Pile-Up

The Baltimore Sun

Maryland has a tradition of stepping up to meet transportation challenges. The evidence is visible in such structures as the Bay Bridge, the tunnels under Baltimore Harbor and a network of well-maintained highways.

It doesn't come easy or cheap. Periodically, a point comes where elected officials have to tell us to dig deeper into our pockets to ease traffic jams, keep the wheels on the bus and keep the economy humming.

We're getting there again. The $27 billion in needs over a 20-year period identified by a blue-ribbon commission in 2000 has ballooned to $40 billion, driven in large part by soaring construction costs.

Traffic congestion is growing at an inexorable rate. In a way, it's a good thing. It means the region is enjoying economic growth. They'd be happy to have that problem in Michigan.

But for motorists stuck in such vehicle traps as Interstate 270 or Interstate 95 or on the Beltways around Washington and Baltimore, it represents a theft of family time and a steady erosion of quality of life.

Gov. Martin O'Malley appears ready to raise revenue before being forced to by a funding crisis. In an interview last year, he expressed admiration for President Dwight D. Eisenhower's vision in building - and paying for - the Interstate Highway System.

But today's political leaders face difficulties Ike did not. Suburban sprawl and poor land use planning have choked our roadways. In many cases, the biggest obstacle to progress is a lack of undeveloped land rather than money. Environmental concerns temper our decision-making in ways they didn't 50 years ago. Resistance to taxation - always high - is deeply entrenched and bitterly partisan.

Some problems have been shoved aside because all the solutions seem unpalatable, impractical or too expensive.

One example is the Capital Beltway, where horrendous traffic jams are routine between I-95 and I-270. In parts of this stretch, there's no right of way for the road to expand without taking the homes of people who are neither poor nor politically powerless. State leaders have essentially thrown up their hands and moved on to challenges that money may be able to solve.

That money won't come easy.

Three years ago, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. mustered the political will to propose about $300 million in new revenues - primarily generated by higher vehicle registration fees - to meet Maryland's transportation needs.

It wasn't enough. The proposal was aimed at meeting about two-thirds of the state's needs. But that was the most Ehrlich and his counselors thought was possible.

The General Assembly, skittish about portions of Ehrlich's plan, gave him about two-thirds of what he proposed.

That was far from enough. It helped get some long-stalled projects on track, but now the increase has been essentially eaten up by inflation.

So this year, O'Malley and Transportation Secretary John D. Porcari are methodically building a case for raising more transportation revenue - next year. Jumping to the head of the parade, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller is calling for a 12-cent increase in the state's 23.5-cents-a- gallon gasoline tax now. But House Speaker Michael E. Busch is questioning whether the public will accept that large an increase.

The state gas tax has remained at the same rate since 1992. In historical terms, it's overdue for an increase. But Annapolis veterans still recall the agonizing two-year struggle Gov. William Donald Schaefer went through to wrestle a 5-cent increase from a Democratic General Assembly in the face of a much more imminent crisis. Politically, there's a reason it's stayed the same since then.

But there are also compelling reasons it may have to go up soon. Porcari estimates the annual gap between the state's transportation needs and the revenue available to meet them at $400 million to $600 million.

"The needs are enormous. The transportation network is literally the lifeblood of our economy, but it is also one of the yardsticks of our quality of life," he said in an interview last week.

Beyond finding money to upgrade a strained highway network, the state faces daunting transportation challenges in other areas:

Three high-profile transportation corridors - two outside Washington and Baltimore's east-west Red Line - need new mass transit service and funding to establish it. Still to be decided is which form they will take: bus or rail. If and when we build them, do we pick the technology that costs us the least money today or the one that will be most useful in 40 years? Maybe they're one and the same. Maybe not.

At some point new capacity for crossing the Chesapeake Bay will be needed. The current bridge has become the state's biggest bottleneck and a point of vulnerability. But there's no politically acceptable place to put that capacity and no way of containing its unintended consequences. No wonder a task force appointed to study the issue in 2004 essentially decided to punt.

The port of Baltimore needs room to grow and an expensive round of dredging to a depth of 50 feet to maintain its economic viability. Then the state needs to find a place to put the muck it has excavated.

The more than 100-year-old Howard Street Tunnel in Baltimore, where a 2001 fire disrupted freight rail traffic through the entire East Coast, remains an unaddressed problem. Its low clearances limit access of double-stacked freight cars to the port, costing it business. There may be no solution except a new freight rail tunnel under Baltimore Harbor. But how do political leaders rally support for a necessary but unglamorous big-ticket item that many voters will never see?

Two Amtrak tunnels, each more than a century old, slow rail traffic through Baltimore and present difficult maintenance problems. They're overdue for replacement - without interrupting existing traffic. The federal government will likely pay for most of it but will likely want the state to pick up a share.

That's just a small sampling. There are also the two beltways to be widened where possible, growth from the military base realignment to accommodate with new and wider roads and bus systems to upgrade. And all over the state, bridges built about 50 years ago are reaching the end of their useful life.

Not every project will need to be financed primarily out of the Transportation Trust Fund. Some, like the federally approved Intercounty Connector in the Washington suburbs, can be built largely using bonds backed by federal aid and future tolls.

Toll-based financing has its fervent proponents, and in a tax-averse political climate the notion of charging people for what they use has considerable appeal. There's also an appeal to the idea of using tolling to prevent congestion by setting the rates at a level where they discourage "excess" use of the facility. That is the plan for the ICC, as well as for the additional lanes planned for I-95 northeast of Baltimore.

During the Ehrlich administration, Transportation Secretary Robert L. Flanagan rejected former Gov. Parris N. Glendening's characterization of express toll lanes as "Lexus lanes." Flanagan regularly noted, for instance, that even a lower-income parent might choose to pay the toll if it could help avoid paying a penalty for picking up a child from day care.

Porcari, once Glendening's transportation chief, now agrees with Flanagan that express toll lanes can work. He noted that congestion pricing has been well received where it has been tried.

"Congestion pricing is not a panacea, but it is an important tool in our toolkit," Porcari said.

But there's a tough economic equation behind this system that suggests the popularity of such roads will decline over time.

Take the ICC - assuming it isn't blocked in court. In the short term it could relieve congestion in some places. But demand for east-west travel in that corridor will likely grow steadily over the coming decades while the capacity of the road to operate congestion-free remains essentially fixed.

The tolls will have to be high enough to discourage a growing percentage of the east-west travel demand from using the ICC. With each toll increase, more traffic will be pushed onto slower alternate routes. The slower those roads, the more value drivers will put on the congestion-free ICC. And the tolls will go up more.

By 2030, will couples be having dinner-table arguments over whether the family budget can afford the ICC tolls piling up on the credit card? Will tolls become the dirty word taxes are today?

But high tolls could also have a positive effect.

Under the financing plan for the ICC - and other congestion-pricing schemes - rapid transit buses would get to use the express lanes essentially free. High tolls could do what years of appeals to environmental conscience have been unable to do: Get people out of their cars for at least part of their commute.

But don't expect the children of the Baby Boom generation - many of whom have grown up in suburban enclaves where mass transit is a foreign concept - to go gently aboard a bus. Many will stare out the window enviously at those who can still afford to use the highway in private vehicles.

Beyond tolls and taxes lies another potential source of funds: the sale or long-term lease of toll facilities to a private entity in return for a massive up-front payment. It's a strategy already adopted by Chicago and Indiana, and it's getting a close look in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where political leaders are seeing gold in their state's turnpikes.

On their face, these deals are potentially a bonanza for governments with assets to put on the market. In Pennsylvania, for instance, Gov. Edward G. Rendell recently tantalized legislators with a vision of a $10 billion to $12 billion up-front concession payment for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, yielding $965 million a year in annual revenue to pour into transportation projects without raising taxes.

But Porcari is wary.

"If you run the numbers on some of the proposals, it makes great sense for the first three years or four years or 10 years, but it doesn't make sense after that," he said.

Timothy J. Carson, vice chairman of the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, recently distributed an analysis of Rendell's proposal. What he found suggests that such deals - with terms of up to 99 years - could be a great deal for current taxpayers at the expense of future generations.

According to Carson, that annual infusion of $965 million could appear paltry in 2047 - when that amount could be worth less than $200 million in 2007 dollars. And the tolls being paid 40 years from now will reflect four decades of a private entity's toll increases - limited by contract but also insulated from political revolt.

Admittedly, the very concept of 2047 is an abstraction today. Forty years from now, most Boomers will be booming no more, and today's college kids will be edging toward retirement. We have no idea what transforming technological changes will occur between now and then - any more than a planner in 1967 could have foreseen the Internet.

But some things don't change. People will still want to get from here to there quickly. And they won't want to bear the full cost.

The generation that built the Bay Bridge and the Harbor Tunnel paid part of the cost of that infrastructure and passed part of the bill to future users. We still pay tolls there today. But when you consider that you can cross the Chesapeake Bay for $2.50 (and come back free) and Baltimore Harbor for $2, it's hard to complain that our ancestors treated us shabbily.

Now it's up to today's voters to strike a bargain with future generations. How much of the bill will we pay and how much will we leave to them? In what condition will we leave their infrastructure? Will our land-use decisions be more enlightened than those of the 20th century?

Whatever decisions Maryland makes about transportation funding over the next year or two will likely be fought out on regional and partisan lines. But they also need to be subjected to a test of generational justice.

Will our great-great-grandchildren say we did enough?

michael.dresser@baltsun.com

By the numbers

Keeping Maryland mobile will be an extraordinary challenge in coming years. Here are some of the reasons why:

518,232: Increase in the number of licensed drivers in Maryland since 1996.

909, 224: Increase in the number of passenger vehicles registered in Maryland since 1996.

10.7 billion: Increase in the number of passenger vehicle miles traveled in Maryland since 1996.

32,000: Increase in the number of vehicles traveling each day on the Baltimore Beltway at U.S. 40 since 1995.

24,000: Increase in the number of vehicles traveling each day on Interstate 95 at Route 32 since 1995.

34,600: Increase in the number of vehicles traveling search day on U.S. 50 near the Bay Bridge since 1995.

$2.4 billion: Cost of the 18 mile Intercounty Connector now under construction, including $400 million to protect and improve the enviroment in near the highway.

52%: Approximate share of the State Hightway Adminstration budget spent on maintaining existing highways.

$1.5 million: Coost of a typical mile of sound barrier erected to protect residential areas from heavily traveled roads.

73.3%: (1.9 million) Share of Maryland commuters who drive to work alone in their cars.

27: Annual hours lost by each Baltimore-area commuter due to traffice congestion.

$1,057: Estimated total annual cost of traffice congestin (17 gallons of fuel and delay) for each Baltimore-area commuter.

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