A Citizen's Guide to the Missing Green Rail Vision for the MD/Metro DC Area

A CITIZEN’S GUIDE TO THE MISSING GREEN RAIL VISION
FOR THE MD/METRO DC REGION

William Neil
January 2008

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Metro DC area is plagued by some of the nation’s most congested, and infamous, traffic gridlock, ranking second or third worst in the nation, depending on the year. That’s quite an honor. Yet it also has one of the nation’s most successful heavy rail systems, our 106 mile Metro. But even as citizens register their support for more rail transit by increased ridership and a 2006 Harris Poll shows “Americans would like to See a Larger Share of Passengers and Freight Going by Rail in Future,” very little has happened over the past decade to move in that direction. There are rail transit projects, to be sure, good ones, like the Purple Line and the Dulles Corridor Line, but they don’t seem to be talking to each other and it is very hard to find the broader vision connecting the parts. Despite the fact that the area has a regional planning body, the great westward (am) flow of traffic from Maryland to northern Virginia has not found an adequate rail response. Yet this essay has located more than the shadow of the once mighty circumferential Purple Line from the late 1990’s – one of the last grand visions the region (mainly Maryland) has put forth. Could some of the delay be due to the lack of a powerful citizen lobbying effort to pursue a regional rail vision, and one for the state of Maryland as a whole?

As higher gas prices and the press of Global Warming help to drive up rail transit ridership nationwide, especially light rail, there are some 88 cities around the nation with rail projects ready to build within a 12-36 month time frame – if the funding were there. California has placed a $10 billion bond act for a 700 mile system of high-speed rail to link its major cities on the November 2008 ballot, requiring the trains to travel at least 200 mph, even as Amtrak’s Acela mopes along at an average 68 mph down the East Coast; in the Mid-West, there are serious plans to tie more than 100 cities together with 3,000 miles of high-speed rail (110 mph, mostly refurbished tracks) for $7.7 billion dollars. The City of Denver is pushing ahead, largely by its own funding, with one of the nation’s most ambitious expansions of rail of various types. So what’s the problem here in the Metro Region and Maryland?

A Citizen’s Guide probes deeply into the flawed reasoning that continues to lead us to spend so much of our transportation money on highway expansion at the expense of increasing rail capacity. The spending ratios in favor of roads are a national, regional and state pattern. But can more lanes deliver congestion relief, much less reduce CO2 emissions? We take citizens back to the underlying pro-auto assumptions, which are challenged by the work of famed architect Andres Duany and the asphalt-breaking analysis of the authors of The Elephant in the Bedroom. It turns out that rail competes with roads on a very slanted playing field, with the costs of highways vastly understated in the price of gasoline, and rail is attacked as too expensive, even as it delivers demonstrable savings over the auto. Because gasoline and therefore driving is vastly under priced, subsidized in reality, there has been little price incentive to shift to rail and the great imbalance has created two nearly dysfunctional systems. But Old Man Auto is not going to give up without a fight, and there is a new high tech, toll lane version of the highway system which promises to solve all our transportation woes without ever raising the gas tax – or supplying alternatives to the car. Since transportation funding involves big capital costs, it leads directly into national debates of taxes and expenditures and therefore readers are introduced to the ideological attack on rail from the Republican and Libertarian Right, with detailed answers from leading pro-rail authorities.

After “A Citizen’s Guide….” leads a tour of the official transit planning documents for our region and state, and finds them fragmented and wanting, with one exception (Baltimore’s), it lays out an ambitious Green Rail Vision for the long term future. It starts with a state office charged with mapping the fragments, old and new, taking the high ground – which includes some skillful negotiating with our neighbors in Virginia and the District. The vision includes more rail connections to northern Virginia via a newly conceived circumferential Purple Line, and a light rail/trolley network for urbanizing Montgomery County’s most congested roadways. A high-speed rail “Quadrangle” between Frederick, Baltimore, Annapolis and Washington, DC. is proposed. Yes, that’s right: Annapolis would be reconnected, for the first time since 1950, directly to Baltimore and Washington by rail. The state capital with rail service? What’s going on here?

The vision is threatened, however, by the gathering clouds from three ominous storm systems. One is here already, a national infrastructure funding crisis, one apparent even before the infamous Minnesota bridge collapse in August, 2007. The second and third storms have led to posted warning flags and are gaining attention. As the economic fault lines begin to widen, references to 1929-1932 are becoming more frequent. The Global Warming tipping point may have already been passed (at 350 ppm CO2) leading to calls for a “moral imperative” to reduce driving. With these forces converging, is there any way out? There is indeed, and we take a close look at a proposal for funding a national infrastructure bank, one capable of supplying the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to deal with the multiple, overlapping crises – and perhaps make up for the construction jobs evaporating in the housing collapse. It could be part, a very crucial part, of a great national Apollo-like program to meet all three emergencies.

This is the time and place to raise the policy and funding bar for public officials. 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 current 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. We note that the size of the national infrastructure deficit, around $1.5 trillion, just about matches federal tax cuts made between 2001-2003, and the price tag some have placed on the Iraq war.

Sometimes it takes great economic storms to create the tidal surge necessary to lift policy changes over the sandbars of old ideas. 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. This paper, while not quite a schedule for the arrival and departure times of future trains, gives citizens some ideas about where they should be running.

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.

He can be reached at: w.neil@att.net

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM HERE? 4
MoCo Congested and Adrift
The Carnage
Global Warming and the Moral Imperative

HIGHWAY ILLUSIONS & TWO FAILED SYSTEMS 8 Induced Traffic and Latent Demand
The Elephant in the Bedroom
Missing Auto Costs: $2.25-$9.00 per Gallon

“T” BUDGETS: RITUAL RATIOS FOR ROADS 12
Capacity Expansion: Putting Rail First

WHY DOES THE RIGHT “RAIL” AGAINST RAIL? 16
For Whom the Road Tolls
Tolling and Gambling: “Induced” Taxation
The Freedom To Crawl
Reagan: “No Fan of Metro”
Three for the Road
Rail’s Account: Paid in Full
Rail Can Shape A Region
Does Transit Work?

FROM VISION TO PROJECTS 24
Origins of the Purple Circle Line
Purple Line: Die Hard with a Vengeance
Virginia Keeps It Alive
Transportation Jurisdictions

WHAT’S ON THE RAIL POLICY TABLE? 28
Metro’s Plans
National Capital Region Plans
NARPAC’s Vision
MD’s Transit Funding Committee
MD’s Transit’s “Getting On Board”
Transportation Transition Team, 2007
State of Maryland’s Leadership Role?
FUNDING: WHAT WE HAVE OR WHAT WE NEED? 33
The Infrastructure 2007 Report
Neil J. Pedersen and the I-95 Corridor Coalition
The Missing National Vision
Fishing for Federal Dollars
To Be Continued: Rail versus Road
Freight Rail’s Funding Problems
The Public Interest in Private Freight Rail

A GREEN RAIL VISION FOR MD & THE METRO DC REGION 40
A Robust State Rail Office
Annapolis, Reconnected
A Great Rail Quadrangle
The Purple Line Revived: Two Routes to Virginia
Where the Trolleys Used to Run
Corridor Cities and the I-270 Gauntlet
A Word About Costs

CONCLUSION: WHERE THREE CRISES MEET 50
Maryland’s Special Session
The Economic Crisis
Global Warming Won’t Wait
Can’t Do Nation?
A National Infrastructure Bank
Rail Around the Nation
Baltimore’s Hidden Plan
A Little Christmas Bonus
But What If…Big Problems Aren’t Over?
Breaking the Spell
Priming the Pump for New Starts
Campaign 2006: “‘You’ve Got to Set Lofty Goals….’”
What If Federal Dollars Aren’t There?
Train Time

WHAT YOU CAN DO 63

RESOURCES 64

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 65