades over the next 5 years — a huge and desperately-needed boost for our sagging “post-sequester” economy.
  3. Protect the funds in the Transportation Trust Fund from future raids.
  4. Save Maryland motorists time and money – the cost to the average consumer is far less than the nearly $2,200 each one of us wastes every year due to traffic congestion.

Read more:  http://www.governor.maryland.gov/costofinaction.asp

Visit our “Take Action” page now to make your voice heard!  Our leaders have listened to local business leaders, civic leaders, transit advocates and motorist who have been crying out for action for a decade or more.  Now it’s up to us to show our support.  Sign our petition for transportation investment today!

The Washington Region’s Transportation Planning Board (TPB) issued, as part of its weekly report, a new analysis of the region’s transportation future and it is a sobering view.    Their main conclusion:

“Travelers in the Washington region will face considerably more roadway and transit congestion in coming decades if current planning and funding trajectories are allowed to continue.”

We couldn’t agree more.  Current funding trends in the State of Maryland and throughout our region are absolutely unsustainable and elected leaders in this State have been AWOL for years when it comes to addressing this crisis.  The economic costs of a failing transportation system are severe, and even crippling in scope, costing the state tens of thousands of well-paying construction jobs already, and hundreds of millions in lost revenue due to a systemic lack of investment in new capacity.   And that doesn’t even count all the lost productivity and jobs in other sectors that will move elsewhere as our traffic congestion continues to worsen relative to other markets. 

As you can see from this chart, the region is expected to see a 27% increase in vehicle work trips and a 24% increase in truck trips by 2040, but only a 7% increase in lane miles.  Even the most wildly optimistic estimates show that future growth in transit ridership will not even come close to addressing this gap — and the money is not there to fund needed transit expansion projects like the Purple Line and CCT anyway.  And TPB’s own figures show simply changing future development patterns doesn’t even make a dent in future congestion levels in the region.  We already have some of the worst congestion in the U.S. so imagine it getting 78% worse.   

This is not rocket science.  We know traffic is going to get much worse if we don’t add significant new transit and road capacity in the next two decades, we know we have no choice but to make these investments yet we have set aside no money to do so, and we have no plan to deal with any of this because Maryland State officials continue to make transportation their absolute last priority, year after year.  Irresponsible?   One could say that, but it would be an understatement.

Here is a link to the latest TPB weekly report.  If this isn’t enough of a wake-up call for State officials to step up to the plate this next session and do their jobs, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

 

The Senate has finally acted to extend the authorization for federal spending on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other vital transportation programs, including roads, bridges, and mass transit projects all over the United States.   The bill extends the FAA’s operating authority through January.  Highway and transit programs, and the federal gasoline tax that pays for most of them, were all due to expire on Oct. 1, but now the deadline has been extended through March of 2012. 

Expiration of the federal gas tax would deal a crippling blow to what is left of Maryland’s transportation program, but the threat is not removed, only deferred.  A long-term solution to transportation funding at the state and federal levels remains one of our top priorities, especially in light of our troubled economy.  Continued pressure needs to be directed to our elected officials to support increased investment in transportation capital projects that put people back to work and add lasting economic value to communities.  This is key to getting us out of the current recession.

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.

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.

Decades of under-investment, fiscal neglect and local opposition to suburban Maryland’s transportation priorities have finally gotten us somewhere – number one on the list of most congested metropolitan areas in the US – according to a recent study cited by the Washington Post. The news comes as no surprise.

The latest Texas Transportation Institute Urban Mobility Report ranks the Washington, D.C., region number 1 (tied with Chicago) in peak hour delays, with 70 hours lost per commuter, per year, on average, in our region.

What could you do with an extra 70 hours each year? This is not to mention the tons of extra carbon emissions and over $3,000 wasted per household on extra fuel and wear-and-tear on our vehicles caused by severe congestion.

The TTI survey ranks our region-

• #1 in fuel wasted per peak auto commuter

• #2 in commuter stress

• #2 in cost of delay per peak hour auto commuter ($1,555/year)

To read the entire report, click here.

The survey’s authors hit the nail on the head:

“In the end there’s a need for more capacity.”

–Tim Lomax, Author

Texas Transportation Institute

2010 Urban Mobility Report