Posted on 11/15/2017 10:34:02 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogans proposal to add toll lanes to three of the most congested highways in the Washington suburbs reaches beyond similar proposals that stalled over the years after being deemed too expensive or disruptive to adjacent communities.
Hogans $9 billion plan would add four toll lanes each to Marylands portion of the Capital Beltway (I-495) and to I-270 from the Beltway to Frederick. It would also widen the Baltimore-Washington Parkway by four toll lanes.
The project would be built using a public-private partnership in what Hogan (R) has said would be the largest such deal for highways in North America.
The success of Hogans plan hinges, in part, on whether the private companies can figure out what state planners havent been able to: how to add four cost-effective toll lanes without having to demolish dozens, and potentially hundreds, of homes and businesses.
Theyre putting a plan on the table, so I think the burden is on them to show how it would be done with the environmental and right-of-way questions we have, Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) said.
Leggett added that he welcomes any attempt to ease gridlock in the region but questions the viability of Hogans proposal. I just think it will be very difficult to accommodate all that, he said.
The states own studies show that it wont be easy.
A 2004 analysis found that four additional lanes could fit on Marylands portion of the Beltway if they were double-decked 80 feet in the air an idea rejected as prohibitively expensive and impractical.
A 2009 look at the northern part of I-270 determined that adding four toll lanes would require razing up to 250 homes and 10 businesses a possibility that contributed to Montgomery leaders calling for two less-disruptive, reversible lanes.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
Cost saving solution: RAISE THEIR TAXES.
Colonel Hogan would have tunnels built.
LOL!
Was in MD, and I think we took Good Luck Road to Kenilworth Ave to get into the city. No highways necessary.
That was a while back, though.
Did you cross the icy Nuthink bridge?
Stupid Idea. Adding additional lanes that would be toll roads doesn’t fix the problem with congestion, which is why additional lanes need to be added. The BW Parkway in reality only needs to have 1 lane added in each direction where only 2 lanes exist, making it a 3 lane road (each way) all the way from Baltimore to Washington.
If I had a big pot of transportation money and was told that I had to spend it on roads (not the smartest place to spend it, btw), I'd prioritize two things over widening lanes on the existing interstates. First, we need better lateral movement around the beltway. The inter-suburban commute is worse than the commute downtown. The existing road net was built to speed suburban commuters downtown; it's a classic hub and spokes design. But since DC is at maximum congestion already for cars, much of the recent growth has been, and most of the future growth will be, in emerging job hubs well outside the urban core. The action in DC is gentrification, but around the metro area as a whole, the real hot spots are the emerging edge cities. Trying to move from Germantown to Rockville, Silver Spring, College Park, Landover, etc. is worse than trying to get downtown.
The other thing I'd rank over widening 270 and the beltway would be creating more crossings so traffic can get across the dad-gummed interstates, which might as well be the Mississippi River. I've not seen any studies on it, but my guess is that a significant share of the theoretically avoidable congestion on 270 and the beltway (and I-66 and I-395 in Virginia) is intersuburban traffic that is forced onto the interstates because you can't get across them.
Ultimately, however, the homebuilders will throw up houses faster than the highway engineers can build new roads. All new arterial roads will go to capacity the moment they open. All they will do is encourage even more sprawl further out. Most people are simply going to have to live closer to their jobs. This is already happening. It drives gentrification in the city and inner ring suburbs. It is driving the development of the edge cities. The main thing, as these new areas build up, is to avoid the automobile monoculture of the 1950's-70's that created the problems we now face. Which is why, if we do spend a ton of money on new highway capacity, a first consideration should be to do no harm to the close-in neighborhoods which are now home to people who have made more sensible decisions about where to live. Don't destroy or degrade these neighborhoods. If your commute is too long, move there.
Cut the Fed DC workforce by half and you won’t need to build or widen the roads
Hogan’s Goat?
Bkmk
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