Category: Better Public Transit

The Purple Line Will Happen, But It’ll Cost the Suburbs More

Posted on by Winstina Hughes

Governor Larry Hogan surprised suburban transit advocates Thursday in announcing that his administration will go forward with the planned Purple Line light rail between New Carrollton and Bethesda, but that does not mean advocates for the project can breath easily. While Hogan’s election last November sparked fears that the Annapolis Republican would make good on his campaign’s skepticism of the project and kill it outright, he threw a new twist into the long-anticipated railway’s fate by drastically reducing the state government’s contribution.

Maryland’s coffers will only put in $168 million on the 16-mile Purple Line instead of a possible $700 million. The project, which was first proposed in 1994 as an expansion of Metro, is estimated to cost $2.45 billion to build. The Federal Transit Administration is in for $900 million, leaving the remainder of the costs to Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Each county previously pledged to spend $110 million on the project, with Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett later saying he could potentially contribute another $50 million. But that still leaves the Purple Line nearly $1 billion short of its total funding.

Hogan, who on Monday disclosed he is being treated for non-Hodgkins lymphoma, made the Purple Line announcement during a press conference touting $1.97 billion in road and bridge construction projects across the state, including the widening of Interstate 270 and other arterial highways. But committing additional funds to roadway projects—for which the benefitting communities will not have to pay extra—leaves less for mass transit. While the Purple Line got a reprieve, Hogan canceled a $2.9 billion planned Red Line in Baltimore.

While the Purple Line is still in planning stages, the cuts today will impact its final design. Instead of six-minute headways when it opens, trains will run every seven-and-a-half minutes; there may only be enough money for one rail yard; and the project might lose a wall protecting nearby communities from the rumble of trains. Transportation Secretary Pete Rahn says the Purple Line, as originally envisioned, was “a Cadillac project, not a Chevy project.”

“He talked a lot about cost effectiveness, but a lot of the road projects on the list may not be that beneficial to economic development as the Purple Line,” says David Alpert, editor of the pro-development website Greater Greater Washington. “It is unfair that he didn’t say, ‘I reached out to Garrett County to say that if you want this road you’re going to come up with your own tax money.’ He sees it as saying the state money should go to roads and not transit.”

The number of vehicle miles traveled per capital in Maryland peaked in 2005 at 10,888, according to a 2013 study by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The Maryland Department of Transportation under former Governor Martin O’Malley estimated that the Purple Line would average 74,000 riders daily by 2040. By comparision, the Intercounty Connector highway, which runs between Gaithersburg and Laurel, was found to carry an average of 50,000 cars per day, well below initial projections.

Kelly Blynn of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increased mass-transit spending, is relieved to see the Purple Line survive, but chafes that its presumed state funding is being mosly hacked off.

“It’s very much a double standard, especially in light of the governor’s decision on the Red Line to spend all this money on roads and bridges,” she says.

Even with funding more uncertain than ever, though, Purple Line backers are relieved the project did not share the Baltimore Red Line’s fate.

“If he wanted to kill it, he could have said ‘I’m killing it,’” says Alpert.

Read the complete article here.

Praise — and concern— for Hogan’s Purple Line plan

Posted on by Winstina Hughes

Gov. Larry Hogan’s announcement that the state would move forward with the Purple Line is receiving both praise and criticism.

The Republican governor said Thursday afternoon that the state would move forward with a “more cost-effective” version of the Purple Line, a light-rail project that would connect Bethesda in Montgomery County to New Carrollton in Prince George’s. His plan: scale back the state’s share of the project to $168 million from the original share of $700 million, and have Montgomery and Prince George’s counties pay more.

Supporters of the project in the two counties where the 16-mile light-rail line is viewed as a potential boost to economic development said they welcomed the governor’s plan to move the project forward but voiced concerns about the proposed changes to lower the costs, which some smart-growth advocates worried could lead to poorer transit service.

Hogan also announced nearly $2 billion in funding for highways and bridges. And in a blow to rail advocates, Hogan killed the $2.9 billion Red Line light-rail project for Baltimore.

[Hogan: Maryland will move forward on Purple Line, with counties’ help]

The Coalition for Smarter Growth, a big supporter of the rail project, called Hogan’s plan “business-friendly” Executive director Stewart Schwartz questioned the governor’s investments on road construction:

There is no better transportation and economic development investment for the State of Maryland. This project will knit together job centers, expand access to high quality transit to new places, and provide much needed east-west connections in the dense inner suburbs of some of the most important economic parts of the state.

We are concerned about proposed changes to lower the costs, especially the decision to not build the second staging area for light rail cars, which could lead to poorer service. We are reviewing the proposals and will reach out to the state and local agencies to ensure that Purple Line performance won’t be significantly degraded.

We also are deeply concerned about the Governor’s opposition to the Red Line, especially in light of his decision to increase spending on new highway construction by close to a billion dollars. Marylanders and residents in the Baltimore region deserve better transportation choices than just the same old policies of the past. We will work closely with allies throughout the state to determine positive ways to move forward from this setback.”

Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) said he is “heartened” by the governor’s decision:

I look forward to further discussions with the Governor over every aspect of the Purple Line – cost, design, construction schedule, and the role Montgomery County will be able to play in making the Purple Line a reality.

Enabling people to move around the Washington D.C. Metro area is extremely important to our overall quality of life. It is important for us to continue to invest in new businesses that create jobs and grow our tax base. Montgomery County benefits. Prince George’s County benefits. And, the State of Maryland really benefits.

Montgomery County Council President George L. Leventhal (D-At Large), welcomed the announcement, but added the governor’s version of the project presents some challenges:

The proposal to reduce some aspects of the project, and to put more of a financial burden on Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, will create substantial challenges, but every aspect of working toward the creation of the Purple Line has had its share of challenges, and in every case, we have found solutions. We will put some more creative thought and energy into this challenge, and we will again find solutions. When a project is this important to future generations of your residents, that is what must be done.”

AAA Mid-Atlantic’s Lon Anderson applauded Hogan’s move to proceed with the project, saying it could bring relief to the Washington metro region, one of the most congested areas in the nation.

In Maryland and in the Washington, D.C. metro area, we have been very hypocritical about funding mass transit, so this is an opportunity to make a significant transportation upgrade and put more money where our collective mouths have been. Budget is the truest expression of policy. The Purple Line will redound to the benefit of suburban Marylanders and to the residents, commuters and businesses in Prince George’s County and Montgomery County. Transportation, including mass transit, is the backbone of the economic well-being of our nation, state, and region.”

For those of us who seek and support sustainable transportation solutions, that includes mass transit, moving ahead with the Purple Line project is a great victory for a region bedeviled by the worst congestion in the entire nation.

Meanwhile, in Baltimore, officials reacted with disappointment to Hogan’s decision to table the Red Line, a light rail project in Baltimore City. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) said she was “disheartened”:

“I am disheartened that Governor Hogan has chosen to ignore the needs of Baltimore City residents by cancelling current plans for the Red Line. Although the Governor has promised to support economic growth in Baltimore, he cancelled a project that would have expanded economic development, created thousands of jobs, increased access to thousands more, and offered residents better health care, childcare, and educational opportunities. I remain committed to working with my partners in government, the business community, and all our community partners to fight for transit opportunities for Baltimore’s residents.”

Baltimoreans also took to Twitter to blast Hogan for killing the Red Line. Hogan’s people tweeted a map showing how his transportation project would help every county in Maryland. The map, Baltimoreans noted, did not include Charm City. The Hogan tweet was apparently deleted, but images continued to circulate online Thursday evening.

Read complete article here.

Transportation overhaul: New scoring system for project funding nearly set

Posted on by Winstina Hughes

The Commonwealth Transportation Board is slated to vote Wednesday on the key details of a new scoring system that will be used to decide what new road projects get funding around the state.

The board is expected to weight various scoring categories in the formula, which will be used to judge all future projects. Projects expected to reduce congestion will score high in Hampton Roads, particularly if a change that the Virginia Department of Transportation has suggested wins board approval.

When the scoring criteria were rolled out in March, the plan was to figure 35 percent of a project’s score in Hampton Roads based on congestion mitigation. The new recommendation is 45 percent.

Board members said they’re not sure whether the change has the votes to pass Wednesday, and two said they’d prefer a compromise of 40 percent. That, they said, would allow increases to at least one other category that they believe has a longer-term effect on congestion relief than the congestion mitigation category itself.

The basics of the new scoring system were laid out last year in House Bill 2, which called for an overhaul of the state’s road-funding process. Supporters on both sides of the aisle, including Gov. Terry McAuliffe, said they wanted to replace an often political process with something more objective and transparent.

Projects will be scored, those scores will be posted online, and if the Commonwealth Transportation Board deviates from those scores when it picks projects, people will notice, supporters said.

There are six scoring categories: Congestion mitigation, economic development, accessibility, safety, environmental quality and land use. VDOT was tasked with deciding how much to weight each category.

Weightings will differ around the state. In rural areas, safety improvement projects will score better. In Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia, congestion mitigation will reign supreme.

But environmental and smart growth advocates said Tuesday that just because a project scores well on mitigation, as opposed to accessibility and land use, doesn’t mean it will have the biggest long-term effect on traffic. Adding lanes addresses issues in the short term, but can discourage people from car pooling, taking mass transit and scheduling travel at off-peak times, said Stewart Schwartz, executive director at the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

Accessibility scores, on the other hand, judge how much a project helps people get to and from work, and it includes a transit component. Land use is based on how transportation projects support efficient development.

Accessibility shrunk in importance by 15 percentage points to increase congestion mitigation’s effect in Hampton Roads, and to up land use’s by 5 points. Marty Williams, a former Newport News city councilman and Peninsula state senator who sits now on the state transportation board, said he’d like to see accessibility bumped back up about 5 points before the formula is finalized.

Both Williams and John Malbon, who represents Hampton Roads on the CTB, said they’d be comfortable with congestion mitigation at 40 percent. They noted that the old system – the one in place before House Bill 2 – probably put congestion mitigation at about 80 percent, though projects weren’t formally scored that way.

Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne said Tuesday that there was some push, from legislators and others, to crank congestion mitigation up as high as 70 percent. Local officials were more likely to prefer the 35 percent VDOT originally suggested, he said.

“I don’t think anybody is really happy with it (at 45 percent),” Layne said. “Which probably means we pushed it about as far as we could.”

Camelia Ravanbakht, who, as interim executive director of the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization, is heavily involved in suggesting projects for funding, said she was surprised Tuesday to hear about the increase proposal. Her group didn’t request the change, and she said it’s too early to know how it would affect specific projects planned in the region.

“I wish I did (know),” she said. “It’s very project-specific. You cannot really generalize it.”

Nick Donohue, the deputy transportation secretary who spearheaded the lengthy process that led to these weighting formula recommendations, told board members Tuesday that there will be some trial and error in the coming years. The state will probably want to tweak the formula “at least every few rounds.”

Local officials will submit projects for funding, but the project-by-project scoring will be done by the state. Donohue said that process hasn’t been set, but will be in the coming months. It’s possible that multiple teams will score projects so that at least some of the projects scored in each round are reviewed by separate teams, he said.

Fain can be reached by phone at 757-525-1759.

Read the original article here.

Here’s what people want in a new Metro GM

Posted on by Claire Zippel

The Metro board’s governance committee is receiving a report Thursday on what government and community leaders, along with riders and other interested parties, had to say about the type of general manager they want the transit authority to pick. The public picked up on the split among the board members over whether Metro needs a transit expert or a management turnaround specialist. These are excerpts from some of the statements presented to the board.

Testimony to WMATA Board Regarding Leadership by Stewart Schwartz

Posted on by Claire Zippel

When I last testified before you in February, I outlined how essential Metro has been to the success of our region and stressed that we need the leadership and commitment of all area officials to the system’s success, and a similar commitment from staff to improving system communications, safety, incident response and customer service.

Transit advocate backs bus-only lane as traffic solution for D.C.’s busy 16th Street route

Posted on by Winstina Hughes

A prominent advocacy group for smart growth and transit challenges the views that a letter-writer and I expressed about the future of bus service on one of the District’s busiest commuter routes.

Sixteenth Street buses are squeezing out all the capacity they can under current conditions. There’s no more room to add additional capacity for cars to the road without harming neighborhoods adjacent to 16th Street NW (nor is driving an option for many residents along 16th Street anyway).

Yet our region continues to grow, and more people need to commute to downtown D.C. from D.C. and Silver Spring neighborhoods all along the corridor. What are we going to do to address that?

The 16th Street bus lanes proposal, in which the current reversible rush-hour lane from Arkansas Avenue NW to downtown would be transformed into a dedicated bus lane, is our best option. With the rush-hour bus lane, we would increase our capacity to move the greatest number of people through this important corridor and with the least disruption to commuters using different transportation modes.

A 2013 feasibility study for the District Department of Transportation showed that creating a bus lane in that stretch of 16th Street would still leave two lanes for cars and only slightly increase delays. Meanwhile, buses, which move half of rush-hour travelers on 16th Street, would move 30 percent faster with a dedicated lane and, most important, would increase capacity for [moving people through the corridor] by 10 percent.

All of this can be done without sacrificing any parking spaces or narrowing 16th Street to one lane for cars in the peak direction south of U Street NW, as the letter-writer in your column suggests.

The same 50-foot right-of-way along this corridor has sufficient room south of U Street to be restriped for three travel lanes in the peak direction during rush hour, and to allow the non-peak direction to remain as it is — with one parking lane and one travel lane. Traffic volume is not as high south of U Street as it is to the north, where street parking isn’t allowed during rush hour in either direction.

As to your other points about bringing signal prioritization to the corridor and increasing the number of Metro supervisors along 16th Street to improve the efficiency of bus spacing, we agree, but it’s not enough.

Buses get stuck in traffic and are thrown off their schedules for two big reasons: They are stopped at red lights, and they are held back from moving through intersections because there are a bunch of cars in front of them.

Dedicated bus lanes free up buses from being stuck behind a line of cars trying to get through an intersection, and signal priority gets the bus through the intersection. Together, bus lanes and signal priority do more than the benefits they offer individually to get buses moving.

When we can do this with a marginal effect on traffic congestion, but a real increase in overall capacity, it’s a win for everyone.

What should be our next move? Do the detailed evaluations, approvals and plans to assess and implement a bus lane. DDOT should also expedite implementation of transit-signal priority, which is scheduled to be operating in the next two years.

The current status of the bottled-up transit service on 16th Street leaves more than half of the corridor’s commuters with a substandard option that is not only unacceptable, but also fixable. Why would we be so biased against effective solutions to make a corridor work for a majority of its travelers?

Cheryl Cort, policy director, Coalition for Smarter Growth

DG: A woman who lived at 16th and U streets in the late 1980s told me the Metrobuses were referred to as the “Banana Bus Lines,” because they always arrived in bunches. Many of today’s riders who try to board in the Mount Pleasant/Columbia Heights neighborhoods and farther south say that’s the most predictable part of the rush-hour bus service.

But to really succeed, a transit service needs the schedules to be predictable, not the bus bunching and crowding.

Metro and the District Department of Transportation consider 16th Street part of a regional bus priority corridor network, but DDOT has not yet presented an official proposal for bus-only lanes on 16th Street.

Maryland-to-D.C. commuters and D.C. residents along the corridor need to see such a proposal to make a proper evaluation. DDOT’s abortive experience with reconfiguring Wisconsin Avenue NW highlights some of the difficulties in translating what looks good on a map into what works for commuters in rush-hour traffic.

Before bus lanes arrive on 16th Street, drivers and bus riders alike need to know the District will be committed to enforcing new rules on lane use, parking and turning.

Bus-only lanes in an urban core are a block-by-block experience in engineering and transportation politics. If 16th Street becomes an initial experience, it needs to be a good one. Otherwise it could poison the environment for other transit improvements.

Read the original article here.

D.C. group launches email campaign to save H Street streetcar

Posted on by Claire Zippel

“We want to be sure we’re doing what we can to look out for the mobility needs of D.C. residents,” he said. D.C. residents can express their frustration in an email to Bowser sent through the organization’s website. “I believe that the streetcar can be a prominent part of a larger transit investment strategy — with the right modes selected for the right corridors,” the email says.

Save the H Street streetcar, ANC 6A tells Mayor Bowser

Posted on by Claire Zippel

An ANC that covers the H Street NE corridor is urging Mayor Muriel Bowser to get the streetcar up and running and expand the system to avoid creating a “useless” service. ANC 6A unanimously voted last night to send a letter to Bowser asking her to save the project. Killing the project would undercut development along H Street, the ANC said.

Is D.C. in too deep to kill the H Street streetcar?

Posted on by Claire Zippel

As the H Street streetcar meets its possible end by the end of this month, various news outlets, organizations, and businesses have confessed their own feelings on one question: to kill or not to kill the streetcar? While controversy has circled around the project since the very beginning, there are still many who hope for the development to come to fruition.