Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Recent correspondence with some old acquaintances in Montgomery County, Maryland, deep in the heart of “Beltway” country, led me to catch up on Governor Larry Hogan’s ambitious plans to pursue the conservative, libertarian fantasy of relieving gridlock in the Metro DC-MD’s worst highway corridors. His plans are for more than 100 miles of new lanes, tolled lanes, on three key highways, at a price tag of $7-9 billion, give or take a billion. There would be two new lanes in each direction on the MD portion of the I-495 Beltway, I-270 out to Frederick, and on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, whose ownership might be transferred from the National Park Service to Maryland’s MTA (Transportation Authority). It’s all under discussion with as many as 15 options in front of Federal Highway authorities. Here are two articles to fill you in on the outlines, if you haven’t been following: www.baltimoresun.com/… and www.washingtonpost.com/…
After I read some local objecting citizen comments from my first Maryland home, in Rockville, MD, it brought back many memories, including the long essay I wrote back in late 2007- early 2008, “A Citizens’ Guide to the Missing Green Rail Vision for the MD/Metro DC Region.” So I have enclosed that essay in its entirety, asking for forgiveness in advance from the more polemical and compressed stylists — and readers — here at the Daily Kos.
But no apologies for what I wrote. Here’s why. The heart of my essay addressed the core struggles still with us in the America suffering under Donald Trump, the not illogical concluding act to the long rise of the Republican Right. The Democratic Party’s fear of big ideas has been one of the consequences of the often successful decades long attack of that Republican Right upon the legacy and values of FDR’s New Deal. Some have called DC’s Metro system the last great legacy of that tradition, and LBJ’s Great Society as well.
Many prominent Democrats in the region, and Annapolis, received a copy of my essay. They were terrified of the scope and cost of filling in even parts of the “missing green rail” vision. However, today, in the late summer of 2018 as I write, the ambitious, daring-to-dream again left of the party is on the upsurge, a continuation of the Sanders-Clinton struggle in the Presidential primary of 2016.
This is relevant for you Ben Jealous. I’m offering the vision, in whole or in usable parts, what I wrote in 2008, to help you answer Hogan’s Highway gambit. If anything, your policy stance on global warming and commitment to solar renewable energy ought to make you question gas driven highway solutions to both congestion and the CO2-Methane fueled oven we are baking in. I’ve talked with one of the leading solar “utility” level developers in Maryland, trying to interest him in our former coal mining sites in the Western counties, and I hope you can do a tour out here sometime soon.
But I worry about the legacy of the many decades we have spent crushed by the Democratic centrist and Republican Right joint embrace inside Neoliberalism, which has left the public and public financing out of the infrastructure shambles that starkly stamp our nation’s decline. Thus we should worry a great deal when libertarians like Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation are quoted as saying “the tolling community, the PPP community, the express-lane community, will be going gaga” over Hogan’s Highways. I guess if I look hard enough, I might find a few traces of “the public interest” in that mix of private power, with a little dash of government flavoring. That is where we have been left by the Right’s totally inadequate public philosophy, the one that turned “housing” over to the likes of the Wall Street banks and their “derivatives magic” ...in the fiasco that led to the Great Financial Crisis, which was already very much on my mind, as was Global Warming, in the essay you will find below.
And let me introduce another problem facing us, another gift of this bi-partisan embrace of Neoliberalism. Maryland prides itself on being an environmental leader, and especially in launching its RPS — Renewable Portfolio Standards — to generate renewable energy, starting in 2004. Yet a hard look at the results, despite our standing 13th in the nation as of March of this year, in solar net generation — shows that the actual number is that we get only 2.97% of our electricity generation from solar, despite a recent burst of big “utility scale” projects. Yet the very success, limited as the percentage is, of solar, has helped turn the Renewable Energy Credit system into a mess of falling prices for each “REC” — the tradeable commodity that the system requires the fossil fuel suppliers to buy from the renewable generators, based on their retail electricity sales in Maryland. Yet the geographic scope and laughably loose definitions of what is renewable, including sources more polluting than coal, gas and oil, have brought strong criticism from the Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility and Food and Water Watch. I agree with their assessments: www.foodandwaterwatch.org/… in which they gave Maryland’s RPS system an “F” grade, outraging the environmental establishment in Annapolis...and here www.chesapeakepsr.org/…
Now they need to tackle what’s wrong with the trading system of RECs, renewable energy credits, insisted upon by the same Market driven Utopians who brought us the mortgage derivatives and the failed carbon trading system which Congress did not pass in 2009-2010. The rapid price drop from over $300 per credit to less than $30 (eventually under $10) occurred when solar was starting to have real successes. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
These troubles in a program which is marketed as very successful, a national leader, also summon back for me the determined insistence of a regular Democratic Party player in Maryland who hated my ideas about rail in that 2008 essay. He insisted that electric cars are the wave of the future, solving our problems, just like the market allegedly always does. Well, the news is that in 2018, we have less than a million of them on the road, around 750,000 in a nation which has 263 million registered vehicles as of 2015. Good luck in making a dent — in time — which is what counts. And in Maryland, almost 40 percent of our electricity is imported, and is still predominantly coal, nuclear and gas generated, not solar.
Let me close by linking my “Missing Rail Vision” effort to the current gubernatorial campaign and a call by Ben Jealous for a “public infrastructure bank” and a “Energy Efficiency Revolving Loan Fund” to support renewable energy. Both are good directions that need to be fleshed out in much greater detail. My sense is we need a green Infrastructure Bank that will support both public rail/bus transportation (my preference has always been rail) and solar and offshore wind. Connecticut and other states have broken some ground in this area, and tout all the private capital that they are attracting to match the initial public seed money. Let me add this: I think we need to have such a bank also sell small denomination bonds to the general public, like the War Bonds in WWII.
This begins to get at the source of our real national troubles: the governing assumptions of the Republican Right, its Libertarian allies, and complicit Clintonians. You can see how Larry Hogan has stepped, via his highway program, into the vacuum left by the small dreams of Democrats like the Clintons, and yes, the regulatory lite “Smart Growth” policies of Governor Glendening, and Martin O’Malley walking away from any ambitious alteration of the status quo.
It all comes back to what Yanis Varoufakis called “The Ghost in the Machine” of public debt: the 1%, despite accumulating a increasingly alarming percentage of the national wealth and income, don’t want to pay higher taxes. So they are going to toll us in every way possible, and call the tax rates under Republican Dwight Eisenhower (“I like Ike”) “socialism.” Varoufakis (in his book “Talking to my Daughter About the Economy”) points out that the economic elite want the protection of the state’s vast legal and policing powers (which have led, in part, to mass incarceration in the US), and our giant defense shield, and the unlimited printing of electronic money when their financial system collapses, but they will demonize the price of civilization, taxes, until it has become Republican rote policy recital, and haunts the dreams of every Democrat running for office. And thus, until the only way to raise capital, such as for Hogan’s Highway’s, is to squeeze it out of average citizens via user fees, and turning the public revenue sources over to the same economic players who want to privatize social security and turn the electricity markets in betting parlors as well.
A sea change is coming citizens, because this Republican Right public philosophy is failing us all in the bottom 80%. I’m glad to have named that problem, in good part, in this 2008 essay, and in my parting words to a New Jersey audience at Sandy Hook on September 9, 2001: “The greatest threat to environmental protection is the Republican Right.” I have since added: “and their Libertarian Allies.”
Sometimes you have to look closely to pierce the thin green veneer of politicians like Larry Hogan, but when you do, you’ll find it’s the same old fossil fuel policies, gas now over coal, adding pipeline capacity and pollution lanes on the road to Global Warming.
Best,
billofrights
Frostburg, MD
A CITIZEN’S GUIDE TO
THE MISSING GREEN RAIL VISION
(FOR THE MD/METRO DC REGION)
This essay is dedicated to those engaged citizens around the nation
who have worked for so many lean years to keep the hope of rail transit alive. They are about to reap the harvest of their labors.
William Neil
January 2008
Introduction:
The Metro DC area is famous for its wide range of advocacy groups – seemingly for every cause under the sun. But there is something missing in this vast spectrum of policy passion: an organization primarily devoted to regional rail transportation solutions. While I discovered some Metro advocacy groups and others that worked on individual projects, like the Purple Line, and some “smart growth” non-profits with broader policy agendas, I was unable to find any group whose main focus was to reach for a robust regional rail transit vision, and a statewide one for Maryland. Given the reputation of the DC Metro region as having the nation’s second or third most congested traffic patterns, after Los Angeles and San Francisco, that was surprising. Based on a 2003 study, Metro DC would have the nation’s worst traffic congestion were it not for its public transit system. Logically, that led me to wondering if there ever had been any long-range “vision” for Metro beyond its existing 106 mile system or for regional rail transportation in general, beyond Metro. From my experience of more than a decade in land-use and transportation issues in the NJ-NY region, I had learned that it is hard to stop big road projects, like Montgomery County’s infamous Inter-County Connector (the ICC), without having a systematic counter-vision. There have to be serious alternatives. Old Man Auto, as I like to call the highway lobby, is still alive and well, and ready to take us down a new high-tech, highly privatized roadway System. This lobby has a putative “solution” to all our problems: funding, congestion, fairness – everything but those increasing Vehicle Miles Traveled – which is, of course, one of the major problems, if not the major one.
This paper is an attempt to sketch out this missing vision, but without illusions that one individual can fully do such a monumental thing without research assistants and grant money. Nonetheless, given the existing vacuum, at least the outlines of the job must still be attempted. And as I continued walking down the tracks to answer my questions, I realized that an inventory of rail efforts was being assembled, one that might prove useful for public action. I hope it avoids the excessive acronyms and technical jargon that plague most publications in the transportation planning field. The author notes, optimistically, that if technical credentials, expertise, and the sharp goads of chronic problems have been unable to move the ball off dead center in this most sophisticated of policy regions, then perhaps these are not the crucial factors in explaining our continuing auto dependency cycle and the lack of inspiring alternative visions. So citizen activists and just plain suffering auto commuters take heart: this essay was written by someone closer to you than to the transportation experts, yet it doesn’t throw expertise entirely to the wind.
The focus here, then, will be upon broader themes and policy visions, and the major impact that contemporary political ideology has had in keeping us more dependent upon the automobile than we should be at the current conjunction of overlapping crises: economic (is it a replay of 1929-1932?), environmental (Global Warming), political (an inadequate public philosophy and funding to solve our problems). Current conservative ideology weighs heavily on the deeper reality of our problems, and it never ceases to amaze me how authors that write in the field studiously avoid recognizing it. Transportation systems are expensive to build and maintain, and rail is especially capital intensive, even though it will last longer than the Interstates have: witness train tunnels and bridges from the 19th century that we are still using. But they can’t last forever. Recent, competent, overlapping studies put the nation’s infrastructure financing backlog at $1.5 trillion dollars over just the next five years. Yet when a major Interstate bridge collapsed in August, 2007, prompting calls to raise the federal gasoline tax – which hasn’t been touched since 1993, our nation’s Transportation Secretary quickly took to the op-ed pages to convey her horror at this “radical” idea.
This region and setting is the right one to raise these issues, here and now. We have a new governor in Maryland, who has, at times, along with his running mate, heightened expectations about a new transit policy. Global Warming is dramatically center stage as a national and global problem/crisis, with auto generated CO2 emissions being one of the root causes of the problem. And the Metro DC area has a tantalizingly successful 106 mile rapid transit system to inspire if not build upon – not without its problems, of course – but, nonetheless, something solid to point to that most regions of the US can only dream of. (And many are dreaming, and building, especially light rail versions.) According to the Washington Post, (Friday, July 6, 2007) Metro rail ridership set a record in Fiscal Year 2007, with 208 million riders using the system, up 2 million from FY 2006. The average daily weekday ridership in FY 2007 was 702,171. Yet despite this track record, there are few major rail projects in motion, like the Metro extension through Tysons Corner to Dulles Airport, and that one has been hanging on by just a cross-tie. As for light rail/trolley - on the table but not on any fast track – we have the Purple Line (a name with a revealing history we will unravel for you) between Bethesda and New Carrollton and the Corridor Cities line from Shady Grove to the Clarksburg “vicinity,” and the Red and Green Lines in Baltimore. In reality these are projects, however, not comprehensive visions. That leaves us with the nagging question: if not here, why not and where….? (So we will lift up our eyes and look around the country a bit, to see who is laying what kind of tracks, and where.)
After all, we have one of the most “Progressive” counties in the nation in Montgomery County, Maryland, a national trendsetter in land-use innovations which is embarking upon a major “Smart Growth,” urbanizing, mixed-use, transit oriented growth policy at nearly all its existing Red Line Metro Stations. It is also running into major problems, practical and theoretical, with its traffic congestion models and rising public skepticism as to whether the current Metro layout can satisfactorily handle the additional auto traffic from the proposed new higher density development. Under current trends, “they” all still bring their cars at traditional ratios. We also have a minimum framework for regional government in the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. And wealth: the Metro DC area has Fairfax, Arlington, and Montgomery among the top rankings of the nation’s wealthiest counties, yet Virginia and Maryland, like most of the other mid-Atlantic states, have Transportation Trust Funds in trouble, under funded, with the state of Virginia offering perhaps the most vivid illustration of transportation infrastructure not keeping up with the rapid commercial and housing growth of the area. These funding problems run head-on into the stonewall legacy of a rigid, outmoded political ideology from the Reagan era – and that’s some policy concussion to be burdened with.
In late September, 2007, on the same Metro Section Washington Post page as an article containing criticism from a number of regional business groups for not adequately funding its Transportation Trust, Maryland Transportation officials announced a desire to triple the ridership of the MARC commuter rail system to 100,000 by 2035. Driven by the needs to accommodate the large inflow of military and intelligence employees from federal base realignments, it is good to see the state looking in this direction. But MARC has big problems in sharing its rail lines with Amtrak and CSX. And funding? The funding, an additional $400 million a year for the Trust, courtesy of the special session of the legislature in Nov.-Dec. 2007, was not designed to handle this new expansion for MARC. So put part of the MARC program on the same “wish list” with other projects that we’ll fund when we reinvent public spending policy.
With this background setting, this is the time and place to raise the policy and funding bar for public officials. Big policy visions always face high political hurdles and a winnowing down process as they advance through the compromises of our political system. Given the scope of the problems we face by being stuck in traffic, stuck also in our Global Warming and oil related-Middle East policy disasters, and pressured by a fairly steady floor of higher gasoline prices, we had better start with an ambitious Green Rail Vision - if we are to end up with anything that offers to make a long term difference to riding around in very slow circles. We need to look well ahead, 25-50 years down the tracks, to prepare the rail routes to meet our carbon-constrained 21st century transportation needs.
So What’s the Problem Here?
MoCo Congested and Adrift
Essays such as this one don’t just drop from the heavens, they emerge from an existing context of history and policy, and so the reader deserves the lowdown on this one. Montgomery County Maryland, a national leader in land-use which already has 11 heavily used Metro stations on the Red line, a substantial bus service, and a “state of the art” transportation management center, finds itself, witnessed by the dramatic election of the fall of 2006, with many still “stuck in traffic,” very unhappy citizens. Indeed, the phrase “stuck in traffic,” which was thrust in front of citizen noses by road signs of the losing candidate in the County Executive primary, backfired; he was seen as promoting the very hyper real estate development that the transportation system was not keeping up with, and supporting what many progressive environmentalists and public transit advocates saw as exactly the wrong response – the ICC (Inter-County Connector) – the multi-billion dollar highway project “from the previous century” as its detractors aptly put it. (He also supported the Purple Line). To be fair, the winning candidate, Ike Leggett, who rode a pledge to slow the pace of development to become the County Executive, was also an ICC backer – symptomatic of the difficulty the current transportation “system” has of looking to a greener, less auto-carbon dominated future. And to rub salt into environmental wounds, both of the major rail transit projects for the county – potential light rail systems – the Purple Line (connecting Bethesda to Silver Spring and College Park and on to New Carrollton) and the Corridor Cities Transitway (connecting the western terminus of the Red line at Shady Grove to Clarksburg, a planned community further north, near the county’s Agriculture Reserve) were knocked out of the federal “New Starts” funding competition by failing to prove adequate ridership potential. (More on this federal program and its rules later).
That was not all. At hearings on its new Growth Policies during June of 2007, it became apparent that Montgomery County’s traffic congestion forecasting models – which showed most of the county’s main arteries/intersections to be satisfactory – were held in disbelief by nearly all sides of the testimony – and disbelief would be a mild way to describe the breakdown. This was not a minor matter; it verged on a secular “crisis of faith” at the very heart of technocratic modeling in a county famous for “planning” and technocrats, and at a time when the county was calling for even higher density levels near Metro stations.
What emerged at the center of the debate was citizen experience and intuition that higher density development around Metro stations, even with good mixed-use options, would make local and regional traffic worse, at least in the short and medium term, since the new residents were still going to bring their 1.5-2.0 autos per household. And The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) own study from 2005 would seem to confirm that skepticism, showing that at best, utilization of Metro from residences and offices right at the station are just 54% and 35% of the proximate populations, falling off rapidly as the distance from the station grows to ¼ mile and then ½ mile. Defenders of this “urbanization” push near existing Metros hoped that the end results of serious mixed-use would equal the claims made for the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor in Arlington County Virginia (what this writer has called the “Mecca of Mixed Use” in his Making Sense of Mixed Use Mania essay from July, 2007), where Smart Growth advocates say the result of such building has not resulted in greater traffic congestion. The big unanswered questions are these: given the great diversity of Montgomery County residents’ employment destinations, could the Metro system alone still meet their needs; and would there be enough folks with Metro-serviced workplace destinations to buy all the new condos being built near the stations, especially given the high-end nature of the construction? The early answer, overlapping with the growing acuteness of the real estate crisis, is no, based on what is happening at Rockville Town Center and condos near the Twinbrook station. But it is too early to render a final judgement.
The question of traffic congestion is not just a matter of personal frustration and convenience. It bears directly on safety, risk, and matters of air quality, with the region being close to non-attainment for ozone and fine particulates - and the growing concern over Global Warming, focused on the 38% contribution rate of C02 generated from transportation sources in Maryland. These are significant factors that contribute direct and background pressure upon citizens in their daily lives and raise pressing questions about the lack of alternatives to driving.
The Carnage
As the early research for this essay was being conducted in the late spring and summer of 2007, two accidents on the “Beltway” served as a jolting reminder to the question: why do we want to continue down this old roadway? The first was a May 30, 2007 crash on the Beltway near Exit 13 (Forestville, Prince Georges County) which killed 2, injured 15 and “closed down all lanes of the inner loop in the Forestville area for nearly five hours and snarled traffic on both sides of the highway late into the night.” (“2 Killed, 15 Injured in Chain of Beltway Crashes,” Clarence Williams and Elissa Silverman, Washington Post, Thursday, May 31, 2007, p. B1). The second was the auto deaths at a Virginia Beltway exit of four young women celebrating their graduations in June. And as 2007 waned, the region was visited again with a horrible accident toll from teenage drivers killed throughout the fall, including four males, aged 14-16, killed in one early November crash near Dentsville, in Charles County. The tolls in these crashes are bad enough, local echoes of the 45,000 deaths and 2.5 million injuries nationwide in 2005 – and in that range year after year with a cost estimated at around $230 billion per year. But they also serve to punctuate the reminder that gnaws at us all when we have to venture out on 495, 95 and 270 – that what we think is a 30-45 minute trip, give or take 15 at either end, could always turn into something dramatically worse, far worse.
As citizens ponder, with Maryland’s transportation experts, possible routes for the 14.5 mile segment of the Purple Line, and the number of potential riders, they might want to ask whether the ridership and “mode shift” models take into account the number of entertainment trips likely in this corridor. Bethesda and Silver Spring are “destinations,” where restaurants and night spots summon the young in large numbers to dine and drink. And tired professionals and retired folks come for the same reason. College Park and its tens of thousands of students should be included in the same line of reasoning. Rail offers a great way to enjoy these thriving night spots and to reduce the dangers for everyone by getting folks out of cars. It’s not all about the commute in the morning. It’s also about safety on the way home after a couple of drinks. Think about it. Parents of young drivers and professionals who really want to relax should be some of rail’s greatest supporters.
Those annual numbers, exceeding the total battle deaths in Korea (about 33,000) and almost equal to those in Vietnam (47,000) and with the millions of injured – have unfortunately become like background white noise to everyday American life. The astounding scale of the slaughter, which statisticians can try to muffle by pointing out the vast number of vehicle miles traveled, is best put in the light of reality – and our resignation to that reality – by posing a question. If someone came forward and said they had a totally new idea on transportation, but the new system would inflict 45,000 dead and 2.5 million injuries and annually, how would we react? Of course they would be promptly ushered off the stage and be given serious help. But instead of a new proposal, we’re trapped inside an aging system, with neglected infrastructure, growing users, and slower speeds. In most parts of the country, there is no viable alternative, even as old maps of the railway and electric trolley system, circa 1900-1925, haunt and tantalize viewers with its former vast extent. That was true even in surprising parts of the country, as in Los Angeles, 1910-1920, where more than a thousand miles of “interurban” trains once ran, heavier than trolleys, lighter than intercity trains, and powered by electricity, not steam, with some lines stretching more than 60 miles from Los Angeles itself. (See “Los Angeles, City of Rails,” a section in Stephen B. Goddard’s Getting There, The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994, pages 79-82). And as for we gridlock sufferers in the I-95 corridor, told that we only move forward, consider the possibilities once open to travel from Delaware to Maine, entirely by trolley, circa 1904, as documented by the publication of Clinton and Louisa Lucas’s A Trolley Honeymoon (see John Stilgoe’s Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene, Yale University Press, 1983, page 289). (The phrase, “going forward,” it should be noted, now laces political speech as frequently as “absolutely” and “bottom line” punctuate everyday speech – perhaps a defensive measure summoned up by the nagging sense that an awful lot is going, if not backwards, at least sideways.)
I personally got just such a shock in the late 1990’s when standing in the enormous old railroad shed at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, at the Hudson riverfront across from New York City (and next to the grand, restored Central Railroad Terminal building) where more than 20 tracks still come together – with the old route signs serving as transportation tombstones, calling out the vaguely familiar names of the vanished lines across the state that today’s New Jersey commuters, stuck in traffic like much of the BosWash corridor – can only dream about. I remember my immediate reaction: “my God, we’ve gone backwards” as, at that time, New Jersey was going through a dangerous and very contentious lane widening project for Route 287 – the Garden State’s equivalent of 270.
Global Warming and the Moral Imperative
Today, c. 2007, we have another major consideration to add to the heading, “what’s the problem here,” in addition to these by now traditional auto lamentations. Thanks to Katrina, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and the courage and persistence of scientists like Dr. James Hansen, we know that the earth is warming, and rapidly. We have our globe on the verge of the “tipping point” where the current concentration of carbon dioxide, the chief culprit in trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, at about 380 parts per million (ppm), is rising around 2 ppm a year, and we have been trying to cap it in the 450-550 ppm range. That’s measured against a pre-industrial age background of 280 ppm. But dramatic change is in the air. Just as this essay was about to go to press, in late December, 2007, Bill McKibben, the environmental writer, says Dr. Hansen has some stark news for all of us: “ ‘…the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm.’” (Bill McKibben, “Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million,” Washington Post, Friday, December 28, 2007, p.A21.) The practical effects of what to the average citizen’s ear does not sound like a very dramatic rise in temperature – 1.5 degrees centigrade by mid-century and 3 degrees warmer by the end of the 21st century – is best illustrated by looking at the projected sea level rise from our melting polar areas (and Greenland). Joseph Romm, a PhD. in physics from MIT and author of Hell and High Water (William Morrow, 2007) lays it out bluntly: “The last time Earth was 1 degree C (centigrade) warmer than today, sea levels were 20 feet higher…The last time Earth was 2 degrees to 3 degrees warmer than it is now, some 3 million years ago, sea levels were more than 80 feet higher.” Under the course we are on now, by 2050, we would be looking at 500 ppm CO2 concentrations. Romm reminds us that “…once we get much past 500 ppm, the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the resulting 20-foot sea level rise become all but inevitable.” And now Dr. Hansen, the dean of the global warming scientists, has revised that estimate to say the dramatic melting is kicking in at much lower concentrations.
Let’s bring that even closer to home, right to the shores of Maryland’s beloved Chesapeake Bay. Maryland has some 3100 miles of coastline, and some 380,000 acres are less than 5 feet above sea level (primarily in Wicomico, Somerset and Dorchester Counties, in the southern portion of the Eastern Shore). Even under milder versions of this warming, a 19 inch sea level rise by 2100, Baltimore could see 860 buildings flooded. (A Blueprint for Action: Policy Options to Reduce Maryland’s Contribution to Global Warming, by Brad Heavner, Environment Maryland, June 2007, at www.environmentmaryland.org/reports/global-warming/global-warming-program-reports/a-blueprint-for-action-policy-options-to-reduce-maryland’s-contribution-to-global-warming). Any one care to do these calculations for a 20 foot rise?
Transportation produced emissions, primarily car and truck exhausts, account for between 34-38% of C02 releases in the Maryland and Metro, DC region, with power generation just about equal, because our area is heavily dependent on coal as the fuel source. According to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, despite new commitments by Maryland to improve vehicle emission standards and to join regional arrangements to reign in power sources, the outlook shows “that pollution is actually going the other way: up. At the current pace, it forecasts, emissions will increase 35% by 2030.”(“D.C. Area Outpaces Nations in Pollution,” by David A. Fahrenhold, Washington Post, Sunday, September 30, 2007, p. C1, 6.) If we are able to implement the California Car performance standards, the projection drops to 22% (TPB News, July-August 2007, Vol. XV, Issue IV, “Looking at Greenhouse Gases.”) And changing land-use patterns - a 5% shift in households to the east by 2030 – only resulted in a 1-2% drop in Vehicle Miles Traveled from the projected increases – hardly a dent.
So long before this writer embraced the fact that Global Warming was perhaps the most acute problem facing us, he had found compelling reasons – safety, lost time, other air-health factors, loss of rural habitats to auto-encouraged sprawl - to begin to move away from the auto-centric view. Apparently, many American citizens share these concerns. The Harris Poll #14 from February 8, 2006, says it nicely in its headlines: “Americans Would Like to See a Larger Share of Passengers and Freight Going by Rail in Future,” and “Safety and energy efficiency seen as top priorities for future of passenger transportation” (at http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=638).
Global Warming adds a new sense of urgency to our transportation woes, however. Now it isn’t just an emphasis on lost time and aggravation from being stuck in traffic. It’s a direct physical danger to millions of people living near low-lying coastal areas, to add to the background noise slaughter generated by car collisions….Somewhat ironically, it seems to this writer, it took a real estate developer with an academic bent to perhaps put the new sense of urgency into the right words, words that have stuck with me over the past year. Christopher Leinberger, a developer and visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, while arguing for eliminating Washington, DC’s building heights to facilitate higher densities, stated that
‘We have a moral imperative to increase density, to get us out of our cars…’…taller buildings, he said, would lower prices and lead more residents and corporations to choose the city over gas-guzzling suburban sprawl. The Threat of global warming makes the need to reconsider the height limit even more immediate, he said.” (Paul Schwartzman, “High Level Debate on Future of D.C., Wednesday, May 2, 2007, Washington Post, p. B1-2.”
Unfortunately, he was less enthusiastic about participating in the struggles to fund the new infrastructure which might aid in getting more people out of cars, for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t be moving to older urban areas. (Conversation with writer, Feb. 2007, National Building Museum). Apparently, the moral imperative did not extend to the prominent ideological roadblocks this writer sees in bringing alternatives to the car to more citizens. His solution seemingly would avoid the politics of funding: move to cities that already have the transit. Very tidy.
Highway Illusions & Two Failed, Competing Systems
Induced Traffic and Latent Demand
With so much of the national land-use dialogue centered on “Smart Growth” and the “New Urbanism,” which seek to build at higher densities in mixed-use, walkable communities located near new or existing transit, it is surprising to see how little most of political reality has moved away from auto-centrism. In 2007, I learned, as a candidate for a seat on the Montgomery County Planning Board, just how small the baby steps have been in taking those first significant strides away from Old Man Auto.
As part of my campaign, I urged the Planning Board, the County Council, and citizens to pick up and read a copy of Andres Duany’s Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (co-authored with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, North Point Press, 2000). I did this because I thought that Duany, whom I had heard lecture in person back in New Jersey, and who has done major projects, like Kentlands, in Maryland, and who has also served as a consultant to Montgomery County, has given everyone the most accessible work yet on our national struggles with land-use and transportation. The fifth chapter of the book, called “The American Transportation Mess” is one of the most readable and succinct summaries of our auto-illusions and why we continue to spend much more for expanding highway capacity than for expanding our transit systems. Duany, who is an architect focused on community planning, and a visionary perhaps on the level of Frank Lloyd Wright (my call), still leaves a substantial place for the auto in his designs, and he has seen the traffic planners and modelers up close from the many projects he has built. So he’s been in the front lines, and given his desire to make money and his pro-growth attitude, he’s a good spokesperson to puncture the still dominant paradigm of putting most of our “capacity expansion/capital funding” into new highways and lane expansion projects.
Why is Duany so confident in saying that building new highways and adding additional lanes to old ones won’t work to solve our congestion problems or reduce our Vehicle Miles Traveled, one of the keys to reducing our CO2 transportation emissions? Primarily, he believes that empirical studies, like one done at the Univ. of California at Berkeley, bear out his own workday observations. The Berkeley study “covering thirty California counties between 1973 and 1990 found that, for every 10 percent increase in roadway capacity, traffic increased 9 percent within four years’ time.” And he looks at places like Atlanta, which has added more highway capacity than nearly any other region except Kansas City, and he finds the residents in massive gridlock, with commutes averaging 35 miles, the highest in the nation.
Behind the failures of added highway capacity are two closely related concepts which are gaining recognition, but still seem to be far from changing the dominant paradigm among the highway lobby and most local elected officials, including those in Montgomery County and Annapolis: induced traffic and latent demand. Induced traffic occurs when additional highway capacity encourages more and more citizens to live further and further out in the countryside, stranding them and “inducing them” to rely upon the same large artery to commute as the rest of their neighbors for their peak time travels – and increasingly for their off peak errands as well. Interstate 270 in Maryland is perhaps the clearest regional example. The missing ligament which links the two terms however, is the idea that since “the real constraint on driving is traffic, not cost, people are always ready to make more trips when the traffic goes away.” (Duany, page 91) So if the new lanes actually deliver some temporary relief (leaving aside the added dangers and delays due to the “construction constriction” -my term - realities of getting there – often lasting years) – the reality that latent demand is about 30% of existing levels of traffic, means then that “adding lanes is futile, since drivers are already poised to use them up.” (Ibid).
It is my experience both from ten years in looking at adding capacity in New Jersey, and now staring at the imminent Intercounty Connector (the ICC) in Montgomery County, the 3 billion dollar, 18 mile toll road through some of the most environmentally sensitive habitats left in the county, that Duany is very much on target when he writes:
While the befuddling fact of induced traffic is well understood by sophisticated traffic engineers, it might as well be a secret, so poorly has it been disseminated. The computer models that transportation consultants use do not even consider it, and most local public works directors have never heard of it at all. As a result, from Maine to Hawaii, city, county, and even state engineering departments continue to build more roadways in anticipation of increased traffic, and, in so doing, create that traffic. The most irksome aspect of this situation is that these road-builders are never proved wrong; in fact, they are always proved right: ‘You see,’ they say, ‘I told you that traffic was coming.’ (Ibid.)
And what is so additionally painful about the ICC is not just its cost and scope, large as they are. It is the fact that it’s being built in the heart of sophisticated planning country and the home state of the “Smart Growth” paradigm - and being done so late in time – in the new century where the fight against Global Warming is now engaged and when , as Duany makes clear, we should all know much better. For a county and state growing very short on Transportation Trust dollars, and where two attempted new transit initiatives have struggled - the Corridor Cities and Purple Lines in Montgomery County - the ICC is a huge qualifier about alleged Smart Growth savvy.
The Elephant in the Bedroom
Now a good portion of the groundwork for Duany’s pithy formulations was laid by the authors of The Elephant in the Bedroom: Automobile Dependence a & Denial, Impacts on the Economy and Environment by Stanley I. Hart, a civil and structural engineer, and Alvin Spivak, a mechanical engineer (New Paradigm Books, 1993). In addition to making clear that the level of traffic congestion is the key restraint on the willingness to drive, Hart and Spivak also pioneered the key to debunking the growing hi-tech gimmicks, such as Congestion Pricing, HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) & HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes, Smart Streets, Ramp Metering - all of which promote the same vicious cycle cited by Duany, which, in addition to increasing road capacity by physical lane expansion, also induce more driving by making existing roads more efficient. Maryland and Virginia though, are about to demonstrate with their HOT lanes along 495 and 95, that we can mix the realm of possibilities - and still get to the same unhappy results.
The Elephant in the Bedroom, despite some overstatement of its premises – after all, it is a polemic - ought to be more widely recognized for calling our attention to the vast under pricing woven throughout our auto centric transportation “system.” Cars and highways have been getting away with a huge understatement of their true costs: for parking spaces; the real estate for the roads themselves; the vast policing network they require, as well as the EMS and general medical cost burden their enormous carnage transfers both to the general fund and throughout our failing health care system; the environmental damage to air, water and habitats. The authors call our attention to the way real estate taxes, as well as other general revenue sources, like the sales tax, are used to make up for the enormous infrastructure repair and maintenance deficits we have run up, deficits that the inadequate gas tax long ago fell behind on.
Missing Auto Costs: $2.25-$9.00 per Gallon
So how big is the automobile subsidy? Or put another way, what would the fuel tax be on a gallon of gas if all the hidden costs were to be made up by this revenue source? Hart and Spivak say the gas tax would fall between $5-$9 per gallon; the lower figure if we included just financial externalities, the higher if we included environmental damage. Now I don’t know if this range would hold up under rigorous economic examination, but even if it is overstated, it has shock value to make a valid point: our direct “highway” revenues (gasoline tax, collections from toll roads) don’t begin to cover the true costs of the automobile’s impacts. These figures, it should be noted, are in addition to the fact that the federal gasoline tax had fallen, by 1993, so far behind the rate of inflation that its buying power was only one-quarter of what it was way back in 1965. (By comparison, Stephen B. Goddard, author of Getting There, The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century, cited above, arrives at an under-pricing for the auto at $2.25 cents per gallon, using a similar if not as sweeping indictment of what we are missing in our shallow assessments of the costs of automobile dependence – see pages 250-256.)
Hart and Spivak have come up with another insight that is widely overlooked or at least never phrased so aptly that it jumps out and registers in the jargon laden world that is transportation policy. And that insight claims that we have not just one but two nearly dysfunctional transportation systems, highways and transit, and they perform a dynamic dance of dysfunction with one another and the broader public which funds them. Here’s the rap from them:
…by underpricing the use of automobiles, we have bankrupted the most important alternative, our public transit systems. In most American cities, we have the worst of all worlds. We have two unsatisfactory transportation systems: a failed and abusive automobile/freeway on the one hand, and an inadequate and bankrupt bus transit system on the other. The freeway system has failed because of too much demand; the transit system because of too little. Both systems, competing for the same patrons, are heavily subsidized from the same taxpayer’s pocket.
Now I believe that as a general statement for the whole country, this has far more truth than falsehood. But it needs some clarification. Some cities, like New York, Boston, Chicago, Metro DC, San Francisco have pretty good transit systems, and the heavy rail portion in the DC Metro area recovers about 65% of its operating expenses through its fare box collections, one of the best records in the nation, according to Resources for the Future (“Transit in Washington, DC: Current benefits and Optimal Level of Provision” at www.rff.org/documents/RFF-DP-06-21.pdf). In those parts of the nation that don’t have a serious heavy rail or light rail component, and rely on highways and just buses for their “competing” system (that is, most of the nation), it is head-on correct, and, as Duany has observed in Suburban Nation, buses tend to be shunned by middle-class folks, because in “most suburban communities, transit passengers are made to feel like impoverished transients, waiting by the side of the road on a graffiti-covered bench or inside an ungainly plastic bubble.” (Page 203).
In the sense that for most of the urban areas of the nation, gridlock has gotten dramatically worse over the past twenty years or so even for those locales that have poured billions into more lanes and freeways, like Los Angeles and Atlanta, certainly the highway system is failing to deliver the goods. But what about the Metro DC area, which has a public transportation system that captures about 18% of all “person trips in WMATA’s service area…the second highest percentage in the country?” Here is where the judgements and difficulties have a finer grain to them than The Elephant in the Bedroom would suggest – but in some sense their “two dysfunctional systems” theory still has a good deal of merit even in our atypical local situation. Yes, we still have gridlock here even with a good Metro system that set a record in July of 2007 by averaging 772,826 daily weekday trips. What the Beltway would be like by adding 772,000 cars – or even half that – in the absence of Metro – well, we don’t want to go there.
Here’s the main point to be made by focusing on Elephant’s argument: the revenues needed to maintain even the current dysfunctional level of both systems in the Metro DC area are falling far, far short of what is needed…as demonstrated by the fact that the Maryland and Virginia Transportation Trust Funds are both in deep trouble, as are others in the Mid-Atlantic region (Pennsylvania and New Jersey), and as is the federal Transportation Trust, which, because of the failure to raise the gas tax since 1993 (since 1992 in Maryland), will be insolvent by 2009.
But wait: there is more to it than that. As Duany, Hart and Spivak have, I hope, demonstrated for you, there is nothing but inescapable frustration in pouring more money – federal, state or local, into highway capacity expansion, whether of the old freeway style or the new HOT lane variety. Gridlock still awaits as the “latent” drivers discover the fleeting and apparitional appearance of congestion relief and jam the new lanes with Old Man Auto. If these authors’ reasoning is sound, and I believe it is 80-90% on target, then we should be working very hard to re-arrange the ratios of how we spend our Transportation Trust money, as short-fallen as these funds are.
Transportation Budgets: Ritual Ratios in Favor of Roads
As one looks at the broad outlines of transportation budgets, a great divide jumps out over how money is spent. On one side of the divide is operations and maintenance, what it takes to keep current transit and road operations safe and functioning, and on the other, the crucial fulcrum category of capacity expansion, which is often a major subset of capital budgets. This category, capacity expansion, tells us how we are going to “get there” in the future. In Maryland, transit (buses, light and heavy rail, which includes Metro and commuter rail, like MARC) usually gets about 35% of total Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) expenditures, half the state’s operating budget but just about 30% of transportation’s capital budget (from the Maryland Transit Study Steering Committee Final Report, January, 2007).
In the 2007-2012 state Consolidated Transportation Plan (CTP) for Capital Expenditures, Maryland Transit Authority gets 16%, the Washington Metropolitan Transportation Authority (WMATA) gets 13% for a combined transit total of 29% - and the State Highway Authority gets 53%. The actual Fiscal Year 2008 Allowances for MDOT shows that the State Highway Authority gets 1.1 billion dollars, and MTA and WMATA combined get 388 million. (Maryland Department of Transportation Fiscal 2008 Budget Overview at http://mlis.state.md.us/2007rs/budget_docs/All/Operating/J00A01__MDOT_The_Secretarys_Office.pdf).
Maryland gets a substantial chunk of its Transportation Budget from federal sources –about 24% - and SAFETEA-LU - the name of the most recent grand federal transportation bill passed in late 2005 and which will take us to 2009 – gives Maryland $580 million annually for highways and $140 million for transit. Nationwide, SAFETEA-LU will distribute 286.4 billion dollars over its life, but only 52.6 billion for transit.
Something else which is important to keep in mind about transportation budgets is the magnitude of operating and maintaining existing systems, both highway and transits. Our state and regional systems are aging, and so it’s not surprising to learn that the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board’s (NCRTPB) 2007-2030 long range plan (called the Constrained Long Range Plan or CLRP – it is “constrained” because transit expansion funding is sufficient only to 2010, not 2030) – devotes 70% of its total budget to “operations and preservation” – 48% for transit and 22% for Highways – so there is only 30% left for expansion of services, with highways getting 21% and transit just 9% (and the transit figure is ballooned since about 4% of its expansion figure, more than 4 billion dollars, is dedicated to just one project - the Dulles Metro expansion project - out of a total budget of 109.8 billion dollars).
If we look a bit closer at suburban Maryland’s share of this long range plan for the Metro DC region (Montgomery, Prince Georges’s, Fredrick and a small portion of Charles County) as laid out in the financial plan prepared for the NCRTPB in September of 2006 by Cambridge Systematics, Inc. of Bethesda, we find that Maryland will spend 21.9 billion for highways, and 16.3 billion on transit through 2030, but, when it comes to system expansion, 11 billion will be spent on roads, and only 2.7 billion on expansions and “new starts” for transit, which includes the Purple Line and Corridor Cities line.
The race for funding between roads and rail looks even worse at the individual project level than the macro spending totals. For the National Capital Region’s projects contained in that 109.8 billion dollar budget out to year 2030, 110 of the projects are for roads, and only 20 for transit, and of those 20, 11 involve HOT/HOV projects, so only 9 are “pure” transit. (Some of the HOT/HOV projects’ lanes will be dedicated to buses, so the distinction between highway and transit blurs a bit). At the Montgomery County level, the 10 year Transportation Plan (2004-2010) shows 80 road projects (22 new roads, 19 widenings, 18 grade separated intersections and 21 intersection improvements) versus 14 transit projects, 3 of which are rail and 8 of which are new parking lots or garages.
So that’s a quick sketch-overview of how transportation budgets ratio out at the national, regional, state and local level. But what does it mean for our purposes here, in light of what we have learned from Andres Duany of Suburban Nation and Hart and Spivak, the authors of The Elephant in the Bedroom? First, even though we spend impressive budget sums on transit, most of it goes for operations and maintenance, just like it does for our aging road system. Our transit systems have lots of workers who have medical costs, pensions and salaries, and lots of equipment which wears out and must be maintained safely, and which, despite our region’s good recovery numbers at the fare box, will never quite pay for themselves, something which has been historically true of railroad passenger operations (as opposed to freight), even in rail’s golden era, 1880-1920 (Again, see Goddard’s Getting There). Second, as our authors tell us, the money we spend on adding road capacity is self defeating, summoning more “latent” drivers and “inducing” more usage, so that we never get the congestion benefits for long, if ever. So while we must continue to spend along these lines for both road and transit operations and maintenance, we have to look at the futile bias towards highways in capacity expansion, and begin to shift a much greater amount towards expansion of our transit system.
Capacity Expansion: Putting Rail First
So this writer is making a major break with current transportation thinking along two lines from “paving as usual.” First, he doesn’t believe that most of the highway money spent for those 110 regional projects will do much to relieve congestion, and will certainly do nothing to get cars off the road, and will probably do much to increase vehicle miles traveled, and he invites readers to take a close look at them to see how the billions are run up by the parochial and micro-focused nature of so many of them. In Montgomery County, I toss out the Montrose Parkway expansion as an example, and most citizens know exactly what I mean. Second, he doesn’t believe that the “Getting on Board” program announced in Maryland’s Comprehensive Transit Plan – to double transit ridership by 2020 (published in December 2000) has the right approach: it wants to “Make the existing system the best it can be before expanding” – in other words, it will continue to emphasize operations and maintenance and system “enhancements” – but it will put “New Rail Lines” – system expansion - dead last among its nine “Themes.” Please don’t misunderstand: this writer can’t argue with Theme 1 – System Preservation – that’s common sense. Or Theme 2 – “Transit Quality” – also common sense. But in order to really grapple with the ills of our 21st century – stuck in traffic, CO2 pollution from too many cars and vehicle miles traveled – and the moral imperative issued by Global Warming to get more and more people out of cars – then we have to offer more alternatives to the auto, especially rail alternatives, and we can only get there within the budget realm by expanding transit capacity.
Back in the NY-NJ Metro Region, the Tri-State Transportation (that’s New Jersey, New York, Connecticut) organization had a slogan to guide dealing with how we spend our transportation dollars: Fix It First. It’s pretty logical; we have to maintain and repair our existing systems, roads and rails, and they get first claim on tax dollars. But we shouldn’t be putting such vast sums into highway capacity expansion – it just doesn’t achieve the objective. Now we know that when new development projects go in next to already clogged roads, new turning lanes and signals are often necessary for the public’s safety. That or some equivalent, must be done. But the vast majority of the projects we see listed, the new road and sustained lane expansions as well as the vastly expensive new interchanges raise directly the question: wouldn’t we be better off in putting these billions into rail transit capacity expansion?
Readers beware: let’s have no illusions about the degree of difficulty involved here. It will be a hard enough struggle to pull transit even with highways for those capacity expansion dollars in the transportation budgets. And an even tougher fight to reverse the ratios we have listed above – in transit’s favor. But winning these competitions is not enough, as we will later see. America, the Metro DC region, Maryland - all have run up tremendous infrastructure deficits – and not just for road and rail maintenance. Four months before the I-35 bridge collapsed on August 1, 2007 in Minneapolis, the Urban Land Institute and Ernest& Young had issued a very good, major report on the state of the world’s infrastructure (a modest undertaking, that), Infrastructure 2007: A Global Perspective whose real purpose, it would seem, was to shame the US’s laggard status compared to Europe and Asia in keeping up with these usually politically mundane, but very expensive underlying structural matters. We’ll have more to say about this report latter, because it is worth closer scrutiny and commentary. For now, in the report we learn that our Highway Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2009, the federal gas tax that funds it hasn’t been raised since 1993, and the current gas tax has only about ½ the purchasing power that it had in the mid-sixties. The US faces an infrastructure deficit of $1.5 trillion over the next five years for maintaining and updating its roads, rail lines, electric grid and water and sewer systems. Zeroing in on just rails, the report states that “mired decades behind Europe and Asia in rail service quality, the United States will need to spend at least $250 billion over the next 20 years in attempts to catch up.” Now not all this money for rail has to come from government. Since the financial revival of the freight rail “system” now entirely in private sector hands, private capital is taking notice and seems ready to put in some financing in selected locations. (More on the financial health of private rail later; there is some conflicting evidence). Nonetheless, updating our rail system will require substantial public funding, especially for new passenger service, in amounts our political system is not eager to a face. This leads us to consider the reasons rail expansion has had such a hard time funding itself in the political arena.
Why Does the Right “Rail” Against Rail?
Despite these ratios of roads over rail – and our region’s are probably better for rail than in most parts of the country - rail, especially light rail in urban areas is making a comeback, gathering momentum despite the power of the road lobby. That’s because in a growing number of areas, the congested facts-on-the-ground and a public preference for rail over bus transit has overcome the odds. With some 20-25 light rail lines now in existence and 58 proposed, planned or in development (according to the American Public Transit Association and Light Rail Now: things get confusing as the two organizations don’t sort Heritage/vintage trolley lines the same way) and rumblings of regional heavy/high-speed rail revivals surfacing in California and the old industrial mid-West (more on them later), and a fairly steady floor of higher gasoline prices starting to push ridership numbers up, there appears to be a favorable shift in the outlook for the future of rail of all types in the United States. The rail comeback is clearly threatening to many road interests, and some strong clues as to what is transpiring can be glimpsed by two recent newspaper articles that appeared in the immediate wake of the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007.
The first appeared in the New York Times on August 7: “Bridge Collapse Revives Issue of Road Spending” by Susan Saulny and Jennifer Steinhauer (http://www.nytimes.com/200708/07/us/07highway.html). Of course, this calamitous event prompted some national soul-searching on the state of our highway infrastructure and it made the Urban Land Institute’s Infrastructure 2007 report, referred to above, look even more prophetic, as well as the earlier one issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers. But the collapse also raised other, dramatic political dangers: that some in Washington might want to raise the gas tax, still idling in place since 1993 at 18.4 cents per gallon. Now the drift of the Times article is that we are spending a lot on transportation – but it’s for new projects, and the unglamorous job of repair and maintenance for existing infrastructure is being neglected. There is clearly some truth to that, without question, as the Infrastructure 2007 report clearly demonstrates. (The history of our “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” shows a pretty constant underestimation of repair and maintenance costs, as Goddard’s Getting There demonstrates. We tend to build our roads “thinner” than in Europe.) But then the article veers off into attacking the new rail projects (rail transit is mentioned five times) as being particularly wasteful in these times, since so few Americans ride rail. And none other than Randal O’Toole, a constant rail critic and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, is given prominent attack space near the end of the article – without so much a mention, much less equal time, given to anyone to defend the rail projects, a number of which had to pass referendums by voters to get built. The Chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Rep. James L. Oberstar (D, MN) is skewered for bringing home $10 million this year for a new 40 mile rail line out of what looks to be a total $12 million appropriation for his state. But as is made clear by a strong criticism of the article in LightRailNow! (http://www.lightrailnow.org/news/n_newslog2007q3.htm#USA_20070815), the 2008 federal allotments for Minnesota’s transportation budget read: highways $608.6 million, fixed rail $9.0 million (…and the ratios were equally pro-highway for 2006 and 2007). In one sense, it’s a heartening sign that someone is feeling so threatened by even the modest advance of rail that it must be attacked in the wake of tragedy; in another, it’s outrageous that an article so obviously one-sided drew so little commentary or notice. Unspoken however, in both the article and rail rebuttal, is the subterranean threat that an increase in the federal gas tax might be used to fund even more rail transit.
For Whom the Road Tolls
Less than a month after the August 1st bridge collapse, on Saturday, August 25, 2007, federal Secretary of Transportation Mary E. Peters wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled “The Folly of Higher Gas Taxes (page A.15). The basic thrust of the article is how outmoded and inefficient the gas tax is in meeting needs for transportation revenue. While politics is named as the culprit in spending for new projects as opposed to the mundane upkeep tasks, like making sure bridges don’t collapse, apparently the threat of applied political will to raise the relevant tax is too much for the Secretary. Instead, drivers should self-tax, though of course she doesn’t use the “T” word. The operative words are instead “charging directly” to raise the repair revenue and to cut congestion. Of course, this is across-the-board toll roads and congestion pricing by any fair restatement, without the acknowledgement of the universal application of the tracking equipment necessary to make it work, if it indeed would work, as our authors of Elephant in the Bedroom doubt. In Peters piece there is no mention of public transportation, rail or Global Warming. But it is a good example of the dominant drift in highway thinking: how high tech and congestion pricing will solve our problems without ever getting more of us out of our cars. Simple, isn’t it?
Tolling and Gambling: “Induced” Taxation
In some ways, the deeper rationalizing mechanism behind toll roads and congestion pricing is the same as in gambling - lotteries, slot machines and casinos: self taxation. You’ll only pay if you drive and if you drive at the congested time, you’ll pay more. But we won’t be raising a tax as nasty as the gasoline tax. This is more subtle and seemingly self-induced, if you can accept that ever shadowing transponder necessary to make it work. And if we can privatize the whole operation, it won’t be elected officials on the responsibility hook for the tax increase – they’ve lateraled that off to the private sector, as in Indiana in 2006. (See “The Highwaymen” by Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway, January/February 2007 issue of MotherJones at http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html )
The Freedom To Crawl
Having come of political age during the years of the rise of the Republican Right, and being a student of its thinking and core values, it’s never been hard for me to see why libertarians often ally with the Republican Right to oppose rail transit. The key word, somewhat ironically in the context of contemporary highway “gridlock,” is liberty/freedom, the very core of the message the auto has been sending since its rise to ascendancy in the 1920’s: the right to go where one wants, when one wants, without having to rub elbows with strangers. The irony stems from the fact that as land-owners and developers get to maximize their freedom to develop all land parcels in an entirely auto-dependent region, the freedom of the open road disappears for commuters and time, money and lives are lost through increased accidents and travel times. One might view the pursuit and the result as putting a little different twist on the old term “revolutions devouring their children.”
As the declining railroad industry broke under the power of the road lobby, its prostrate economic posture coincided pretty closely with the public perceptions and fate of urban America as something not only to be avoided physically, but as a drain on the public’s purse, needing “welfare” or it’s industrial equivalent - “operating subsidies.” It’s not hard to see that the greatest demand on taxpayers for rail support is for the big urban systems of New York, Boston, D.C., Chicago ….Philadelphia. Amtrak, in this light, operates as a continual source of libertarian and conservative irritation (jointly hereafter for my purposes – “the Right”) along the old urban eastern coast between Boston and Washington.
As land-use trends and auto-dependency reached their crescendo in the “Roaring ’90’s” (1990’s, that is), with an apparent political shift of power to the Republican suburbs further and further out from the old urban cores, and rail passenger trips nationally fell to just 1-2% of all surface transportation trips…and with low gas prices enabling the SUV trend, conservatives indignantly asked why their gas taxes, marshaled by the Transportation Trust, should be supporting these “losing” rails ventures, so seemingly irrelevant to… Texans, Californians, Floridians… and eastern shore Maryland residents, just to bring it a little closer to home – to, in fact, the whole of Duany’s Suburban Nation.
Reagan: “No Fan of Metro”
One of the hidden dynamics of the debate for and against contemporary rail passenger spending is the failure by many transit supporters to recognize the depth of the ideological nature of a substantial part of the opposition. The Reagan Revolution dropped a not too subtle hint, right out of the gate, as chronicled by Zachary M. Schrag in his fine book, The Great Society Subway (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2006): “Within weeks of the inauguration, administration aides leaked word that they were no fans of Metro and were considering cuts. And cut they did.” (p.215). When Metro officials testified that they needed $511 million per year to come in at a total price tag of $8.2 billion by 1989, and that funding at $275 million would push the cost to $11.8 billion and the finish line to 2002 “the White House budgeted $275 million.”(Ibid.). The warning actually came to be true: the final stops on the Green Line to bring Metro to its 103 mile completion were finished in January of 2001 (the Branch Avenue Station – since then it’s added three more miles on the Blue Line.).
Three for the Road
That type of “in your face” opposition has continued today, but you will look in vain for a clear exposition of it at sites where one might expect to find it, like the American Public Transit Association (http://www.apta.com), where typing in “conservative or libertarian opposition to rail” in their search engine doesn’t generate any results, nor even when the query is for three of the most prominent rail opponents in the 21st century: Randal O’Toole, Wendall Cox and Ronald Utt. Readers will be much better served by turning to the website for LightRailNow at http://www.lightrailnow.org. There, if you pop in the name Wendall Cox you’ll get 32 articles referring to his activities against rail transit. As for Mr. O’Toole’s “Thoreau Institute,” readers will find that “…Oil, Asphalt and Pipeline Money Feed an Extremist Attack on Urban Planning and Public Transit,” an article by the LightRailNow!PublicationTeam from January 2007. Citing research by Media Transparency, the article says that the “Thoreau Institute” received $311,000 dollars during 1997-2005 from three major conservative donor sources: the Sarah Scaife foundation, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc. The LightRailNow! site also does a good job of reporting on how these anti-rail advocates work with state conservative foundations to oppose specific rail projects.
This section is not intended to be a detailed expose of all the Right’s institutional participation in opposing rail projects. Readers can scope that out for themselves at the above locations. But the doggedness of the opposition is suggestive of deeper currents in American public policy and politics. Zachary Schrag has correctly framed, in the title of his book, The Great Society Subway, and made explicit in his Introduction and Conclusion, that our region’s Metro was not meant to be the cheapest transportation system available. It was intended as a grand and serious public alternative to the neighborhood-obliterating push of Interstates into the fabric of the city itself, and meant to connect suburbs to city in an integrated regional framework. Without directly taking on the “Right” and their opposition to current transit projects, Schrag is nonetheless clear that “Since Vietnam and Watergate, Americans have remained suspicious of big government, expressing their distrust in tax revolts and votes for candidates who promise to dismantle and deregulate.” (p.282). And perhaps if I were a liberal “outpost” teacher at conservative George Mason University, I would be as circumspect as he is in naming “the Right” as one of the main obstacles to the great public tasks we are now facing in dealing with Global Warming and our auto dependent “transportation mess.” Nonetheless, he clearly sees the deep underlying dynamics of the situation we are in
.
Rail’s Account: Paid in Full
The Right’s attack on the current stirrings of rail transit around the nation has been worrisome enough (without really being able to stem the shifting tide) that a sustained academic response addressing their core lines of argument has been mounted. Before we turn to that response, we should make clear the core of the Right’s case against transit. Because such a small number of total surface transportation trips nationwide are undertaken by rail, and because it appears to need such lavish public subsidies, and because road capacity has also fallen behind the curves of increasing drivers and vehicle miles traveled – and it does not appear that even in the “big time” older rail cities that rail transit has been able to reduce congestion - then why spend on rail at all – put all of our national transportation dollars from the gasoline tax into increasing highway capacity.
Now as I hope this paper has made clear, pro-transit thinkers like Duany and the authors of Elephant in the Bedroom believe the real futility is in adding highway capacity – that it doesn’t work to relieve congestion – and can’t by definition, get cars off the road, and in fact draws them because of induced traffic and latent demand. But the real fulcrum of the arguments between the Right/highway lobby and rail transit proponents lies in how the costs/benefits of the competing systems are toted up – how much does the auto-highway system really cost in neutral and comprehensive accounting terms, including social costs – and how would drivers react if they had to pay the full costs at the gasoline pump?
Enter Rail Transit in America, A Comprehensive Evaluation of Benefits published on August 31st, 2006 by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with the support of the American Public Transportation Association (http://www.vtpi.org/railben.pdf*) This effort is clearly meant to respond to the arguments of O’Toole and Wendell Cox, especially O’Toole’s Great Rail Disasters, a 46 page document produced in February, 2004 at (http://www.jamesmadison.org/pdf/materials/136.pdf). If readers thought that I am exaggerating the institutional presence of the Right in fighting rail transit projects, they are invited to Google “Great Rail Disasters-O’Toole” and see how many institutes and think tanks have picked up and published their own customized version of the 46 page essay.
Reading the two essays side by side is a mind-twisting excursion through conflicting measurement tools as well as policy conclusions. They are apt symbols of the vast divides between the two ends of the political spectrum, although Litman’s writing is more dryly academic and doesn’t carry the “chip on the shoulder” ideological baggage that rail critics usually do. O’Toole finds widespread declines in transit ridership between 1990 and 2000, higher costs than bus and auto travel, and no reductions in congestion. In addition he finds most rail lines, except for heavy rail, more dangerous than freeway and bus travel measured in deaths per billion passenger miles traveled, and that rail doesn’t save in energy consumed per passenger mile, although he concedes the lines with highest ridership are more efficient than auto travel.
Litman concedes that rail transit is subsidized at a rate of $12.5 billion per year, “which averages about $90 additional dollars annually per rail transit city resident compared with Bus only cities.” But he finds that the savings are dramatically higher: $67.7 billion annually from reduced congestion costs, roadway impacts, parking costs, consumer costs and reduced accident costs. He goes on to say that
This study indicates that rail transit is particularly important in large, growing cities. Large cities that lack well-established rail systems are clearly disadvantaged compared with large cities that do in terms of congestion costs, consumer costs and accident risk. Rail transit can be a cost effective investment in growing cities, provided it is supported with appropriate transport and land use policies. Large cities with newer and smaller rail systems have not yet achieved the full potential benefits of rail transit, but, if their rail systems continue to develop with supportive public policies, their benefits should increase over time. (p.4)
He does not think that rail is the appropriate answer in all situations, and stresses that it works best in urban settings “that desire to become more multi-modal, and are willing to make an adequate commitment.” (p. 44) But he states flat out that “rail travel consumes about a fifth of the energy per passenger-mile as automobile travel, due to its high mechanical efficiency and load factor.” And he notes that electric rail has minimal direct air and noise emissions and that “residents of large Rail cities drive 12-20% fewer vehicle miles than residents of Small Rail or Bus cities, due to rail’s leverage effect on vehicle ownership and land use” and “rail transit can provide about half the per capita transportation C02 emission reductions required to meet the Kyoto targets.” (p.30). His conclusions on energy use are clearly at wide odds with O’Toole’s, and the source of the discrepancy is not obvious, except that under-utilized diesel rail would loose a lot of efficiency if only a few people rode it. On the safety comparisons, O’Toole is using deaths per billion passenger miles, Litman deaths per capita per 100,000 population. O’Toole concedes passengers themselves are safe inside trains of all types – it’s the collisions with autos and pedestrians that cause the fatalities, apparently. That implies that it is light rail which is not grade separated that is dangerous, which is a function of cost. Ideally, grade separation (by tunneling, corridor depression or elevation) though more expensive, increases speed and safety. Strangely enough, Litman goes to the British Isles for his statistics that show that trains are safer than autos and buses on a billion-passenger kilometers basis. (Not so LightRailNow, which found that urban transit is much safer that auto mobile travel, using a fatalities per 100 million passenger miles comparison base; at http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_00020.htm).
Litman’s demonstration of rail transit effectiveness on cost and congestion relief, especially in the older large urban areas, apparently is having some effect, because in Wendell’s Cox’s more recent article “Mass Transit: Separating Delusion from Reality,” published Sept. 10, 2007 on the Heritage Foundation’s web site(http://www.heritage.org/Research/SmartGrowth/wm1607.cfm) he concedes “that transit does a superb job of getting people to the largest downtown areas in the nation….the problem with transit is that, on average, 90% of jobs are not located in downtown areas.” Well, I guess that’s progress of a sort, and a more accurate than not summary of the difficulty job dispersal poses for effective transit solutions. It should be noted here that there are no “superb” adjectives for rail transit anywhere in Great Rail Disasters.
To this important observation that even in urban areas, jobs are dispersed, which Cox made in his 2000 article “Urban Rail: Uses and Misuses,” Litman has an interesting answer, one we need to keep in mind as we look to the outlines of a new Green Rail Vision for our Metro DC area: “Many people are moving back into cities, and many suburbs are becoming more urbanized. If a travel corridor has enough travel demand to create significant congestion there is often enough demand to justify some form of grade-separated transit.” (p.42) (my emphasis).
Rail Can Shape A Region
So what are we to conclude based on these mostly dissonant visions of the effectiveness of rail transit? I find it interesting that the time frames of the data in transit critic O’Toole’s work are based in the 1990’s, when gas prices were low relative to the prices we are seeing in 2006-2007. On balance, the international economic and geopolitical events I’m looking at point towards higher fuel prices, not lower, going deeper into the 21st century. And that’s without the added pressure from increases in gasoline taxes, which would both push us away from auto use and raise revenue to build the auto-alternatives. The transit critics serve some useful purpose with their overriding thrust to evaluate transit proposals primarily on grounds of cost efficiency, even as their methodology leaves many important cost factors out. Those transit proposals that are flatly unrealistic need to be weeded out. However, as this essay is written in late 2007, the very terms of judgement are shifting beneath rail’s critics on a very broad front; not just gas price pressures but solid “failing infrastructure studies” that call for more rail not less, passenger and freight, to make the US competitive with societies that are not as auto dependent. And the Right’s narrowly focused criticism misses a very important perspective that Zachary Schrag calls attention to in his Conclusion to The Great Society Metro: that good transit systems are not static, they have “multiple and evolving functions” that have a dynamic shaping effect on land-use and the public spaces their stations create. At a time when Global Warming and the need to reduce CO2 emissions is reshaping all our old energy and transportation assumptions, and adding a moral dimension to the transportation debate (“a moral imperative…to get people out of cars”see above, p. 7) rail transit can play an increasing role in reintegrating, in a more energy efficient way, all the strands that are being called into question. No wonder rail’s libertarian and conservative critics are on edge. The asphalt beneath them is beginning to crack.
Does Transit Work?
When I posed the ideological question to Professor Schrag – could there be a large rail vision today, given the power and values of the Republican Right – he answered by steering me to an essay by Paul M. Weyrich of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation. Please note that he didn’t send me a list of conservative pro-rail writers. And although the essay, co-authored with William S. Lind, Does Transit Work? A Conservative Reappraisal (May, 1999; available at http://www.apta.com/rsearch/info/online/weyrich2new.cfm) has gotten decent circulation, it doesn’t seem to have a distribution network to match the conservative one for Great Rail Disasters. So I don’t think that the essay has shifted the great ideological lines of force inside conservatism that make it work against a large rail vision – or even local project initiatives. Now, having said that, it’s a fine essay on its own terms, with insights that seem to me useful for advancing the argument for appropriate rail, and it actually reaches back into the history of rail for these insights, which I don’t see in many of the contemporary pro-rail articles. So I welcome it.
The insight from Weyrich’s essay that has gained the most traction is his parry of the conservative charge that any mode claiming only 1-2% of total surface transportation trips and around 5% of commuting trips, must be a spent force, clearly not competitive with the auto. Weyrich says the question should be: how does rail do in the corridors/regions for which it is truly available and satisfactorily run, since national household surveys show that transit of any type is available to just 54% of total households and only 28.8% felt that it was a satisfactory system if it was within reach? His answer, based on a close look at the Chicago Metra (heavy rail), the San Diego and St. Louis light rail systems, is that they are doing very well, although the exact percentage of trips and commutes each captures depends on how one cuts the geographic area for which they can genuinely compete. In Saint Louis, a look at the comparable lines of trolley from the heyday of urban rail in the 1920’s shows that the current line, Metrolink, opened in 1993 and originally 18 miles in length, “now carries between one-half and two-thirds the ridership it did in 1925, in the areas served.” (It has added a 17 mile extension in May of 2001, a 3.5 mile extension in May of 2003 and an 8 mile addition in August of 2006.)
Weyrich continually emphasizes the importance of increasing the availability of rail as the key to improving its share of national surface transportation. It must be well run, after that, of course. And it needs plenty of parking at its stations. But he then makes a fascinating observation: that “…high tech can be the enemy of rail transit.” It’s a lamentation over the fact that too much of the light rail on the market today is way overbuilt. He and his co-author describe their hands-on experience in driving cars from pre-1910 days that could reach 80 miles per hour and cars designed in the 1930’s that would do just fine today. They ask “why must Light Rail systems often overbuild track, stations and wiring and pay 3 million for modern Light Rail Vehicles when older technologies and approaches, vastly simpler and less expensive, did the job just fine?” To me, that sounds like a call for a revived domestic manufacturing niche to meet basic needs – and in an industry where too much of what is purchased in coming from overseas.
There is another caution that he tosses out onto the public policy playing field, something that new urbanists, smart growthers and transit oriented developers need to pay attention to. Even in rail’s heyday, in the early decades of the 20th century, when urban trolleys and the new intercity electrified rail arose to compete with the more traditional heavy rail, rail found its patrons using the service for commuting and recreational trips, not shopping. Shopping was still something mainly done on foot, at the urban downtowns and smaller cities’ Main Streets. It’s connected to contemporary data the authors cite which reveal that 35.6% of total national trips are for shopping, medical or dental appointments or other errands. Only 22.8% of total trips were for work and/or commuting. Now mixed-use, transit oriented development is trying to make a dent in these shopping/errand trips by good design, and bringing more and more people within pedestrian range (between ¼ to ½ mile) but the task won’t be easy because of the wide range of services that must be reintegrated into compact development.
Although Weyrich wrote his essay in 1999, before the new take-off period now underway for light rail, he leaves us with an observation that is sure to trouble his erstwhile allies on the Right: “The plain fact is, a lot of Americans have always liked riding trains and trolley cars, and they still do. They like it well enough to leave their cars at home or in a parking lot when there is a train or trolley they can ride.”
FROM VISION TO PROJECTS
We have now reached the point in this essay that many citizens have been waiting for, a discussion of why our Metro DC Region and the State of Maryland don’t have a genuine Green Rail Vision for our transportation needs. I note that at a public forum in May of 2007, I asked this question of one of the legislative leaders on transportation, who insisted that there was a vision, but who didn’t spell it out that night or in a subsequent Email query by this writer. So the best way to describe this fairly is to share with you my search for the answer to the question, is there a vision, (and, was there a vision), and if there isn’t, what exactly is out there to guide our rail transit future as we move into the likely tumultuous 21st century?
Origins of the Purple Circle Line
Because of its size and importance to the region, the missing vision question must first be directed to our existing Metro System. If there’s a good summary article about what happened between the late 1980’s-2002 for plans/dreams of a major expansion of Metro, it has escaped my searches. The history, it would seem, like much of current transportation planning, exists in fragments and separate projects, not comprehensive proposals. And in many ways, it seems to have disappeared from the public’s awareness as well. It deserves better, even though the best I can do here is outline what was once on the table. The boldest proposal came from Stanley Allan, an architect/planner who worked extensively on the stations of our existing Metro system. Allan’s grand vision for a new Purple Circle Line (“A Circle Line for Washington?” in Railway Age, October, 1995) goes unmentioned in all the buzz about our traffic woes, and if it weren’t for author Zachary M. Schrag (The Great Society Subway, 2006) calling it to my attention, I too would be unaware of its dimensions. Allan’s vision called for spending $500-600 million per year (it sounds like so much: remember, a 25 cent per gallon increase in just Maryland’s gas tax would raise this much, maybe as much as $700 million annually) to build the new circle line “generally inside, above, and/or below the alignment of the Capital Beltway, with platform-to-platform transfer capability where it intersects each of the nine existing radial Metro stations…” to “…provide the next natural segment of Metro system growth, serving the metropolitan region with interlinking flexibility for travelers desiring hub-and-spoke and/or circumferential suburb to suburb origins and destinations.” Anticipating the language used today by planners in calling for high density development near the existing Metro Stations, Allan noted that his “crossrail stations are the logical locations for developers to build attractive mixed-use commercial facilities combined with pedestrian-oriented residential apartment complexes, with ready access to the world’s finest rail transit system.” (Readers are here again reminded that where there is fixed rail, developers will be likely to follow – no judgements involved, that’s the way it’s supposed to work and how rail generates wealth and value which is not always recognized by its critics.)
Yes, that’s right, readers, the Purple Line of today, a light rail proposal connecting Bethesda to Silver Spring and extending to New Carrollton, some 14.5 miles, and perhaps, most importantly in the long run, supplying Intermodality, the new buzz word of transportation, by connecting the Red, Green and Orange Metro lines with MARC and Amtrak, is descended from this older, grander vision of circumferential Purple. Harry Sanders, President of PurpleLineNow! (at http://www.purplelinenow.com/) and co-founder of the Action Committee for Transit (a MoCo organization that advocates for public transportation), says the descent was deliberate. As support for the grand outer Purple Line waned, he decided to convert one of the study outcomes, the “P6 Inner Light Rail Line” to simply the Purple Line, and specifically, this 14.5 mile segment, which Governor Glendening endorsed at a press conference in October of 2001.
The grander outer vision did not die easily, gaining momentum towards the end of Governor Paris Glendening’s second administration and being championed, according to Professor Schrag, by Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan: “By September 2001 Maryland officials seemed to agree on the desirability of some circumferential line, arguing mainly over whether to build a light-rail system inside the Beltway or a heavy-rail line further out.” (Page 275.)
That may have been the case, but I detected evidence of some stronger headwinds arguing against the project. In a Sierra Club newsletter that appeared in the summer of 2000, Audrey Hill argues, in “Justifying the Purple Line,” that it should go forward even though a Maryland Capital Beltway Corridor Transportation Study found that “beltway traffic would be reduced by only about 1%,” based on 34,000 to 64,000 riders diverted from autos, and a total daily ridership of 160,000 to 200,000 riders. The context seemed to be, suggested by the title, that the ridership numbers might not justify the expense. Whether the study was definitive, or disputed, or fairly took into account the additional ridership that intensified real estate dynamics would likely generate from such a dramatic new proposal, are beyond the scope of this paper. Professor Schrag sketches the subsequent events piling on to stifle the larger dream this way:
All expansion plans were threatened not long after by a shaky national economy and a failed tax referendum in Northern Virginia. By early 2003, planners in the District, Maryland and Virginia were all pointing to buses on exclusive right-of-way as a potentially cheaper mode than heavy or light rail. A greater long-term threat to grand designs for transit was WMATA’s 2003 decision to lay off 90 percent of its planning and construction staff for lack of work. (page 275).
Although almost all the current public focus is directed on the 14.5 mile segment of the Purple Line, Bethesda to New Carrollton, glimpses of a more ambitious circumferential route still remain, just beneath the radar screen. For example, at http://home.comcast.net/~phyilla1/sstrails/sierraclub2005.pdf readers can find a well done brochure called “Riding Into the Future: The Promise of the Purple Line” from the Sierra Club, Metro DC chapter, dated September, 2005, the latest date I could find for promoting any type of more ambitious circumferential route. The route referenced here, however, is a light rail one inside the existing Beltway. Among the elected officials endorsing this vision are Eric Olson, then City Councilman from College Park (now Prince Georges County Council member for District 3, and who graciously agreed to be interviewed for this paper), David Harrington, Prince Georges Council member for District 5 and Montgomery County Councilman Tom Perez. Tom is still pursuing circumferential routes; his focus, however, has now shifted to race tracks, not inner Purple Lines, since he is serving as point man for Governor O’Malley’s gambling initiative while serving as the Secretary of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation.
Purple Line: Die Hard with a Vengeance
More determined citizens, with an optimistic bent, can almost divine echoes of substantial portions of the Inner Purple Line circle by putting the following together on their maps: in Virginia, “Study 18, Metrorail, Dunn Loring to American Legion Bridge” on page 13 in the Long Range Constrained Plan of the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board Brochure (http://www.mwcog.org/regionaltransportationplan/documents/CLRP_Brochure_Final.pdf); the same project is found in the Northern Virginia Transportation Plan Map, item #2 under the I-495 Beltway Corridor Section), for a 2020 Study, with a potential Capital Cost of $740,000,000 at (http://www.virginiadot.org/projects/resources/NOVA20_20TransPlanMap.pdf); in the 10 Year Capital Improvement Program of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA, but known as Metro) dated September 12, 2002, we find a Metro Rail proposal for expansion from the City of Alexandria to the National Harbor Project, Phase 1 (4.5 miles) and from National Harbor to the existing Branch Avenue Station (8.5 miles) in Prince Georges County, Maryland (Green Line) (on page 81 of the System Expansion Program section (SEP), at http://www.wmata.com/about/MET_NEWS/pressroom/CIP.pdf). Unfortunately, this Woodrow Wilson Bridge/Potomac River crossing component, long a dream of big vision Purple Line advocates, both light rail and heavy Metro versions, did not make it into the necessary National Capital Region’s Long Range Constrained Plan as a rail project; instead, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge crossing makes it into both the Maryland and Virginia studies under the grand I-495 HOV lane highway expansion project. And apparently, the project is neither a priority for the state of Maryland or Prince Georges County according to a February 13, 2007 article in The Examiner by Daniel Fowler, which cited a letter from Congressional Representative Al Wynn (D, D-4) to Governor O’Malley. at (http://www.examiner.com/a- 563552~Wynn_wants_Wilson_Bridge_study_expedited.html). It should be noted, in the interests of election fairness, that Wynn’s major challenger for the 4th Congressional District seat, Donna Edwards, played a prominent role in keeping space on the bridge open for future rail transit.
Really sharp readers will realize, however, if they have a great memory or a Metro map in front of them, that the above portions still leave missing segments in Maryland from Bethesda to the American Legion Bridge (I-495 crossing), in Virginia from the Dunn Loring-Merrifield Orange Line Station to the vicinity of the Franconia-Springfield Station on the Blue Line, and the far eastern Maryland segment from the Branch Avenue Station on the Green Line to New Carrollton on the Orange.
Virginia Keeps It Alive
It should be noted that an ambitious proposal for the missing Virginia segment has been kept alive by the Fairfax Coalition for Smarter Growth, Inc, which issued a “Citizens White Paper on Light Rail for the Capital Beltway in Virginia,” on May 9, 2000, authored by E.L.Tennyson and Paul S. Hughes. The paper emerged in response to the collapse of the grander Purple Line vision and exasperation with the Beltway widening proposals, given “VDOT’s (Virginia Department of Transportation) own projection of continued gridlock on this portion of the Beltway even after completion of a 12-lane widening.” (see http://www.smartergrowth.org/BeltwayWhitePaper4.htm) The Coalition’s basic proposal was for a 12 mile light rail system double tracked between Tysons Corner and Dunn Loring and a single track from Dunn Loring down to Springfield. At $25 million per mile for an at-grade system, this segment would cost $300 million, and picking up the broader vision, it noted that “if the system were extended to the American Legion Bridge as part of an overall Beltway light rail system connecting Tysons with Bethesda (a total distance of 18 miles in Virginia) the estimated cost would be $450 million.” It’s good and crucial to see these hopes kept alive by citizens acting outside of government. It should be noted that co-author Tennyson also serves as a consultant to the folks at LightRailNow!.
Transportation Jurisdictions
And a word is required now before we go on to look at the various official “visions,” such as they are, to clarify the confusing jurisdictional bodies working on studies or drawing up plans, even if it is only for “segments.” WMATA, Metro itself, has representatives from Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. But there is another large regional planning body for transportation, the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board (NCRTPB), which consists of the two states’ representatives and their transportation agencies, the District, of course, but also the county governments of Frederick, Montgomery and Prince Georges (and a small portion of St. Charles) in Maryland, and Fairfax, Loudon, Prince William and the city of Alexandria in Virginia, as well as WMATA. The NCRTPB assumes even greater importance because it serves, under the federal transportation structure, as the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), and projects that wish to receive federal money must have the approval of their MPO, if one exists. So think about this, fellow citizens: you want more rail transit, a 14.5 light rail segment, like the current Purple Line project between Bethesda and New Carrollton for example, then it must receive the backing of Montgomery County, Prince Georges County, the State of Maryland, the NCRTPB and the federal government. So even though our region has a regional transportation planning framework, its default setting in times like we are in, with the ideological (taxing and funding) envelope constructed more as a fiscal straightjacket than a fiscal enabler, is to work towards smaller projects and segments, not big visions.
WHAT’S ON THE RAIL POLICY TABLE
Metro’s Plans
So let’s take a look at what government agencies have been willing to put forward over the past decade or so. Back in March of 1999, WMATA, or Metro if you like, adopted a 25 year Transit Service Expansion Plan that looked to double ridership in that time frame, and which contained 19 heavy Metro or light-rail line extensions to add an additional 150 miles, compared to the existing 106 miles. Citizens will have trouble finding details of that version, however, because what is dominantly on the table now is the narrower 10 year System Expansion Program (SEP) from September of 2002. It was down to 114 miles additional miles and had emphasized new light rail routes instead of 6 miles of tunnels and 6 new stations for a new Blue Line, 7 miles of surface heavy rail westward to the West Falls Church Station and 6 miles underground eastward to the Benning Road Station on the Blue Line, going under the Anacostia River – all contained in the 1999 25 year plan. In the 2002 ten year version, the District’s proposed extensions are 35.9 miles – all light rail or trolley, the Dulles Corridor Project is there for 24 miles, and Maryland has a total of 27 miles of rail from the long version of the Purple Line segment and the Woodrow Wilson Bridge extensions of 13 miles. A “Should Do” program for the 10 year SEP would cost about $6 billion, and WMATA recognizes that even the full 10 year program (much less the 25 year one) “is beyond existing funding capacities using traditional sources.” (See http://www.wmata.com/about/MET_NEWS/pressroom/CIP.pdf).
National Capital Region Plans
When one shifts focus to what has survived from WMATA’s 25 and 10 year Expansion Plans in the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board’s Long Range Transportation Plan for 2030, the answer is not too much: the Dulles Rail Project is there and it’s big and expensive, but only the three mile version of the Purple Line and virtually none of the heavy rail and tunneling projects for Metro – nor even a tiny fraction of the 39.9 miles of light-rail for DC is contained in the 10 year plan (only the Anacostia Street Car Project made it).
NARPAC’s Vision
Once again, I have a citizen’s group, NARPAC, Inc., to thank for keeping some of the policy continuity alive so that citizens can have some sense of how “official” visions narrow over time. (NARPAC stands for the National Association to Restore Pride in America’s Capital, whose founding members are Leonard Sullivan, Jr, Richard J. Levine and Nicholas J. Kauffman.) Their critical writings provide the overview that official websites don’t as older plans disappear from government websites and only the current one is left to ponder. They were quite critical of both Metro’s 10 year and 25 year vision, stating, in powerful language that “DC, WMATA, the region, and the Congress have all made top-level decisions to let our world-class national capital subway system strangle on its own success, stagnate and obsolesce, become irrelevant to the city’s future economic growth, and continue to provide a tempting terrorist target to cripple day-to-day city operations.” No mere polemic, NARPAC lays out (at http://www.narpac.org/METROVIZ.HTM) the outlines of a major reconceptualization of how Metro should be transformed inside the city, underground and on the surface, essentially changing the design from a “hub and spoke system” to a Multiple Grid System which would create many new stations, new levels at existing stations, as well as new lines intended to encourage economic development in overlooked parts of the city, beyond the downtown. Their “circle line” would be within 2 miles of the downtown, in answer to the more suburban ones we have been pondering. And woven into the 10 goals they outline is concern for moving more people into and out of the city quickly and building redundancy into the layout so that breakdowns cannot have the multiple line shut-down effects they now have – and for greater assurance that the system could function better in full-blown evacuation emergencies. The numeric face on their plan looks like this: 38 miles of new double track, 28 new stations, 11 modified stations, 9 new parking facilities for subway cars, 18,000 new auto parking spaces – all for the bargain level price of $20 billion.
Yes, that’s right, $20 billion. Given the tight ideological/fiscal envelope we’ve been describing at the national level and in the three major political jurisdictions that would have to fund it, this DC centric vision obviously would be treated with great disdain in serious political and transportation policy circles. Yet as a 25 year plan for the nation’s capital – the world’s capital – as seen by many sets of eyes – we should not be so disdainful. When Stanley Allan laid out his vision for the circumferential Purple Line in 1995, he referenced three other “world capital” cities – London, Paris and Moscow, whose rail transit systems had reached similar major turning points that were resolved by large new spending and expansions programs. And that’s NARPAC’s reason for being, after all, to get us to think in these terms for DC. I cite what they’ve proposed not as something doable in our regional transportation vision/struggle – because it is too DC centric – and its price tag would pull too much away from the orbits of Maryland and Virginia and their joint problems of mobility – but as an example of citizens putting systematic ideas out in bolder visions than government currently wants to come up with – and as a bracing way of saying that we are really, in everything I’ve described about the status quo so far, mostly just treading water in facing our regional transportation problems. (In the concluding section of this essay, where a different set of political and financial assumptions are introduced, readers may come to ask themselves whether NARPAC’s vision just might have a fighting chance.)
MD’s Transit Funding Committee
A sketch of Maryland’s rail transit future is contained in several documents which each have their own different emphasis. In the summer of 2006 the Maryland legislature passed Senate Bill 850, which set up the Transit Funding Study Steering Committee, composed of six legislators and the Secretaries of Transportation and Budget and Management. Its 66 page report can be found at http://www.marylandtransportation.com/Planning/Transit%20Funding%20Study/January2007CommitteeReport.pdf . Although the main focus of the study was upon transit (bus and rail of all types) funding through the lens of the state’s insufficient Transportation Trust Fund, which the study found would develop a deficit of some $950 million through the years 2007-2012, growing to $13.5 billion by 2027, it was of course based on certain assumptions about capacity expansions for existing or new systems. And those assumptions hint at future intentions. That $13.5 billion deficit won’t be run up by any grand rail transit expansion - far from it. It is based on an existing 20 year plan for MARC expansion (how these MARC assumptions differ from the expansion plans presented to the public by Maryland Transit Administrator Paul J. Wiedefeld in late September, 2007, which envision tripling ridership to 100,000 per day by 2035, is not clear) as well as funding just four rail projects already in the pipeline: the Red and Green Line projects for Baltimore, the Purple Line (the 14.5 mile version) and the Corridor Cities project between Shady Grove and Clarksburg.
Yet page 49 of the Transit Funding Study sketches a future we can’t fund, a wish list of projects/directions, as follows, with my comments in parentheses: extending WMATA’s Green Line from Greenbelt to BWI airport; expansion of MARC in the northeast part of the state (that would be on the Penn Line, which runs close to I-95 northeast from Baltimore on to Newark, Delaware); expanding the Purple Line east (sic) from New Carrollton to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge (that should be west, not east from New Carrollton); high capacity transit service to southern Maryland (presumably this means in the Rt. 301/5 corridor); Light Rail to Columbia (a big regret that founder/builder James Rouse expressed before he died – that his town had no rail transit; and no mention of the Baltimore Rail Region System Plan from 2002, which is much more ambitious and which is the basis for the line to Columbia); rebuild and expand the Howard Street Rail Tunnel in Baltimore (something we will have more to say about later when we discuss the I-95 Corridor Coalition and the interaction between freight and passenger rail).
MD’s Transit’s “Getting On Board”
This list from the Funding Study is considerably more robust – I’m not sure I would call it a “vision” for Maryland’s rail future – but it’s more ambitious than what is laid out in the Maryland Comprehensive Transit Plan from December 2000, called “Getting On Board” with the subtitle “Doubling Transit Ridership by 2020.” As we have previously noted, this plan ranks expanding the state’s rail transit systems dead last among its nine listed goals. On page 18 of the first volume of the report, it lists the Red and Green Lines, a downtown loop for Baltimore, the short version of the current Purple Line (here called the “Georgetown Branch” – the three miles between Bethesda and Silver Spring), the Corridor Cities line – “feasible segments” of the grander circumferential Purple Line route (remember, this is towards the end of Governor Glendening’s second term) and a plea to “preserve the transit right-of-way between Branch Avenue Metro Station and White Plains” – which places it in the Rt. 301 corridor just south of DC and outside the Beltway – and links it to the legislature’s Transit Study reference to bring “high capacity transit service to southern Maryland.” Perhaps the reason for the lack of scope here is the looming cost if the ambitious circumferential Purple Line were to go forward – but at this point in time 1999-2000, it was still at the very preliminary feasibility study stage – and the mode – light or heavy rail - was up in the air.
What I take away from the Getting on Board plan is the tremendous pressure that revenue constraints place on rail transit thinking – especially when it comes to system expansion. There is great practical fiscal pressure to list expensive new route expansions last – and to concentrate on improving service and quality in existing lines. Much of this is just common sense, as is System Preservation, which is listed as the first goal. If ridership can be increased in existing lines, like Metro and MARC, by adding additional cars and trains, that makes sense too. But keep in mind the observation of our conservative rail supporter, Paul Weyrich, that “what has held down transit ridership is not unwillingness to use satisfactory transit, but its declining availability.” To my way of thinking, availability also means looking at currently congested roadway corridors and seriously examining whether rail transit can help there – and what type of rail service would be most appropriate.
Transportation Transition Team, 2007
Revenue constraints are the leading theme in the Report of the Transportation Workgroup from Governor O’Malley’s Transition team dated January 2007, headed by Donald C. Fry of the Greater Baltimore Committee, James C. Dinegar of the Washington Board of Trade and Anwar Hasan of EA Engineering. (at http://www.gov.state.md.us/documents/transition/Transportation.pdf). The report was correct in giving the lack of funding prominent attention and the two leading business groups cited here lobbied hard for more than the $400 million per year increase in funding for the Transportation Trust that was passed during the Legislature’s Special Session in November/December of 2007. They were correct in their math: that increased funding level over 20 years still falls well short closing the $13.5 billion gap cited by the Legislature’s Transit Study Committee. (It would take another $275 million per year). But on the whole the report was overly cautious, hardly a visionary document, and perhaps that’s what the Governor wanted. The transit section was revealing in ways perhaps not intended. While noting that “Great expectations exist in the public for the expansion of transit….” and “while public support for transit is high, fiscal and federal approval constraints hamper the state’s ability to deliver.” (page 24.) The list of projects that can’t be reached by current funding levels, besides the four in the pipeline cited in the Transit Study Committee’s report, are nearly identical to the Transit Committee’s list. While the Transportation Workgroup recognized the need for “the development of a long-term General Plan for the State in response to growth” under the heading of Multimodal Planning (page 41-42), it fails to mention the energy consumption/Global Warming public urgency factor anywhere in the report. (To be fair, neither did the Transit Funding Study Steering Committee.) Transportation planning, in its view, primarily responds to economic and population growth dynamics, and while it recognizes the need to closely coordinate with land-use plans, which it cites as the main contributor to road congestion, it clearly underestimates the impact that major transit decisions can have, in turn, in shaping land-use plans, for better or worse.
It also should be noted that there were complaints about the lack of environmental/transit advocates representation on the Transportation Transition team, made to Governor O’Malley as the body was deliberating.
State of Maryland’s Leadership Role?
The report also makes a comment, very similar in vein to one made by the Transit Funding Study Committee, when it talks about the possibilities we are looking at but can’t reach under current funding, that strikes me as rather revealing about the role government plays – or avoids – in creating the long-term vision. . On page 24 the Workgroup states that “Concepts for additional major projects are being suggested by communities and business constituency groups”; in the Transit Funding Study we find that “a final analysis conducted by staff considers the financial impact of a wide range of other major transit initiatives that are being discussed at various forums around the State.” Now projects that originate in civic groups, business groups and regional settings are natural and commendable and should be encouraged to continue. After all, the impetus for this paper is entirely from outside government, from a citizen trying to understand and explain how rail transit has faltered. But at a certain point, given our congestion problems, the key role of state funding and the need to take the common good and the moral imperative of global warming into primary account, and to compile in one place all the information needed to see the possibilities for future rail transit (like a central location for mapping all the existing/abandoned rail lines and the utility corridors as well, more on this later), the state of Maryland needs to take more of leadership role in shaping the 25-50 year outlook. Having watched the League of Municipalities at work over more than a decade in New Jersey, and knowing the comparable power of the Maryland Association of Counties (MACo) here, I don’t fear at all that local interests, or business interests, would be overmatched by a more vigorous state “rail vision.” Local, county, and private sector needs would still press forward and make their case. But I do think it is fair for citizens to expect more, to ask the Governor to take the initiative in developing an impressive Green Rail Vision for the state, one that will inevitably have to interact as well, to succeed in its vision, with Virginia and the District of Columbia.
The fact that the American Public Transit Association (APTA) reports that public transportation ridership is up 2% nationwide in the third quarter of 2007 (a 50 million trip increase) with light rail leading the way at an 8.9% increase, commuter rail up 5.4% and heavy rail (subways) up 4% (see http://www.apta.com/media/releases/071204_ridership.cfm) surely indicates that higher gas prices and congestion, and the increased availability of these modes are factors to be given increasing weight in future planning considerations. As national policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions struggles forward and world economic demand for scarce oil products grows, it is hard to imagine gasoline/oil prices coming down to the misleading levels of the 1990’s. That two major Maryland transportation reports issued in 2007 can evade mentioning these factors driving future transportation considerations indicates the need for greater policy focus at the state level and much motivational work still to be done.
FUNDING WHAT WE HAVE OR WHAT WE NEED?
The Infrastructure 2007 Report
Before we leave official state and regional “visions” of rail transit to sketch out our own, citizen-readers need to be aware of some other major forces out there on the public policy playing field for the rail infrastructure and funding debates. Many months before the August 1, 2007 collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis, the Urban Land Institute, sometimes referred to as the real estate industry’s think tank, along with Ernest and Young, the accounting/consulting firm, issued a major “goad” of a report indicating just how worried major private sector firms are over our nation’s refusal to raise sums adequate to maintain our aging infrastructure of all types (roads, rail, waste and water treatment systems), much less to revamp them to face 21st century needs. The 69 page report, which was referred to briefly earlier in this paper, Infrastructure 2007: A Global Perspective (at http://www.ey.com/Global/assets.nsf/International/Industry_Real_Estate_ULI_Report/$file/Industry_Real_Estate_ULIReport.pdf) deserves to be read for its breadth and wealth of information. But it is primarily a goad as it looks at nations on the move, like Singapore and China, and sees the amounts they are raising to build modern, integrated (Intermodal) transportation systems. The report says our backlog on infrastructure of all types amounts to $1.5 trillion over five years – and suggests that’s just for repair and maintenance. As for rail, it states that “mired decades behind Europe and Asia in rail service quality, the United States will need to spend at least $250 billion over the next 20 years in attempts to catch up.”(p.29.) That figure is very close to the capital expenditures needed for rail cited by the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Report Card for America’s Infrastructure (2005), which gave rail a C- grade and said freight rail needed to spend $175-195 billion over 20 years to upgrade and meet expected demand, and that intercity passenger rail would need to spend $60 billion over the same time frame, which works out to “$12-13 billion per year.” (see http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/index.cfm). Noting that “car dependent environments are badly disadvantaged in the global economic chase,” it soberly adds that “retooling systems – building rail corridors and incorporating mass transit – will require huge additional capital outlays that many governments are not prepared to pay.” (Page 6.) And, of course, that national Highway Trust fund is insolvent by 2009 with its gas tax having just ½ the purchasing power that it had in 1965 (page 8). Global warming is taken note of as a possible motivating force – or maybe just a “passing fancy,” that might “help spur greater acceptance of smart growth principles which are generally more environmentally friendly.”(Page 9). Logically, the recommendations in the report, focused on connecting different transportation modes and on jurisdiction-spanning corridors, call for “regional master planning.”
Despite the note struck in the opening cover letter by ULI President Richard M. Rosan, who spoke of the “declining ability” of governments to fund infrastructure repairs and improvements, countered by the private sector cavalry rushing to aid from a “world awash in investment capital looking for secure assets,” the report actually throws cold water on the idea of extensive privatization of public infrastructure, seeing maybe 5-10% suitable for deals (Page 58). It also reminds the public that the central factor underlying the privatization phenomenon is increased tolls to pay for infrastructure improvements – and to earn a profit for investors. So the private sector will play the tax “heavy” and take the heat for the increases instead of elected officials – but there’s no point for the investors to be interested without the prospect of substantially increased revenues which come from taxing/tolling the public (page 57-58). How else does the public think investors will earn return rates in the range of 7-10%? Now that’s refreshing candor.
(In early January, 2008, Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, unveiled a bold plan to fund transportation improvements and pay off the state’s massive debts by raising $30- $40 billion from bonds backed by sustained toll increases on New Jersey’s famous toll roads. At http://www.thnt.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/B3/20080108/NEWS0301/80108049)
Marylanders who thought we had fiscal problems should acquaint themselves with the scope of New Jersey’s problems. This is a much more publicly focused plan than Indiana’s and at the heart of it lies the Governor’s realization that if toll roads can generate 7-10% profits for the private sector, then they can also generate reliable revenue to help the state directly deal with it’s fiscal problems – if tolls are brought into line with inflation and the rest of economic reality.)
This writer has only two complaints about the report – and they don’t constitute grounds for ignoring its main important messages. The first comes from that suggestion about the declining “ability” of governments to fund the infrastructure needs. That word really should be “willingness,” not ability. The many anonymous laments quoted about tax increase fears – presented as a lack of courage and political will by several commentators – is really a matter of political ideology. Anti-tax attitudes did not fall to earth in green pods near Roswell, New Mexico in 1980; they were carefully cultivated in conservative hothouses since 1964 and finally transplanted to Washington in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan may be in the grave, but his hands still serve as a choke-point on public spending – even if it’s for something that many in the private sector see as crucial to sustain economic competitiveness. The curious, anonymous handling of comments by the distinguished list of “interviewees and forum participants contained at the end of the report” (Pages 62-63), can be taken as a measure of the ideological heat still generated by the idea of “tax increases.” Did the report’s authors have visions of commentators for attribution having to run a gauntlet set up by Steven Moore of The Club for Growth? Well, perhaps something like that. Nonetheless, the folks listed at the end, separated or not from the anonymous quips and quotes in the report, run the gamut from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and the Carlyle Group to Kenneth Jackson (Crabgrass Frontier author), Doug Foy (formerly head of the Conservation Law Foundation, among other posts), Robert Yarrow and Alex Marshall (of the Regional Plan Association) and several policy experts from the American Public Transportation Association. To my mind, that’s a pretty inclusive list of commentators, though doubtless good portions of “the Right” would object.
Before we leave this Infrastructure 2007 report, however, I want to ask my readers to remember the following idea that keeps coming back to me as I think about the policy landscape before us. Among the many striking facts and needs in the report, the notion that really stuck with me for the matters centrally at hand in this paper, for our missing “Green Rail Vision,” was the comment that we are a crisis driven nation, and that leads to “‘…a tendency to invest in the infrastructure we have instead of the infrastructure we will need.’” (Page 5, my emphasis). Readers should keep these notions in mind as they ponder the dilemmas laid out in the second half of the essay.
Neil J. Pedersen and the I-95 Corridor Coalition
Working betwixt and between the public agencies introduced so far to our intrepid readers is an important figure and coalition leader: Neil J. Pedersen, who is simultaneously the Administrator of the Maryland State Highway Administration, the Chair of the I-95 Corridor Coalition, and also the Chair of the AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) Policy Committee on Future Expansion of the Interstate System. While two of those hats that Neil wears are self-explanatory, the I-95 Corridor Coalition is not, so a word about it first. It is an organization that has 60 public agencies/organizations as members, including all the I-95 states from Maine to Florida, and two Canadian provinces. Its focus is Intermodal, especially on the rail and road congestion problems, as one might imagine. As an introduction to what the coalition deals with, and the policy breadth covered by Mr. Pedersen, his testimony to the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission at its Field Hearing in New York City on November, 16, 2006, offers considerable insight (at http://www.i95coalition.org/PDF/Pedersen_I95Coalition_Commission_2006_Nov%2016.pdf
The Missing National Vision
First of all, the Administrator’s choice of words brings a smile to this author’s face. In just 14 pages of testimony, he invokes the term “vision” at least six times in conjunction with a call for a “national transportation policy” that addresses what he lays out are the problems for both our rail and interstate highway systems. Mr. Pedersen declares that “we are at the edge of a transportation crisis in the I-95 Corridor Coalition region. The demand for transportation has outstripped our ability to deliver new capacity, to unscramble congestion, and to ensure reliable freight and passenger trips…..we have not invested enough in the system to keep pace with economic growth and trade…We are at risk of choking our economy.” (Testimony, Nov. 16, 2006, pages 4-5). All of which is true enough: if one looks at the increase in regional vehicle miles traveled over the past 25 years, they have gone up many multiples of the highway lane miles added. However, the same pattern is true for rail freight; they are carrying more tonnage on fewer miles of rail line, since the private sector run freight rail system abandoned many thousands of miles of track after the passage of the Staggers Rail Act in 1980 – in an effort to cut costs and increase efficiency. Both rail and highway infrastructure is aging; many miles of I-95 can’t just be resurfaced: the pounding it has taken from heavy trucks and its age means replacement of the deep underlying structure, which is very expensive. If much of the I-95 roadway goes back 25-50 years, the rail infrastructure, especially bridges and tunnels, frequently dates to the late 19th century or early 20th – and there are new heavy bulk rail freight cars needing stronger bridges - and double stacking container cars requiring greater tunnel clearance. In other words - as if this should come as a surprise to travel savvy citizens in the I-95 corridor - we have a congestion mess on our hands, rail and auto. A study by the I-95 Corridor Coalition that Petersen chairs, the Mid-Atlantic Rail Operations Study Summary Report (see http://www.66.167.232.132/pm/projectmanagement/Upfiles/reports/full112.pdf) sets up a rather fatalistic framing, however, for the problem: “The era of building major new transportation system facilities in the Mid-Atlantic region – highways, airports, seaports, rail systems – is largely past.” (Page 6.) Now, as a large generalization, that’s probably true. And it has been the focus of this essay so far that there is a vast imbalance between the funding of the highway system and the rail transit system that needs to be corrected if we are to solve our transportation problems. Yet it may be true for some rail needs that only a new line works to solve the problem. We’ll see, but I want to raise the point that this generalization may overstate the case against new lines. And if one adds up the costs of the new Express Toll Lanes on I-95 and for the Beltway and the ICC – then we’re looking at the costs of a new rail line. Those caveats aside, let’s see how the I-95 Coalition Chair plans to meet the funding challenges for the improvements needed to deal with the congestion problems.
Fishing for Federal Dollars
The answer offered by Mr. Petersen is based on his diagnosis: that we suffer from highway “bottlenecks” (65 freight-truck bottlenecks, mostly at urban Interstate interchanges throughout the entire I-95 Corridor area) and rail “chokepoints” (70 within the Mid-Atlantic Region alone). By focusing on these nodes, and prioritizing them, we can battle congestion at less of an overwhelming financial scale than if we looked at the cumulative infrastructure needs. Now of course, that’s not what the Chair stated, but I think it’s fair to say that’s the basic thinking underlying the funding approach. Instead of tackling the enormous sums suggested by the Infrastructure 2007 report and its predecessor, the American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card for America’s Infrastructure (2005), the I-95 Coalition intends to obtain funding in an incremental way, avoiding ideological battles over taxes increases, or new taxes, especially the gasoline tax and the federal National Transportation Trust shortfall, which are not explicitly mentioned in his testimony. Instead, we get two illustrations of the problem nodes, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge improvements , which cost $2.4 billion and took twelve years to solve (unmentioned is the struggle to keep space for the rail option on the bridge), and the as yet unsolved Baltimore Tunnel problems, the Howard Street, BP and Union Tunnels. The Howard Street Tunnel is the major freight line, owned by CSX, which runs parallel to I-95 and is called the “only viable alternative for relieving the crush of truck traffic on that highly congested highway corridor.” (Testimony, Page 8). The BP and Union tunnels, which are used by Amtrak’s Acela and MARC commuter trains as well as Norfolk Southern freight trains, are aging and cause the Amtrak trains to go through “at very slow speeds, adding significant time to Acela and Metroliner trips along the Northeast Corridor.” (Page 9).
It should be noted also, that throughout the testimony, the stress is upon this corridor being a major truck freight route, that rail freight is unable to keep up with demand and is “shedding” freight to the trucking industry along I-95, and that if the poor little auto commuters don’t want to be even more intimidated by truck traffic than they already are (my characterization), then they need to worry about these freight bottlenecks too – rail and highway.
To Be Continued: Rail versus Road
The start of the solution, originating in the Mid-Atlantic Rail Operations Study Summary Report from April of 2002 (cited above), is to spend just $6.2 billion dollars over the next twenty years to address the worst of the identified rail choke points. And the strategy for federal funding will be to have both the bottlenecks and chokepoints funded by taking advantage of the category which the federal transportation bill SAFETEA-LU set up, called “projects of national and regional significance.” Now the problem I have with this is that the funds available from the current national assumptions won’t raise enough to solve even the Mid-Atlantic region problems, much less the ones along the entire I-95 Corridor and, obviously, across the nation. And let’s add another dimension to this funding problem: that other hat that Mr. Pedersen wears, as Chair of “one of AASHTO’S policy committees on the future of the Interstate system.” He readily admits that policy implications under this “hat,” “are consistent with the issues I have raised on behalf of the I-95 Corridor Coalition, but some go beyond the points that I have focused on thus far.” (My emphasis). That’s a slight understatement, because he goes on to call for (page 13) essentially doubling the lane miles in our existing Interstate system (47,000 existing miles) by adding 50,000 miles, although they are not presented in one sum (I did the additions.). Think about the funding implication of that for the incremental approach being taken towards solving the problems along the I-95 corridor and the sums recommended in the other infrastructure reports we have cited. In other words, if two lists of projects, one highway “bottlenecks” and another of rail “choke points,” is presented to Congress under current assumptions, then we should expect the currently very imbalanced funding ratios to still drastically favor auto solutions.
Freight Rail’s Funding Problems
And now consider the Freight Rail problem laid out in one the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ (AASHTO) own reports, issued in January of 2003, called the Freight-Rail Bottom Line Report, prepared by Cambridge Systematics, Inc. (at http://freight.transportation.org/freight_lit.html). This report lays out the dilemma as follows, daring to cross the public-private Rubicon set up by the fact that the freight rail “system” is entirely privately owned and dominated by 7 big “Class I” railroads:
Broadly speaking, the choice for the nation’s freight-rail system is between “market-driven expansion” of the freight-rail system and “public-policy driven expansion” of the system. Market-driven evolution will accommodate some of the forecast freight growth, but relieve little of the forecast congestion on the highway system. A public-policy driven expansion could produce a rail industry that provides the cost-effective transport needed to serve national and global markets, relieve pressure on overburdened highways, and support local social, economic, and environmental goals. (Page 5.)
The report states that the total cost to achieve the “aggressive investment scenario” is estimated at “$205 to $225 billion over 20 years” and that “up to $83 billion or $4.5 billion annually, would have to come from sources other than railroad revenue and borrowing….Inclusion of costs for bridges, interchanges, etc., could double the estimate.” (Page 5).
But hold on here citizens, please, just a moment, to ponder this thought. We have noted earlier in this paper that continual stream of criticism directed at public rail transit by “The Right” – with Amtrak serving as the main object of scorn, and light rail now increasingly taking the brunt. Much of that criticism focuses on the inability of passenger rail transit to fully pay its own way, requiring help from public funding sources. But what does the Right have to say about the privatized rail sector needing support? Not much that I can find. Yet the private sector appears to be unable to fund a good portion of its own capital needs, to overcome the problems of its 19th century lay-out and infrastructure, which can’t handle the weight of the new 286,000 lb. capacity cars (143 tons), and which prevents widespread use of double stacking of container cars. The old system needs more passing tracks, and to straighten tracks that are too curved to allow higher speeds. These problems are presented in The Freight Rail White Paper from the I-95 Intermodal Leadership Forum (at http://www.66.167.232.132/pm/projectmanagement/Upfiles/reports/full225.pdf)? Here’s what the report has to say in partial answer:
Since the industry was deregulated in the 1980’s, the railroads have relied on consolidation, restructuring, and cost-cutting to boost productivity and offer competitive rates and services. Since deregulation, freight productivity has increased, ton-miles handles per railroad employee have nearly quadrupled, rates have fallen, service has improved, and market share has stabilized. However, these improvements have not been sufficient to significantly expand market share and increase revenue. Competition among the remaining Class I railroads has forced continuing rate reductions, with the result that revenues have declined in real terms (accounting for inflation) despite increasing traffic volume. While the industry’s return on investment has improved from about four percent in 1980 to around eight percent in 2000, it is still below the cost of capital at 10 percent. Most of the economic benefits of railroad reorganization and productivity improvements have accrued to shippers and the economy in the form of rate cuts, rather than to the railroads and investors. In this environment, rail will continue to generate substantial public benefits in the future, but may not live up to its full potential. (Page 5).
Since the American media does such an excellent job of keeping our freight rail system out of sight, here are a few background statistics from the Freight-Rail Bottom Line Report, cited above, to put freight-rail in some perspective to other modes of moving freight, especially airlines and trucking:
- “The freight rail system carries 16% of the nation’s freight by tonnage, accounting for 28% of total ton-miles, 40 percent of intercity ton miles, and six percent of freight value.”
- “If all freight-rail were shifted to trucks tomorrow, it would add 92 billion truck vehicle miles-of-travel (VMT) to the highway system and cost federal, state and local transportation agencies an additional $64 billion for highway improvements over the next 20 years.”
- “If all freight-rail were shifted to trucks tomorrow, it would cost rail shippers $69 billion this year alone.”
- “Compared to the constrained investment scenario, the aggressive investment scenario removes 1.35 million tons of freight and 40 billion truck VMT from the highways, saves shippers $401 billion, saves highway users $635 billion and saves $27 billion in highway costs over the 20 year period. Inclusion of costs for bridges, interchanges, etc., could double the estimate.”
The Public Interest in Private Freight Rail
The public policy implications for all of this, raised especially by the directions outlined in Mr. Petersen’s testimony for Congressional funding, would take up at least a full paper themselves. Yet if public money is to be raised in Congress to solve these infrastructure problems for the private sector freight railroads – acknowledging openly their large impact on the public good – from keeping trucks off the road to speeding up the public rail passenger trains which are sharing their tracks - then I think it is fair to open up the question of some direct financial return, or claim upon the profits, for the public purse. The state of Delaware has apparently worked out such an arrangement with one of the rail companies in a joint project to rebuild an important bridge, in which the State will get revenues from additional traffic generated from the work.
But the even bigger public policy question raised is the amount needed to give us a 21st century rail system, public and private, starting from where we are now. The “postpone the big questions” of a more adequate revenue approach, while understandable for its tactical problem-solving appeal in the short run, looks woefully inadequate for the objective needs of where we want to go. And this writer wants to make it clear that he supports the “public policy driven expansion” of the freight rail system. The current anti-tax ideology is a real barrier to solving these problems, and represents a vastly inadequate public philosophy to deal with the problems laid out by Mr. Pedersen’s testimony. But we should thank Mr. Pedersen for all his hard work to compile the information on the problem areas and to begin to prioritize them. He is right to press for greater clarity in a national vision that will attempt to harmonize competing transit modes. His approach is suggestive, even if it deemphasizes the importance of political ideology in creating – and eventually solving the problem. Not only is more money needed, rail should play a much greater role than it has in the past. And the states and regions which can produce the clearest visions (and detail the costs) for rail’s future will be best positioned to take advantage of great troubles and opportunities on the national economic horizon.
A GREEN RAIL VISION FOR THE MD/METRO DC REGION
A Robust State Rail Office
This writer believes the starting point for this vision is to have a Maryland state office charged with developing the vision and staffed with those favorably disposed to increasing rail transit of all types to help solve the problems that this paper has laid out: our regional transportation mess. It need not be a huge office, but it will need some real transportation expertise: we want believers in rail transit, but their feet should still be connected to the ground. That phrase cited earlier, from the Infrastructure 2007 report that we tend to “invest in the infrastructure we have instead of the infrastructure we will need,” could be a good guide, and with a little editing, supply the motto for the new office: “Vision for the Rail We Will Need.”
Consideration of the tough problem of financing the Vision, wrapped as it is in the tightly constructed conservative fiscal envelope of absolutely “no new taxes” - should be set aside for the moment so that the Vision doesn’t end up in fragments before it is ever presented whole. The system we currently have, both as to financing and the multiple layers of governmental approval needed, assures that there are plenty of brakes on visions that are too big, too unrealistic, or that can’t gain local support. We need to encourage outlooks that offer regional transportation solutions, that take a clue from the perspective of the I-95 Corridor Coalition (but giving greater emphasis to rail) adjusted to the scale of the immediate region we are talking about.
One of the initial tasks of this office of “state rail vision” will be to pull together in one place all the information and maps we have of existing rail lines, abandoned rail lines and rights of way that may have been sold but are undeveloped, some having been parked in “Rails to Trails Corridors.” (A heads up to hikers, and I’ve been one of you and sympathetic: rail is knocking at the door and may want some of the trails back.) This sounds like a common sense proposal, but my best understanding from inquiries made to state officials is that the information does not exist in one place. I recognize that it is no small task, because Maryland is one of the oldest rail states, rich in lines from the 19th century. Even a very basic map of still active lines from more than 20 current rail owners, including the State of Maryland, dated 1996, and supplied to me courtesy of the Maryland Transit Administration, shows a pretty impressive network around the state, including, surprisingly, up and down the Eastern Shore. A map showing what I am calling for would be much denser and more complex, but I suspect it’s needed to help think systematically about where we can go – and where we need to improvise or build from scratch. And speaking of improvisation: the map needs to include all the main power line/gas line/sewage line corridors to let planning imaginations see possibilities they can’t now. Today, transportation planners are shy out of the gate because of the cost of acquiring new rights of ways, and that’s understandable in our expensive region. That’s another reason why we need to have before us all the abandoned rail lines and current utility corridors. Originally, my thought was that this level of detail has of course already been pulled together at least at the Maryland county level; but after talking with several county transportation offices, that doesn’t seem to be the case – remarkably. Here’s a great chance for public planning officials to engage that great reservoir of knowledge residing in rail road hobbyists and historical societies. That knowledge can be put to good use in a great mapping project so we can see where we might go for the best available price. (My thanks to Leonard Sullivan of NARPAC for calling my attention to the possibilities of utilizing utility line corridors.)
Annapolis, Reconnected
If one steps back and looks, with fresh eyes, at the rail transportation picture as it stands today in Maryland, what is the most glaring missing rail connection? Is it the missing circumferential light rail line to answer the east-to-west auto commute to Northern Virginia? Is it the missing light rail/trolley system to meets the needs Metro can’t address (and wasn’t designed for) - the urbanizing plans of Montgomery County and the City of Rockville, coming to White Flint and the entire Rockville section of the “Pike” and eventually forming a network along all our most congested older suburban roads: Veirs Mill, Connecticut, University, Georgia, Colesville (Rt. 29), New Hampshire, Piney Branch? These are crucial parts of the missing vision, but I think the answer is, at least at the symbolic level, that our state capital, Annapolis, one of the architectural wonders of the eastern seaboard and glories of the colonial era, and which today is a major tourist attraction, stands without a rail connection to the rest of the state, and most shockingly, to Baltimore, which is only 25 miles away. To tantalize us further, the city is within reach, just 12-13 miles, of MARC’s Penn Line, and we have already mentioned the major September, 2007 announcement of the plans to triple the ridership of MARC between now and 2037. Surprisingly, the 32 page MARC Growth and Investment Plan’s map does not show Annapolis, even though the map goes all the way over to the Chesapeake Bay, the Eastern Shore, even to the Delaware line. (see http://www.mtamaryland.com/marc%20plan%20full.pdf ). Of course the defense will be that the map says “Existing Service,” but as a matter of courtesy, one might think that the state capital would be placed on the map. But then, folks would see how close it is to existing rail service. Naturally, this strikes me as rather interesting, that there is not even a whisper to reconnect this splendid city to Baltimore, to which it once had solid rail connections, and to the nation’s capital. Following my curiosity a bit further, I made a visit to the Annapolis Comprehensive Plan Transportation Issue Paper, dated March 23, 2007. (at http://www.annapolis.gov/upload/images/government/depts/pl_zon/compplan/Transportation.pdf) to pages 16-17 where I found these remarkable sentences under the heading Rail Mode: “While this is desirable, particularly for travel to D.C. or Baltimore, it is so far beyond the City’s capability to influence in the short term that it is not worth much discussion. (My emphasis). However, a single connection point for both destinations should be developed and planned where it connects to local transit…It may be that starting such a service would promote eventual extension of heavy rail.” Now this is an astounding level of fatalism to find expressed by a famous state capital, and reading this and speaking with one of the city’s transportation planners has supplied some of the motivation for writing this paper about our missing Green Rail Vision. Connecting Annapolis to the Penn Line and therefore Baltimore and Washington is doable, even if the station is located at Parole because downtown Annapolis and the Naval Academy don’t have an interest in a more “urban” location. (That would be against the best professional advice I’ve come across, which always stresses intercity rail lines that have their stations in the central downtown areas.)
A Great Rail Quadrangle
As I searched about the state for the missing Green Rail Vision, one “back of the envelope” notion caught my attention, during my work on Governor O’Malley’s Transition Team for Planning and Smart Growth. So this idea was not mine, but I’ll take the heat for promoting it for John Frece, whose idea it was. John is with the Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, and he served as the chief spokesperson for Governor Glendening’s Smart Growth program in the 1990’s. John’s notion, and it literally has gone no further than the back of an envelope, was to create a high speed rail quadrangle between Frederick, Baltimore, Annapolis and Washington, DC. Now I happen to think this is just the type of long term vision that we need to help create a viable rail alternative to future ICC’s. But what does this mean in practical terms, given the current rail and transportation landscape?
Because of the constrained fiscal situation that transportation planners carry around in their minds, everyone’s focus is on utilizing existing rail corridors. It’s understandable, but it carries very heavy baggage with it that makes it harder for rail to compete with air and auto, even in corridors where it should, as between Boston and Washington. Amtrak’s famous problems with its high speed Acela are relevant guidelines here. Because it must share tracks with freight trains, federal rules put a massive “armoring” requirement on the high speed design, just in case it crashed head-on into a freight train, making the train much heavier than European models - that have dedicated passenger train only tracks. Even though the new design could go 150 miles per hour or greater, the tracks and tunnels and freight dodging meant it could only achieve those speeds in very limited rural stretches, and Acela hasn’t been beating conventional Amtrak trains by much. Some feel that the added weight to meet the freight crash standards led directly to the other equipment failures that pulled it out of service in 2005. You can see the MARC expansion plans struggling with the same issues, even though it is not meant to be a high speed service. A look through the 32 page expansion plan shows the need for a lot of new passing lines to maneuver around those freight trains.
So the question to ask transportation experts, if they were to grapple with a ”high speed” line in the great Quadrangle outlined above is: could it ever work well if it were to rely just on existing MARC lines, and extending them to Annapolis. {There are two existing freight lines between Frederick and Baltimore, one that curves north and east to Westminster and then back down through Glyndon and Owings Mills to Baltimore, and a more southerly line that runs east close to I-70(40)}. From the reading I’ve done, our rail planners should be asking if a dedicated line removed from freight trains wouldn’t serve well with more conventional locomotives that could then cruise at 110-125 miles per hour. Alternatively, improving the shared freight lines to take these same locomotives at speeds that can’t be currently achieved because of old tracks, tunnel slowdowns and too much curvature must be considered. Either way, a sufficiently large initial capital investment may be necessary to deliver a genuinely competitive advantage over the auto, as the Amtrak-Acela troubles have shown. The fact that Acela has been able to draw enough ridership to cover its operating expenses shows that the public is interested and yearning for rail solutions. And the quest for the European rail speeds may be unnecessary for much of the American scene, especially over the shorter distances. Setting up infrastructure where our trains could run between 90 mph and 125 mph on either separate lines or much improved lines shared with freight may be good enough in all but the Boston to Washington main corridor, which is intended to compete with the air shuttles, and so pushes itself to achieve that 150 mph goal under daunting circumstances.
Such a proposal will set off a flurry of speculation about the land-use implications, no pun intended. No illusions on that score. Emphasis should be placed on maintaining the highest possible train speeds, so no new stations spaced every ten miles. Downtown stations should be stressed, as noted elsewhere in this paper. Where a new station is proposed, the state should make it clear that compact transit-oriented adjacent development is required: no Clarksburgs (and Kentlands, for that matter; sorry, Mr. Duany) miles from the station. And that northern leg, Frederick to Baltimore, would be the one that leaned the most towards encouraging sprawl. Remember: the idea here is to cut auto-travel and emissions, and to revitalize cities that need it, not to create rail driven suburban sprawl.
The thought of a “fast” rail connection between Frederick, Baltimore, Annapolis and Washington, DC deserves the attention of the public and Maryland transportation planners. They won’t be contemplating such a notion in isolation. Around the country, similar connective rail concepts are stirring. In an address in October of 2007 to The National Corridors Initiative, Inc. Connecticut’s State Senate President Donald E. Williams spoke about the change in focus in rail commuting: formerly it went one way, into New York City; now the focus is on the “reverse commute” into “Stamford, Bridgeport and New Haven,” and to broader regional connections to Worcester, MA and Providence, RI. (see http://www.nationalcorridors.org/conferencearchive/conf07-02.shtml). In the mid-west, New York Times reporter Keith Schneider is hosting a website called “Build High Speed Rail in the Midwest” (at http://www.modeshift.org/?p=136) that lays out the following vision: high speed rail there is consistent with what we have been stressing, 110 mph. The large view encompasses nine states, with the hub being Chicago, with the spokes reaching out to Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Columbus, Des Moines, ultimately connecting 100 large and small mid-west cities with 3,000 miles of upgraded tracks. The cost? According to the feasibility study – it would be $1.1 billion for 63 trains and $6.6 billion for upgraded tracks, coming in at the “same cost as building less than 120 miles of new Interstate freeway.” That study also “….predicted that the system would generate so much passenger traffic, over 10 million rides a year, that annual revenue by 2014 ($528 million) would exceed the operating and maintenance expense ($453 million). The main obstacle? As always: financing… (Ironically, one of the studies that demonstrated the positive economic benefits from this project was done by Frederick, Maryland based Transportation Economic Management Systems.).
The Purple Line Revived: Two Routes to Virginia
So connecting our Quadrangle and re-connecting Annapolis to the world of rail is the first layer of our vision. The second has been outlined in earlier parts of the paper (in the “From Vision to Fragments” section) – now it needs to be highlighted. As this writer went about looking at the pieces of our transportation puzzle, especially the fate of the circumferential Purple Line, he realized that it had not entirely died, even though the remaining fragments, and their sponsors, didn’t seem to be communicating too well with one another. Readers are recommended to pick up the basic Metro Map, called “Your Guide to Metro and the Nation’s Capital,” available at any station, to help visualize the existing and missing fragments from the “vision.” Here’s how it looks to me in December of 2007:
- The plans for the extant Purple Line, 14.5 miles from Bethesda to New Carrollton, are going forward and have gotten good ridership projections, 47,000 per day, from state numbers crunching, crucial to achieving federal $ from the “New Starts” Program. (“Appetite Grows for Purple Line Data,” by William Wan, Washington Post, Thursday, December 6, 2007, Metro Section, B1, B6)
- The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board’s (NCRTPB) 2030 Long Range Plan reveals a major study for Metro Rail, from Dunn Loring (VA, Orange Line Station) to the American Legion Bridge (that’s the Beltway, I-495, over the Potomac). Dunn Loring is one stop east of the Vienna Station.
- The Northern Virginia 2020 Transportation Plan lists this same route, Dunn Loring to Maryland via Tysons Corner as a capital project for $740,000,000 (under the Section of I-495 Beltway Corridor Projects)
- The Fairfax Coalition for Smarter Growth, Inc., issued a whitepaper in May of 2000 calling for a 12 mile light rail line double-tracked from Tysons Corner to Dunn Loring, and single tracked from Dun Loring to the Franconia-Springfield Station (still VA, on the Blue Line). They went on to comment that “if the system were extended to the American Legion Bridge as part of an overall Beltway light-rail system connecting Tysons with Bethesda (a total distance of 18 miles in Virginia), the estimated cost would be $450 million.”
- In WMATA’s (that’s Metro’s home agency) 10 year System Expansion Plan (SEP) there is a project called “Branch Avenue to Alexandria” in two phases totaling 13 miles – this is the fabled “rail on the bridge project,” which would link the Green Line from the Branch Avenue Station in Prince Georges County, MD to one of the Yellow Line’s VA stations in Alexandria. This is the segment Congressman Al Wynn has complained about as being too low a priority with both Maryland and Prince Georges County officials, citing 100,000 commuters from Prince Georges that cross the Woodrow Wilson Bridge now by car, heading west into Virginia. Donna Edwards, his challenger in the Democratic primary for his 4th Congressional District seat, fought hard to keep a space open for rail on the bridge. Given the picture we’re painting, it should have been a “no-brainer” for that space.
So if you are penciling in this information on a map, here’s what we have: we’re missing something substantive, a plan or study, for “only” the Bethesda to the American Legion Bridge portion, in Montgomery County about 3 miles; over on the eastern part of the great Purple circle, from New Carrollton through Largo Town Center to Branch Avenue, about 5-6 six miles (maybe a bit longer if it followed the Beltway) – and something “official” from Springfield to Dunn Loring, about 5-6 miles. Whether these missing segments have fallen by the wayside because they have missed some earlier tryout/cut for ridership numbers stemming from that Purple Line-I-495 Corridor study done by MDOT towards the end of the Glendening administration, or they are not even in any imaginary queue due to some other unnamed reason is something that needs to be looked at by a sound Green Rail Vision planning effort. Two other thoughts come to mind concerning this aspect of the regional rail/congestion picture.
On Monday, November 12th, 2007, the front page of the Washington Post Business section headlined an article called “Dulles Slows Down,” an overview of the history of all the commercial office space that has poured into a circle with an 8 mile radius around Dulles Airport in Loudon and Fairfax County, Virginia, and a expected downturn in the market (article by Alejandro Lazo, page D1, D-7.). The article notes that “as an office market, the Dulles Corridor surpasses Tysons Corner in raw square footage.” What struck this writer as remarkable about the coverage is that there is just a brief indirect reference to the grand Dulles Metro extension project, mentioned by the developer of a particular project near a future Metro station along the Dulles Toll Road. Even though the map shows the heavy office concentration near Herndon and Reston, it does not pencil in, even with a dotted line, the future Metro line which goes right through the circles portrayed. Now the question that has to be placed front and center for our Green Rail Vision for the Region is: what is the rail connection answer to the great morning auto migration from Maryland to Virginia, east to west, to reach both the Tysons Corner Area and the Dulles Airport vicinity? It seems that answering this question depends upon completing that missing Bethesda to the American Legion bridge rail crossing and the Branch Ave line over the Woodrow Wilson Bridge to Alexandria, and linking both to the Dulles Corridor Line and the Dunn Loring-to the Legion Bridge segment. That’s what this writer is waiting to find or hear in planning discussions to help ease the great auto migration that so taxes our region.
He’s also hoping that the MARC expansion plans announced in September, 2007 (see http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-te.md.marc24sep24,0,5095732.story) as covered in the Baltimore Sun by Michael Dresser (“MARC aims to Triple Service) and referred to several times earlier in this essay, are not meant to be in lieu of the missing Northern Virginia rail connections we have described just above. MARC’s expansion plans into Northern Virginia, as indicated in the 32 page plan (at http://www.mtamaryland.com/marc%20plan%20full.pdf), call for, in the 2020 section, a new station at L’Enfant Plaza and Crystal City, but still utilizing the Long Bridge Potomac River crossing near the Tidal Basin and the Pentagon. And the article indicates that Crystal City and the Pentagon are the Virginia destinations. This writer says if the demand on the MARC lines is there, then the plan makes sense, even if the money to pay for it is not there yet. It also depends, on its eastern side, on solving the existing tunnel choke-points in Baltimore, so it overlaps with the framework of the I-95 Corridor coalition. The Sun article also hinted at one of the trends in rail commuter lines, and that is to have the lines driven by the commuting needs of high income riders. The Sun article states that “The MTA chief (Paul J. Wiedefeld) said the expansion of MARC – with a large percentage of high-income riders – would not come at the expense of other transit service such as the bus system, light rail and the Metro. ‘We shouldn’t think of this as a Gucci system,’ he said. ‘This is moving toward more of an urban commuter rail system.’”
Where the Trolleys Used to Run
We turn now to one of the most pressing and daunting challenges of our congested Metro, DC region, and to the future of Green Rail. And that is the road situation in the older suburbs between DC and the Beltway, and just beyond it, up the Rockville Pike to Rockville itself, and up Georgia Avenue to at least Wheaton. As readers of the essay “Making Sense of Mixed-Use Mania” know, the Montgomery County Department of Park & Planning, as well as the City of Rockville, are pushing hard to build denser, mixed-use transit oriented development near existing Metro Stations, especially on the Red Line at White Flint, Twinbrook, Rockville itself, Shady Grove, Wheaton and Glenmont. Additionally, the city and the county want to see mixed-use residential development be blended in with new retail arrangements in the 3.1 miles of the Rockville Pike between the White Flint Station and the Rockville Station. Prince Georges County would love to be doing the same thing around its Metro Stations, but so far Montgomery County is cornering most of that type of development. Now the noteworthy, audacious even, aspect about these plans is that citizens were unhappy with the traffic situations on the main roads around these stations even before the new higher densities began arriving, yet the plans rely entirely on the hopes that the existing Metro stations and in some cases, gridded street patterns (especially along the Rockville Pike at White Flint and north towards the City of Rockville) will get folks out of their cars for their shopping, service errands and, hopefully their trips to work. The question in this writer’s mind is: shouldn’t this type of development be accompanied by plans for a light rail or trolley system along the existing, already congested roadways? Folks who don’t want rail transit claim the densities aren’t high enough. For the outer parts of the region, that’s probably true, but the plans are for increasing densities, and light rail/trolley possibilities start at around 7 units per acres, something communities like Twinbrook and others along Veirs Mill, Connecticut, University, and Piney Branch already meet – and the trends are going denser. My understanding is that Veirs Mill Road and University Blvd. have two of the highest, if not the highest ridership bus routes in the State. That’s a clue, and the new developments are not here yet at Wheaton, Glenmont and most of the Pike.
Other thoughtful citizens have different ideas to deal with the Montgomery-Prince Georges traffic problems. Clarence Steinberg, a retired professor from the University of Maryland, sees big additional traffic woes from the Federal Drug Administration’s move to the White Oak area (near the intersection of New Hampshire Avenue and Colesville Road/Rt. 29. Employees of FDA who once road the rails to Rockville and Federal Center in DC now will be on the highways. Steinberg’s remedy is an extension of Metro north and west from the Greenbelt Station (with an additional station at Ikea Center- National Agricultural Library) to the White Oak area, then north to Briggs Chaney, before heading west to Glenmont, Rockville and Kentlands, then turning south to cross the Potomac and head for a connection with the new Dulles Line and Tysons Corner. In essence, this is an “outside the Beltway” twist on the circumferential routes. Because the federal government is abandoning Metro use for those FDA employees, Steinberg thinks it should bear the cost burden for the Metro expansion near the new employment bases. A regional bond issuing authority, like the Port Authority of New York/NJ would be needed to finance the rest, with federal backing similar to loan guarantees to keep the bonding costs reasonable. In addition, large parking garages near the stations, with free or very low cost parking, could help deliver the maximum traffic relief to the region’s famously congested roadways.
The most serious response from elected officials is a proposal for a six mile, six million dollar Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line along Veirs Mill Road, connecting Wheaton and Rockville, where 11,300 folks currently ride the bus each day.(see http://www.fta.gov/documentd/montgomery.pdf). For a recent critique of BRT, readers can visit (http://www.nj-arp.org/brt2.html) from the New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers, as well as a good collection of articles at LightRailNow! (at http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_brt.htm) This writer can’t help but feel that this project is driven mainly by cost considerations, and not good long range transportation planning. Andres Duany makes the case for light rail over buses well in his Suburban Nation (pages 202-203), arguing that the frequency and predictability of routes are important consideration and that historically, poorly maintained bus systems have led to a situation where “…the only people who take the bus are those who have no choice, creating a self-perpetuating underclass ridership.” Buses, of course, are a necessary component in a well-functioning transportation system, especially to reach areas where the development is not dense enough to support more expensive forms of transit. But Montgomery County is the one of the wealthiest counties in arguably the wealthiest state in the country. Rockville Pike and Wisconsin Ave., Connecticut Ave., New Hampshire Ave. and Colesville Road, as well as University Blvd., and Piney Branch and Randolph all deserve serious examination for a light rail system that will serve the new denser developments and the needs of residents that Metro’s DC-oriented design was never intended to meet. Conversations with residents who have lived in the area for many decades tell me that trolleys once served many of the streets just named, at a time when the suburbs were much less dense than they are today, and are going to be in the future. Once again, professional planners should set aside the fixation on contemporary funding roadblocks and examine the long term future, given where land-use plans and other large external pressures are going. Fixed rail of any type in these corridors will set off a real estate battle between bets already placed and those yet to be made along possible routes. Fixed rail will mean greater densities along the routes. For a serious practical and theoretical critique of smart growth plans without adequate supporting public transit, and without the densities necessary to support the retail component, readers are invited to look at the essays by Alex Marshall, a senior fellow at the prestigious Regional Plan Association in New York (at http://www.alexmarshall.org/index.php?category=New%20Urbanism), especially “Building New Urbanism: Less filling, but not so tasty,” and “Columbia, Maryland.”
Thoughtful folks considering the system we are outlining above for Montgomery County, know it wouldn’t be effective by ending abruptly at the county’s legal borders. A logical exploration of the streets named above leads to inclusive planning with Prince Georges County and the District, and therefore a sharing of the expenses. Since WMATA and the District seemed to have abandoned, for good, or dramatically scaled back ideas of major investments in new lines of heavy rail Metro, they should make the effort to look seriously at a light rail/trolley system connecting with their neighbors.
Several other comments about buses versus rail in these densifying corridors are in order. There is no question, in this writer’s mind at least, that under the Republican Ehrlich and Bush administrations, buses were favored over rail, even though it is hard to picture many Republicans riding on the buses I see on Veirs Mill and University Boulevard. Going to rail should pull in more riders than buses currently carry; it should not lose any riders and it should pull in middle class riders who will not presently ride buses, and there is national evidence that BRT studies overestimate actual riders, and light rail studies underestimate them. Further, rail on these routes will replace the buses, and they can be retired from them or be freed up to serve less dense corridors, to help serve as feeder systems for the main rail lines.
Given the outlook of elected officials in the county, and the burgeoning deficit, no one should expect rail “around the corner.” But given the county’s ambitious growth plans some type of additional rail is worth a serious feasibility look. After all, when I raise the seriousness of the real estate downturn (and the possibility of a structural economic crisis) as a reason to be more cautious with current development plans, county and Rockville officials, planners all say “stop worrying,” we’re looking at a 25-30 years planning horizon.
Corridor Cities and the I-270 Gauntlet
Before we leave our Green Rail Vision for the region and Maryland, we have several more stops to make. One is for the troubled Corridor Cities Transitway project and region, where we are waiting for the latest projected ridership numbers (as of late-December, 2007). Slated to deal with congestion problems in the I-270 Corridor between the Shady Grove Metro station on the Red Line and the new town of Clarksburg, this is one of those transit proposals that seems to fall between the cracks. It appears to be a slow collector system for communities that are pretty dispersed in its corridor, designed to get folks to the existing Shady Grove Metro Station. Will the winding route, whatever mode, bus or rail or something-in-between, be able to get folks there in any reasonable length of time to get the “mode-shift” out of cars? Isn’t the real problem in the I-270 Corridor, as it promises to enlarge even further by the addition of the new variably priced toll lanes, that I-270 remains a commuting nightmare because the destinations are pointed towards northern Virginia at morning commute, something the existing Metro Red Line can’t solve, even with more frequent 8 car trains? We have suggested in a number of places in this paper that the Maryland auto traffic flow into Virginia needs to be dealt with more directly. The highway forces have long hoped for another bridge crossing over the Potomac – just another extension of the ICC westward, many have said. But my vision would have I-270 donating one of its many lanes (it is up to 12 lanes before the new ones are laid down) to rail transit – in a dedicated corridor – that would cross the existing American Legion Bridge and link up with the rail projects being planned or studied in Northern Virginia. Somehow, if the idea is really to get people out of cars for the common good of slowing global warming, the idea of rail cars zipping by in a highly visible way in the I-270 corridor at rush hour, seems like an excellent marketing strategy that ought to help pay for itself – without the special marketing. That’s where we should be putting our money, long term, instead of more auto lanes on the ever-widening 270. Defenders of the current directions in transportation planning will doubtless point out those future expansions in the MARC Brunswick Line, which very roughly parallels 270 from about Germantown to Rockville, will offer some help. The plans call for adding some 20,000 additional seats by 2037, to the existing daily ridership of 7,000 passengers. That’s some help, but not on the order of magnitude to grapple with the problems on I-270. And remember, tripling MARC’s ridership would be eye-catching if the base were starting not from the 30,000 figure for over-all ridership on three lines that is the reality today, (and going to 100,000 by 2035) – but if it were going from 100,000 to 300,000, for example. So we need to keep MARC in perspective, and in the Brunswick Corridor, it doesn’t get us to the Northern Virginia job destinations that drive our region’s traffic woes.
Several of our official planning documents have mentioned the possibility of extending the Metro Green Line from the Greenbelt Station east to BWI airport. Certainly the direction of the logic of the Infrastructure 2007 report points that way, because it would increase Intermodality, being able to easily shift from one mode of transit to another, rail to air in this case. And doubtless public officials focused on economic competitiveness watch Dulles Airport about to be connected to Metro and fear falling behind. However, in conversations this writer has had with a savvy transportation “expert,” we shouldn’t expect that many folks will ride this line right now. So ranking it depends on the goals one has in mind for transit. In this paper, we’re proposing that that relieving congestion in the most traveled corridors and getting cars off the road to reduce CO2 emissions rank very high. But after that we are looking down the rails to the long-term future of mobility in the state and region, and that’s where this project would come in.
Also mentioned in Maryland documents is rail service for southern Maryland, in the State Rt. 5 and US 301 corridors, which starts in Charles County and heads north into Prince Georges, south of the District. It seems that local officials in that corridor are leaning towards light rail, not heavy Metro, out of fear that traditional Metro will attract more development than they want. However, it would also seem to be very important to ask which goes first, a light rail connection from the 301/5 corridor to the existing Green Line, or to the proposed Branch Ave. to Alexandria line across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Since the river crossing line would provide faster and more direct access to Virginia employment centers, then it might be prudent to wait until that line is built.
A Word About Costs
Readers concerned to keep their feet grounded after reading this vision section may appreciate a word on costs, especially comparisons between road and rail construction costs, which on the rail side usually include the rail line itself, electrical system, cars and stations – the whole deal. We have provided readers with many, many sites in this paper, pro-rail and anti-rail, so we invite you to check these numbers for yourself. But to keep it simple in this section, we’ll give you the best sense of the ranges we’ve encountered in our research. From our Baltimore Regional Rail System Plan comes the very high end of figures: for underground service, $250 million per mile; elevated, $100 million per mile; at grade $50 million per mile. (The ball park figure for our existing Metro system, $10 billion in “constant” dollars for 100 miles of rail (rounded), came in at $100 million per mile. Construction material costs have gone up dramatically since then.) The mode – Metro (heavy rail), or light rail or trolley was not specified for Baltimore, and remember, this is toward the dense urban end of building, so these figures are much higher than the national average for light rail. Nationally, a conservative number for light rail is $35 million per mile. St. Louis, Salt Lake City and Denver have come in between $14 million and $24 million per mile. On the highway side, the stats usually cited come from the Federal Highway Administration, in 1996 dollars, “weighted rural and urban combined” costs per mile estimate of $20.6 million per mile; the rural came in at $9.84 million; urban $44.13 million per mile.
It should be noted that in New Jersey, the rapidly growing and successful Hudson-Bergen light rail line, with 21 stops along 20.6 miles near the Hudson River and with a great view of Manhattan, is one of New Jersey’s most expensive public construction projects ever at 2.2 billion dollars. The federal government picked up 61% of the cost of phase one and 41% of phase two. The line is owned by NJ Transit, but the 21st Century Rail Corporation (a subsidiary of the Washington Group), received a design-build-operate-maintain contract. So it runs, under a long term contract (15 years), as a public-private partnership – and it seems to be working just fine. Ridership is up to 27,000 weekday riders. It’s an indication that there are a variety of ways to achieve rail transit. Private sector skills are welcome, and it’s pretty clear they saw the potential given this line’s prime location, as have real estate developers.
CONCLUSION: WHERE THREE CRISES MEET
Maryland’s Special Session
As this essay is reaching its final form in late December, 2007, it is all but impossible to finish the job without addressing the broader context of current public policy and the economic situation. The state of Maryland, at the request of Governor O’Malley, has just finished a special legislative session to close a structural budget deficit of some $1.5 billion dollars. Although it has raised “just over” $400 million in new revenue for its Transportation Trust (by raising the vehicle excise tax from 5% to 6% and the titling tax from $23 to $50, and sending 6.5% of the total sales tax revenue to the Transportation Trust, the sales tax having been slightly expanded in base and from 5% to 6% in rate), this was disappointing to many business leaders and this writer who know that additional revenues will be needed to even begin to fulfill the Green Rail Vision called for here. More precisely, the $400 million increase would not cover the $13.5 billion dollar deficit the Transit Funding Steering Committee took note of, for transit projects already “in the pipeline.” The path chosen was the one of least political resistance, steering clearly away from any increase in Maryland’s 23.5 cent gasoline tax, which hasn’t been raised since 1992 – not even indexing it for inflation. A gas tax increase can raise a lot of money for transportation projects: a penny increase in Maryland raises about $32 million dollars per year. Now this writer circulated (in the fall of 2007), to selected legislators and policy folks, a short essay entitled “Gas Taxes, Global Warming and Reagan’s Free Lunch,” advocating a 25 cent per gallon increase in Maryland’s gas tax, which would bring in between $600-$800 million dollars annually for the Transportation Trust. But there were no takers, despite the paper’s citation of big league Republican economists (Alan Greenspan, N. Gregory Manikow, Andrew A. Samwick) who differ with the Republican anti-tax die-hards and join company with Democrats like Al Gore and Paul Krugman, who have in the past seen a federal gas tax increase as the most direct way to send the right price signal and move the nation off its foreign oil dependency, with offset mechanisms to redistribute the tax’s pain from those least able to bear it. Thomas Friedman, the NY Times columnist and noted author, captured the sense of chagrin from the lost opportunities over the past six years with his column “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda,” about the failure to enact a $1.00 a gallon gas tax in the immediate wake of 9/11/2001, when oil was priced at $25.50 a barrel. (at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/opinion/14friedman.html). However, given the nature of the special session and the political heavy lifting required to raise $1.5 billion, it is very unlikely that there will be a regular session effort to revisit the issue.
The Economic Crisis
And now the press is filled with accounts of new budget gaps, especially at the county level (Montgomery County: $401 million) from the drop in real estate revenues due to the bursting housing bubble. Don’t be surprised if new budget deficits appear at the state level too. Since the August 2007 financial market crisis, triggered by the fallout from the subprime calamity, and the inability of markets to shrug it off, and despite massive and repeated interventions by the world’s central banking authorities, worries have increased on the probability of a recession, and even worse. That’s because the new financial instruments that have become dominant with the rise of hedge funds since the 2000-2002 stock market collapse, have spread risk rather than reduced it. So far we’ve all heard about how traditional mortgage debt has been sliced and repackaged around the world, and how that’s made lending very uncertain, because the new instruments lack proper regulation and transparency.
This writer has some bad news for the reader: the same pattern could be repeated for debt instruments built around auto loans, which are now seeing an uptick in delinquency rates, and even more ominously, credit card debt. So it isn’t about just the housing news. The security and credibility of a good part of the world’s basic financial architecture is at stake, as foreseen by Kevin Phillips in his prescient book American Theocracy (2006), the last chapter of which, called “Borrowed Prosperity,” is all about debt and the shaky new financial architecture. This writer called public attention to the economic situation with his February 2007 essay, entitled Fiscally Responsible or Ingredients for an Economic Katrina? One of the major fault lines in the system, detected in my research for the paper, was the open worry, from even those “engineers” who helped design the new financial instruments, about how they would perform in a down (that is, recessionary) market. Unfortunately, we may be about to find out. Even a casual reading of recent Op-Eds carries an increasingly ominous tone. Here’s just a brief sample: November 25, 2007, “Wake up to the dangers of a deepening Crisis,” by Larry Summers (yes, that Larry Summers, from the Clinton “Committee to the Save the World”) in the Financial Times (at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b56079a8-9b71-11dc-8aad-0000779fd2ac.html); December 3, 2007, “Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis,” by Paul Krugman in the New York Times, where Krugman asks, “How bad is it? Well, I’ve never seen financial insiders this spooked…” (at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/opinion/03krugman.html); Even the cautious David Ignatius, writing in the Washington Post of December 16, 2007, in an Op-Ed entitled “What Bankers Fear,” ends his column with a quote from a leading hedge fund manager who wishes that someone could bail him out of all his current “positions,” that is, his bets on the market’s future direction.
Where is this all leading to? Steve Fraser, an economic historian who has written extensively about the role of Wall Street in American life, posted an essay called “The Perfect Storm of Campaign 2008,” on Dec. 10 on Alternet, (see http://www.alternet.org/story/70120/) which builds a case that we are in a very similar structural situation to….well, there it is: 1932. In longer works, books rather than Op-Ed pieces, it is all leading back to that same watershed sense of 1929-1932, when the old economic assumptions could not deal with the “new financial architecture” of the late 1920’s that led to 1929 – and could not climb out of the deep economic hole that was dug. (See Robert Kuttner’s new book, The Squandering of America, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, where Chapters Three through Five can be summarized by one of the subheadings – “The Compulsion to Repeat 1929.”)
Global Warming Won’t Wait
Since history never repeats itself in exactly the same way, the situation in 2007-2008 has another layer of complexity that citizens of the Depression era did not have to face, even though they had their own extreme weather events, like the Dustbowl: the threat of Global Warming. All through the fall of 2007, newspapers have been full of accounts of the acceleration of visible climate change impacts, such as the jolting increase in summer ice melt in the Artic. The noted journalist Ross Gelbspan, whose two earlier books The Heat is On (1997) and Boiling Point (2004) kept the Global Warming crisis in front of citizens before Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and Nobel Prize, has a sobering, disturbing assessment of the trends and the potential remedies in an article entitled “Beyond the Point of No Return” (at http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/10/165845/92). And running in a different window on the computer screen has been the great international gathering in December, 2007 in Bali, Indonesia, actually two processes at once, under the easy to remember title of “Thirteenth Session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and Third Session of the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol.” It might have been called “Where are We Going and How Will We Get There?” By visiting the Pew Charitable Trusts climate pages at http://www.pewclimate.org readers can find a readable seven page summary of what happened at the conference and also a good one page summary of the most advanced US legislative stab at a beginning of a cap and trade system, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act – S-2191, which passed out of the Senate Energy & Public Works Committee on December 5, 2007. Of course, Dr. Hansen’s announcement that we’ve run past a crucial climate tipping point – 350 ppm of CO2 already….means that this bill is probably far behind the curve of climate reality. His preferred solution is for a direct tax upon carbon.
So we have three major problem narratives running simultaneously here: a national infrastructure deficit, including especially for our regional purposes, a rail transit deficit, a looming economic crisis, and an intensifying Global Warming crisis that is going to ask all of us to move away from CO2 emitting activities, like driving, to the greatest extent we can. And since this writer is aware of the economic situation looming, indeed, announced it in his public testimony of June 26th, 2007 on Montgomery County’s Growth Policy and had written about it, in greater depth in February, 2007, he is well aware of the conventional economic wisdom, not to raise taxes heading into a potentially very serious economic downturn. That is usually sound advice. What isn’t sound advice is the state and local “conventional wisdom,” translated into law, of requiring balanced budgets even when the economic storm flags are flying. Layoffs and reduced spending are exactly the opposite of good economic policy when a recession is looming. However, the problems facing us here are not conventional. Is there a way we can deal effectively with the overlapping crises?
Can’t Do Nation?
And at the same time as yours truly was doing research for this paper, he felt the power of the “can’t do” current consensus. He read how we were struggling to field just one train line in this big nation that could boast of 150 mph speeds, and fumbling that job pretty badly with Acela between Boston and Washington, and read the admonition that in our older transportation corridors, like the I-95 Corridor, we shouldn’t be looking for any big new systems, and inferred that most transportation planning professionals had their horizons reduced by that very tight fiscal/no new taxes envelope that they felt they were compelled to plan inside of. Taking all this into account, he then came across the following description of the construction achievement of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), from the New Deal years of 1935-43: it “eventually put nearly nine million people to work to build 650,000 miles of roads, 800 airports, and hundreds of thousands of public buildings, parks, bridges and other projects.” (From Jeffrey Frieden’s Global Capitalism, W.W. Norton, 2006, page 234.) Yes, that’s 650,000 miles of roads, compared to the Interstate Highway System’s 47,000 miles, and the Boston to Washington Amtrak line of just 450 miles. This writer also drew upon memories of the Manhattan Project during World War II, the Apollo Moon Project from the 1960’s, and the remarkably successful Mars Exploration Rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on the Red Planet in January of 2004 and which are still moving about on scientific missions that were to have only lasted 90 days. (I could be mistaken, but I believe they’re solar powered.) And he wondered what type of nation we have become, at least inside the Beltway horizons, where we throw in the towel over getting just one fast train line up and running. Fortunately, not everyone is thinking inside this suffocating envelope, despite the looming crises. There are ways out that can build on our past achievements in daunting times, times when things seemed pretty hopeless, like in 1932. That’s why economist James K. Galbraith’s 13 page essay The Macroeconomic Considerations of a Public Investment Strategy deserves a close look (at http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/macroeconomic_considerations_public_investment_strategy). {And yes, he is the son of famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith.}
A National Infrastructure Bank
Presented in October, 2007, courtesy of The New America Foundation, so that it was located right in the middle of the overlapping storms we have described here, the essay opens with a description of a trip out of China’s Shanghai airport on a German built Maglev train that hits, at times, 450 kilometers per hour. It averages 150 mph. (Amtrak’s Acela, currently America’s fastest train, hopes to hit 150 mph in a few stretches, but averages just 68 mph on its Boston to Washington run. Does anyone really think this is the best this nation can do?) Galbraith proposes that federal infrastructure spending rise to 2% of Gross Domestic Product – or about $290 billion dollars a year, or three times its current depressed level, which has been on a downward spiral ever since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. The mechanism through which this increased spending will be handled would be a “federal infrastructure bank,” and the idea is that it would be deficit financed through the issuance of bonds. That route is appropriate, Galbraith feels, because it will be dealing with long term capital assets, current public deficits are small in relation to GNP, and the economy is not at full employment, indeed, given the context being set by this essay, the economy is headed in the opposite direction. Now the great public policy fulcrum around which this infrastructure spending would rise rests upon the issue of Global Warming and building a new infrastructure that is far less reliant on carbon, whether for transportation, electricity generation or heating our homes and businesses.
So that means there will be price increases, taxes if you like, on carbon based fuels, and this writer thinks that’s true whether we end up with the economists’ dream program of a direct tax on carbon close to its sources (the raw carbon fuels themselves, right out of the ground or immediately after processing) or it’s hidden through the labyrinth called “cap and trade” contained in the Lieberman-Warner bill. But this is not a simple tax increase in the face of a deteriorating economic situation. The revenue raised by increasing the price of carbon based fuels and their consumption is going to turn right around and go back into the economy, with a large multiplier effect, through the increased infrastructure spending. Now Galbraith says it in a little less dramatic way than this, but that’s basically the idea: “Since public policy would favor a high price for all carbon-based fuels, this would create the scope for new taxes on all such fuels to help finance an infrastructure investment program. Thus, an effectively structured program of new investment should have substantially less net inflationary impact than the war in Iraq has had.”(Pages 9-10.) Galbraith also points out that additional infrastructure spending would coincide with the rapidly contracting home building labor market, which this writer thinks likely will be depressed for far longer than the usual building downturns, based on economist Dean Baker’s analysis (see Midsummer Meltdown at http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/meltdown_2007_08.pdf) . And, as our friend Andres Duany pointed out in Suburban Nation, “…spending on transit creates twice as many new jobs as spending on highways.” Tom Toles, the Washington Post political cartoonist, caught the spirit of the times, and part of the solution, with his Sunday December 16th, 2007 “talking Metro Smartrip Card,” which answers “everyman’s” request to show how much smarter the new card is by disclaiming that “if you want to improve traffic congestion and help the environment, you should be shifting costs to gasoline consumption, not raising Metro fares.”
Rail Around the Nation
Anticipating the direction that Professor Galbraith is heading in is Alan S. Drake, an engineer and researcher who specializes in transportation and energy issues, who has compiled (May, 2007) a list of 88 cities with rail projects of varying types (Wash. DC and Baltimore are included on the list) that are close to “ready to go,” meaning they would likely break ground within 12-36 months – if the funding was there. He has presented this as part of the “Electrification 101 Series” at LightRailNow (at http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2007-04a.htm) and says that if they were all electric rail that they could cumulatively reduce national oil consumption 4% in 12 years. He says “these oil savings are comparable to an optimistic estimate of Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) oil production – but unlike oil production, these savings will grow, and not deplete.” The total price tag is estimated between $135-175 billion – well under the annual increase of infrastructure spending proposed by Galbraith.
Not all sections of our nation are waiting, however, for a federal revenue solution. Perhaps the most ambitious single state proposal comes from California, one of the nation’s leaders in fighting Global Warming, on the ground and in the courts. Way back in 1996, the state established the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which has been planning for a 700 mile intercity high-speed rail system to connect San Diego, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, Orange County, the Central Valley, the Bay Area and Sacramento. In its scope, it rivals the Mid-West proposal we’ve described, with fewer miles but much higher speeds. That’s because it’s intended to compete directly with air travel in this corridor. Senate Bill 1856, which put the proposal to raise $9.95 billion in public bonds (it’s expected to cost $40 billion) on the ballot in November, 2008, gets pretty specific about “placing the order:” the trains are to be electric and achieve speeds of 200 mph, and the system is to be completed by 2020. It will have a maximum of 24 stations and the travel time between San Francisco-Los Angeles has to be 2 hours and 42 minutes – or better. Nearly $1 billion of the bond act will be used to construct a rail “feeder system” for the high-speed routes. To get to that $40 billion figure, it is also expected to tap private capital markets. According to SPUR (San Francisco Planning & Urban Research, at http://www.spur.org/newsletters/36203_SPUR_JUNE07.pdf), the system will be grade-separated but in or near existing rail corridors, and will place most of its stations in existing downtowns. It is expected to carry 117 million passengers a year by 2030 and reduce GHG (Green House Gas) emissions the equivalent of taking 1.88 million cars off the road. However, the political history of this major proposal illustrates the great hurdles we have been talking about in this paper. Its ballot appearance has already been twice postponed (in 2004 and 2006) due to unresolved route issues and large, competing bond infrastructure proposals, and the overall level of state indebtedness. Readers should note that Wall Street constraints (due to bond rating agency conventions) limit the ability of states to raise the capital necessary for ambitious infrastructure proposals, something cited by Professor Galbraith in making his case for a federal infrastructure bank. (Note: in late December, 2007, the route has been decided and it looks like voters will have a chance to vote for hi-speed rail in the November, 2008 election.)
The Denver, Colorado region is also not waiting for an entirely federal solution. In November of 2004, voters gave 58% support to a ballot measure to spend $4.7 billion for their regional FasTracks system (by increasing a regional sales tax), for 120 miles of rail service, commuter and light rail, on 6 new rail lines, built over 12 years. A recent check with the Denver Regional Transportation District (at http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/main_26) showed the price tag up to 6.1 billion dollars due to construction material price increases, and it includes 18 miles of Bus Rapid Transit, 57 new stations, 21,213 new Park and Ride spaces and regional enhanced bus connections.
Baltimore’s Hidden Plan
Denver’s system happens to be just about the size of the vision for Maryland’s own Baltimore Region Rail System, which will total 109 miles of rail, with 66 new miles to be added over 40 years to its existing 43 miles of Metro and light-rail. The vision is contained in a very well done 34 page online brochure (at http://www.baltimoreregiontransitplan.com/pages/brrsp.html). It calls for a total of six lines, with the Red and Green lines taking construction priority. Some 68 new stations will be added to the 54 existing; the Yellow line will eventually head west to reach Columbia, Maryland. What is surprising about this very good, very citizen friendly document is that its existence entirely escaped my research until near the very end of this paper, for reasons that should be by now….well… maybe not so surprising. That’s because all the official documents that we have cited in earlier sections refer to isolated fragments of this plan – almost always the Red and Green line – and don’t refer to the broader vision. Eventual rail connection to the city of Columbia was listed back in our Transit Funding Study Committee Report – but it didn’t mention the Yellow Line connection to the broader Baltimore Region Rail System document, which was finished way back in August of 2002. What is the price tag for the Baltimore Rail Regional System? About $12 billion. And reaching out to connect to Annapolis? That’s in a section near the end, beyond the 40 year planning horizon, which says that corridor is not yet dense enough for rail (which doesn’t fit the conceptual model of intercity rail connection, downtown to downtown, Baltimore to Annapolis, which informs our Quadrangle proposal and which leans toward high speed commuter rail, not light rail). But that shouldn’t distract too much from an otherwise fine vision and presentation.
A Little Christmas Bonus
It just so happens that on the very day when this writer has put the price tag to paper for our Baltimore Rail system , $12 billion, the famous Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs has announced its Christmas “bonus pool” for 2007: $12.1 billion. (“Goldman Bonuses Up 23%,” by Christine Harper, Washington Post, Wednesday, December 19, 2007, Page D2. What is exquisite in the timing and scope of these cost and reward totals - between public need and private wealth - is that it so nicely illustrates the infrastructure problems we have been talking about. Starting with the Reagan election in 1980, a massive transfer of wealth has taken place through tax breaks for the already wealthy and the vast financialization of the economy (from civil engineers to financial engineers?) so that we arrive at a point where Christmas bonuses for one Wall Street firm match the entire rail expansion needs, for 40 years, of a struggling, major metropolitan area. To add some further irony to this economic imbalance, Goldman Sachs had two Managing Partners listed as participants in the Infrastructure 2007 Report we have cited, the report that calls for spending $1.5 trillion to bring us up to operating speed. Of course, we don’t know, because of the way comments were handled, where these Partners fell on the spectrum of opinions.
But What If…Big Problems Aren’t Over?
It is a long standing historical cliché to assert that the “climate of the times” and its usually implicit assumptions about what is possible, dominate large public policy questions, such as the infrastructure needs we are pondering here. And clearly these assumptions bear upon questions of public spending and the taxes needed to support it. This writer has spoken in public (speech to the Rockville Kiwanis Club, January, 2007) about the incredible inflexibility of the core Republican value of “no new taxes” and its close relative “tax cuts”: that to be invoked to cover all situations at all times as a secular, “theological” absolute makes it one of the most irresponsible public philosophies of all times, comparable to the Social Darwinism of the late 19th Century. But it is not the only dominant element in the “climate of the times” that is causing so much trouble, and undercutting our ability to deal with what is imminently on the horizon. In 1996, when President Clinton claimed, in his State of the Union Address, that the “era of big government is over,” he was badly misled by events that gave that pronouncement some plausibility: it appeared to him, and many others, that the era of “big problems” was also over, given the end of the Cold War, a rising economy, 9/11 not on the horizon, Global Warming a distant worry...shaky world financial architecture not yet in distress mode. As we have seen in this section, a number of observers feel we are entering a watershed era that will likely turn that pronouncement on its head. If the scope of repairing our infrastructure problems seems incomprehensible under the assumptions of Republican tax theology and President Clinton’s “captive to the market’s” formulation of “little” government, then the scope of Global Warming and the looming economic storms may be just ready to turn the existing assumptions upside down. And remember, the magnitude of President Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, if extended and made permanent, as he is requesting, would, along with the Alternative Minimum Tax relief he wants “cost $3.5 trillion through 2017,” according to the Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office estimates (see the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis by Aviva Aron-Dine at http://www.cbpp.org/1-31-07tax.htm). It almost goes without saying that the war in Iraq has cost anywhere between the officially budgeted $804 billion to estimates that go to $1.5 trillion and higher, as high as $2 trillion dollars according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes as reported in the Christian Science Monitor (at http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0110/dailyUpdate.html ).
Breaking the Spell
It is also clear to this writer, despite the courage Maryland Governor O’Malley and the Democratic legislature displayed in late 2007 to close the $1.5 billion state structural deficit, that elected officials at all levels are still terribly under the power of the Republican Right’s framing of tax and spending issues. That can be seen in the Governor’s presentation of the package, which stressed that many voters would be actually getting a small tax break amidst all the shuffling of the income tax, sales tax and various other taxes and fees. And it was very clear that any increase in the gas tax, despite its fifteen year slumber at its old rate, was off the table, including a linkage to an inflation index. Even the state’s environmental community, as well as national environmental leaders, backed away from calls to raise the gas tax, given the pain being delivered to consumers at the pump from the rise of oil prices to the $90-100 dollar-a-barrel range. (See the 2007 Greening the Budget Report, from the Maryland League of Conservation Voters at http://www.marylandconservation.org/issues/2007greeningthebudgetreport). They, along with many national leaders, may have been reading The New York Times/CSB News Poll from February 2006 which revealed that 85% of Americans oppose increasing the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gasoline tax, the one that hasn’t been raised since 1993. Yet a little further reading into the same poll discloses that 55% would support such a tax if it reduced our dependence on foreign oil, and 59% would support a gasoline tax increase if it would reduce gasoline consumption and fight Global Warming, which is a good part of the intent of raising it.
Priming the Pump for New Starts
The cautions of elected officials who feel they are still playing inside the tightly drawn taxing and spending envelope constructed for them by the Republican Right are understandable, and deeply govern the scope of the vision they are willing to present for rail transit. Local officials from towns like Annapolis and Rockville, and counties, even very affluent ones like Montgomery, all look up the chain of government for solutions: locals to county, the county to the state, the state to the federal government. There, at the federal level, for our purposes of rail transit funding, most eyes focus on the New Starts Program, which will be scrutinizing hundreds of applications over the next six years, working from a total allocation from the SAFETEA-LU (the latest big federal transportation bill) of $9.3 billion – or just $1.5 billion per year. As the national frustration level was building at this rail funding “chokepoint,” a 2003 Brookings Institution study, Highways and Transit: Leveling the Playing Field in Federal Transportation Policy by Edward Beimborn and Robert Puentes took a close look at its tough rules for transit funding, rules that highway funding didn’t have to meet. (see http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2003/12metropolitanpolicy_beimborn.aspx). The authors of the report didn’t think that the multiple social, economic and land-use considerations that New Starts asks local projects to meet is unfair, for the intent is to weed out unworkable projects that won’t have enough riders and won’t meet broader public needs – and therefore to protect the taxpayers’ interest in sound projects. Unfortunately, the same is not being asked – or required - of highway projects. “Leveling the playing field” between road and rail is a good starting place for a new administration’s transportation policy in Washington. And as events push in the direction indicated by Professor Galbraith, to consider a major infrastructure investment bank, it may well be wise to keep the tough standards in place to meet the inevitable attacks from the Right, attacks that are there now even at very modest levels of project approvals.
Campaign 2006: “‘You’ve Got to Set Lofty Goals….’”
As this essay is being finished, in late December, there is a sense of watershed change in the air, and some of that evidence for change has been placed in front of the reader in this last section. My thoughts go back to a little noticed campaign story from the Maryland Governor’s race of 2006, one that seems well worth recalling now. It involved Maryland’s young Lieutenant Governor, Anthony Brown, and was entitled “Brown’s ‘lofty’ Purple Line plans draw fire from transportation officials,” from the October 4, 2006 online edition of The Gazette. It seems that young candidate Brown had let a bit too much rail vision push into his campaign outlook when he met with the Gazette’s editorial board the previous week. What got Brown into trouble was his statement that “‘We’d like to see the Purple Line go from Bethesda to across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge… Let’s swing that boy all the way around.’” (see http://www.gazette.net/stories/100406/burtnew214616_31941.shtml). Brown also apparently called for new bridges over the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, which got him in immediate trouble with environmentalists. Observant readers will notice that this paper, while sharing Lt. Gov. Brown’s ambitions for greater rail reach into Virginia, did so by utilizing existing bridges. When pressed about big visions, Brown replied “ ‘You’ve got to set lofty goals…everything you talk about is going to cost money…the need to some day fund those programs should not prevent you from identifying those programs and initiatives that we so desperately need to address the issues of transportation.’” Then Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich’s Transportation Secretary Robert L. Flanagan, whose support for the $3 billion dollar InterCounty Connector Highway and buses seemed to push rail into the background from 2002-2006, wasn’t too enthused over Brown’s enthusiasm: “ ‘That’s the kind of thinking that could bankrupt the entire transportation budget and the entire state.’” Governor O’Malley, when asked about the idea of rail across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, said “transportation officials from Maryland and Virginia should be discussing the idea.” This writer couldn’t agree more. And those same officials should be looking at room for rail between Bethesda and the American Legion Bridge as well. Do the assumptions of the studies from the late 1990’s still hold in the new era of $3.00+ a gallon gasoline, Global Warming and Middle East disasters? It’s worth another look, given those growing rail ridership numbers from around the nation. If this author is right that a watershed moment is approaching – politically, economically, environmentally - then there is no downside to putting extra effort into ambitious planning now – things aren’t going to be funded or built today or next year, but possibilities for plans carefully laid now will have a better chance at getting built if Professor Galbraith is right on infrastructure funding at the federal level.
What If Federal Dollars Aren’t There?
But let’s put the ominous direction of this line of thinking aside for a moment; what if Galbraith’s national infrastructure bank doesn’t come to pass, would our Green Rail Vision “bankrupt the Transportation Trust and the State” as Mr. Flanagan claims? Let’s start with the most “conservative” assumption: only transit projects in the pipeline now, and no new money. If we go back to that long range (2030) plan and the funding for it done by the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board, remember that it was going to spend, for its suburban Maryland jurisdictions, $11 billion dollars for road and highway expansion projects, and just $2.7 billion for new transit starts and expansions. Readers will recall that our Green Vision called first for a tough fight to reverse the ratios of highways over rail transit. What if roads only got $3 billion and transit, buses and rail got the rest, close to $11 billion. Then things begin to look a lot different. We would be able to increase the rail projects in the pipeline, perhaps dramatically. Under these terms, roads still get maintained, and repaired, but there won’t be many new ones, although there is room for those demanded by regional needs (where there is little transit) and safety considerations. Second, Maryland did not raise its gas tax. If a quarter is too much for elected officials, do they maintain a dime would get them tossed out of office? A dime might raise as much as $320 million a year. Given the wide swings we’ve had in gasoline prices over the past two years, from $2.50 per gallon to $3.50 – would a dime even be noticed? Third, Maryland followed the pattern set by many other states and as hinted at by its Transit Funding Study Committee, it opted to raise the sales tax and dedicate 6.5% of total revenues to the Transportation Trust. The legislature, in its special session, did not branch the sales tax out to cover a whole range of middle class and upper middle class services that still await the touch of the 6% tax that average citizens will pay on many of their mundane purchases. Extending the reach of this tax, without raising it, would make it more progressive, and a good portion could be dedicated to rail transit projects. While the figures would vary depending on the scope of services included, this avenue could potentially raise on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Fourth, thinking of the county level close to DC, especially Montgomery County, one asks what are the great sources of wealth that are not being utilized adequately for the support of transportation? The answer is the real estate base. Looking at the state figures for MoCo from FY 2003 through FY 2013, we find that the total real estate tax base was going to rise from 82 billion dollars to 221 billion dollars. Now with the real estate troubles coming and likely to last, this will be a very difficult sell for raising transportation revenue, probably impossible. Yet my calculations did show that a one time assessment of one quarter of one-percent, set aside and dedicated, perhaps in an investment fund that could be gradually tapped to back bonds, would raise $312.5 million dollars based on the base year of FY 2007 ($125.35 billion). That’s from one county. And there could be many variations in approach: just taxing commercial property, for example, or assessments based on distance from Metro. All this may be very difficult to do, given what we have said about that fiscal envelope that we play inside of, complicated now by the economic storm clouds gathering. Perhaps what we should remember is the unwillingness to raise revenue even when times were good, say from 2004-2006. That’s why we emphasize that the revenue approach of the Right is irresponsible: even as the real estate boom would be adding thousands of cars, and times were flush, it’s never the right time to raise revenue with the Right. But we are not poor, and we have been under funding transportation for many years. The problem is one of will and attitudes, not lack of means.
Train Time
The rumbles of impending change – and their visual clues as well, are being detected by some other very acute observers. John R. Stilgoe, a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, and author, most recently, of a book “Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2007), is a popular lecturer whose unconventional courses teach students to see in their surroundings what their too casual first glances gloss over. He also has a reputation of being one of the nation’s great repositories of knowledge on American railroads in their heyday years, 1880-1935. Some of that knowledge was made public in his Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (1983, Yale University Press). In Train Time, we are given glimpses of what busy Americans stuck in traffic along both coasts often miss: the venture capitalists and real estate investors jotting down their notes in long abandoned railroad rights of ways – in coastal Massachusetts, for example. Rental cars and Texas accents are encountered in Greenbush, MA and Stilgoe ends up in a “cross-examination” that tells him that their interest is many years and many miles from where they are standing, but is based on yet to be revitalized rail lines. Stilgoe is not on a nostalgia trip, however, despite his tremendous knowledge of the old system, and he reminds readers that “replicating the past is foolish, but the possibility of welding the best of the past to the most-choice components of the present makes the study of places like Greenbush well worthwhile.”(Page 41). In keeping with the theme and his preference for one word Chapter titles, this one is called “Whisper.” Another Chapter, “Express,” reminds readers just how efficient the fast mail trains once were, even compared to contemporary services: “A two-cent stamp on a letter mailed in New York before 5:00 on any business day would buy next-day delivery in Chicago…Canton…Lima…and Fort Wayne too.” (Page 152). Private investors today, looking at the plight of first class mail and small packages, airport and major corridor congestion, ask how the old system managed to do it.
Although the general tone and style of writing in Train Time demands very close reader attention, there are brief portions of the Preface and Introduction that deliver the message of the return of the train with the force of a locomotive. Speaking of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a new train location that also caught my attention, he notes that “Albuquerque might seem an unlikely city to institute commuter rail service, but some of the most aggressive railroad reincarnation happens where city councils suddenly abandon hope in highways. In Atlanta, St. Louis and other automobile-centric cities, politicians are initiating feasibility studies and rail-equipment manufacturers are soliciting orders. The Train is returning, an economic and cultural tsunami about to transform the United States.” (Page xi). A good portion of the book is centered on the freight rail industry, and takes readers away from the congested coasts to more inland locations, ones also poorly served by the major hub-obsessed airline industry. So the physical locus of change may surprise quite a few people, witness the discussions of the Lynchburg, Virginia region and remote parts of Maine, where state officials are busy laying the rail lines for the future and successfully lobbying Amtrak for increased service. Here’s how Stilgoe lays out this image of impending change:
When the railroad returns, not if, it will not only transform the half-forgotten jewels that lie along the nation’s obscure operating railroad routes but also reshape regions far from existing tracks. Return will alter everyday life more dramatically than the arrival of personal computers, Internet connections, or cell phones. Return will remake the United States economy in ways that private-sector savants already anticipate. However difficult it is to imagine a grass-grown railroad track becoming a high-speed, heavily trafficked route, it is still more difficult to imagine grass growing through the pavement of interstate highways. But a least some people with imagination have made the intellectual leap…whether or not they know it, millions of Americans live in an economy waiting for the train… (Page 14).
Since his book is filled with descriptions of encounters, by phone and field, with “deep-pocketed, long-term” investors looking at rail, especially freight rail lines, his handling of freight rail’s future would seem to be somewhat at odds with the financial picture presented by the I-95 Coalition, which portrayed freight rail as not being able to raise enough capital in the private markets to make the improvements needed to deal with its congestion problems and outdated infrastructure. Whether the discrepancy is due entirely to the different geographical focus – the old and expensive I-95 corridor versus the vast inland area - is unclear, but the disconnect is duly noted. Of course, there is always the possibility that where the public might pick up the tab, private capital will head somewhere else, especially if it sees higher returns.
Stilgoe has sensed the twilight of one transportation age and the beginnings of a new one, even if his emphasis is more upon freight rail than passenger rail. For passenger rail, as the demand grows and the economic and environmental storms converge, the inadequate public philosophy which has financially starved the public’s transportation infrastructure since 1980 cannot hold. Yet conventional politics is unable to deal with the financial scale of the problem, which is, in reality, more a matter of ideological scale than objective fiscal scale, as Mr. Galbraith has demonstrated. Sometimes it takes great economic storms to create the tidal surge necessary to lift policy changes over the sand-bars of old ideas. Professor Schrag, our Great Society Subway writer, has got the feel for these transitions, even if the great economic turbulence of today was not as apparent when he wrote in 2006 that
Since the 1970’s, the Department of Transportation has stuck to the Ford Administration approach of funding only incremental transit construction, rather than approving region wide systems in the manner of Metro. Perhaps only a major shift in national ideology, comparable with the New Deal and the Great Society, can return public transportation to health and prominence both in Washington and around the nation. (Page 282).
This writer hopes that this essay truly serves as a Citizen’s Guide to unraveling the confusing puzzles of current transportation policy, as well as helping to usher in the coming changes, which are so long overdue. Our time, our safety and our planet’s health all have a stake in more of us riding on the new or refurbished tracks. This work, while not quite being a schedule for the arrival and departure times of future trains, gives you some ideas about where they should be running.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
RESOURCES
Many thanks,
William R. Neil
Rockville, MD 20851
William Neil is the former Director of Conservation for NJ Audubon Society. He served on Governor Martin O’Malley’s Transition Team for Planning and Smart Growth and was a candidate for the Democratic Seat on the Montgomery County Planning Board. He resides near the Twinbrook Station on the Metro Red Line, and hears MARC, CSX and Amtrak trains travel on the adjacent Brunswick Line, serving as portents for the future.
A special note of thanks for those public servants who gave their time to be interviewed: Ron Kirby, Director of Transportation Planning with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Henry Kay and David Ganovski of the Maryland Department of Transportation, Eric Olsen, Prince Georges County Councilman, John Swanson of the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board.
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