The Board of Public Works Should Put the Brakes on Wrongheaded Transportation Policy

When Maryland’s Board of Public Works meets Wednesday, August 11, 2021, the body should vote to halt Gov. Hogan’s misguided proposal to add toll lanes to the Capital Beltway and I-270. The proposal will worsen racial inequity in Maryland’s transportation system, do little to reduce congestion, and undermine efforts to control the growing climate disaster. Instead, the state should strengthen investments in public transportation, including improving existing infrastructure and expanding transit options. 

The Board of Public Works plans to vote Wednesday on whether to advance Gov. Hogan’s highway expansion plan to its next step. The plan would create a contract between the state and Accelerate Maryland Partners, a group of private companies, to build new lanes on the Capital Beltway and I-270 with tolls linked to the amount of traffic at any given time. This plan would deepen the state’s already-lopsided focus on roadbuilding over public transportation and would thereby worsen racial inequity in our transportation system: 

• Neighborhood segregation and racial income disparities—both the products of centuries of racist policy choices—make transportation policy in Maryland unavoidably racialized. About one in six Black workers in Maryland take public transportation to get to work, compared to only one in 20 white workers. Workers in other racial and ethnic groups are about twice as likely to commute via transit as their white counterparts. 
• On average, it takes transit commuters in Maryland just over 50 minutes to get to work each day, plus another 50 minutes to get back home. Average car commutes are a little over 30 minutes each way. Over the course of a year, this adds up to about a week of extra commuting time for a full-time worker. 
• On average, workers in the Baltimore metro area can reach only 8% of jobs in the region by transit in one hour or less. In the year after the BaltimoreLink transit overhaul, the region saw the biggest drop in transit accessibility among the nation’s 50 largest metro areas. 
• By car, 100% of jobs in the Baltimore region are accessible within an hour. In fact, there are more jobs within a 20-minute drive of an average Baltimore-area worker than within an hourlong transit ride. 
• In the Washington, DC, metro area (including portions outside Maryland), workers can on average reach 10% of the region’s jobs in an hour via transit or 85% in an hour by car. 
• Put together, this means longer commutes for Maryland workers of color, with the widest disparities in the communities with the most residents of color. 

Doubling down on car-centric development is an especially wrongheaded choice in the same week that the U.N. published a report documenting catastrophic, irreversible impacts of climate change that are already locked in. The U.N. secretary-general described the report as a “code red for humanity.” In this context, the highway expansion plan amounts to slamming on the gas pedal right as we approach the climate disaster cliff.  

Even in the interest of reducing Washington-area traffic, the plan is of questionable merit. There is strong evidence from multiple cities that simply widening highways mainly draws more people onto the road, negating any hoped-for improvement in congestion. Including variable tolls could mitigate this problem somewhat, but would essentially reserve the new capacity for drivers wealthy enough to afford high rush-hour fees. 

A better alternative would be to invest in affordable, sustainable transit, targeted toward communities with significant unmet needs. These investments can come in two forms: 

• Improving current infrastructure: The Maryland Transit Administration in 2019 identified $5.7 billion in needed capital investments over the next 10 years, of which 81% is necessary just to keep the current system functioning. The American Society of Civil Engineers in 2020 rated the state of Maryland’s transit infrastructure D+ (see “State of Good Repair” section), compared to C for roads and B for bridges. 
• Expanding transit access: Expanding Maryland’s transit systems could shorten commute times, increase job opportunities, and improve equity, especially if planned thoughtfully to target the communities with the greatest needs. As one place to start, the federal infrastructure bill currently making its way through Congress includes a provision that could enable construction of the Red Line light rail in Baltimore, a project that would have connected segregated communities to thousands of jobs before Gov. Hogan capriciously canceled it in 2015.