The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board’s latest Constrained Long-Range Plan is literally a blueprint for gridlock. It deliberately excludes any data on how new roads and bridges could alleviate future traffic congestion. At the same time, it assigns the bulk of available money to mass transit, even though the ratio of drivers to transit riders is currently 10:1 — and will increase to 15:1 by 2030, according to TPB’s own estimates.
A breakdown of the maintenance and operations budget (which accounts for 70 percent of the nearly $110 billion total) reveals that $52 billion will go to transit, with only $24 billion earmarked for highway maintenance. This is a more than 2:1 ratio in favor of mass transit, even though in the coming years it will be carrying progressively lower percentages of Washington commuters than it does today.
The new plan assumes only two new major highway projects will be built in the next 25 years, the Inter-County Connector in Maryland, and the Tri-County Parkway in Virginia. There are no new bridges, no new regional bypasses, no new parkways to accommodate more than 2 million people who will soon be moving to this area. There’s no new Potomac River crossing and no outer Beltway to detour the thousands of trucks and others passing through on I-95 around D.C. and get them off the inner Beltway.
It’s as if the TPB wants more congestion, more gridlock, more air pollution and more headaches for commuters. Do they really think commuters will stand idly by as the TRB makes us all more and more miserable until we ride Metro?
“It’s disgraceful,” Bob Chase, president of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, told The Examiner, but it’s not an accidental oversight. TPB’s Mobility and Access Study, now in its sixth year, contains no traffic projections that include any new highway or bridge corridors. “They have not allowed the staff to do it,” Chase says. “They ignore data their own planners produce” — such as the inconvenient fact that while the population increases 45 percent, only two new highways will be built.
Maintaining the region’s existing highway system is imperative for public safety, and adding more capacity to existing roads is a prudent use of scarce resources. But the region’s top transportation planning agency is making multi-billion-dollar decisions now that will affect all of us for decades while refusing to consider new ideas outside of their preconceived “solution” — dense new development around Metro stops, even though the bulk of the new jobs will be located in the exurbs — where Metro doesn’t go and where the vast majority of trips are made in cars and will be for the foreseeable future.
The Washington region desperately needs an expanded regional transportation network focused on long-planned roads that haven’t been built. If TPB keeps its head in the sand, those roads never will be built. Remember that the next time you sit helplessly trapped in another traffic jam.
