Congested corridor is ‘Hell on earth, five days a week’
Farrell Keough drives a sleek BMW Z4, but he rarely gets to enjoy the zippy speed of his ride.
The Frederick County resident is usually stuck in stop-and-go traffic as he makes the 26-mile drive from his home in Urbana to his job at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. He made the drive in 20 minutes once, but it usually takes an hour. Sometimes more than two.
“Coming home, it’s almost worse,” he said.
Keough has lots of company — and that’s the problem. Each day more than 200,000 vehicles travel the busiest stretch of Interstate 270, the highway that serves as a key corridor from Pennsylvania to Washington. The interstate was listed among the five most congested corridors in a recent National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board report that measured the worst stretches in the traffic-clogged Washington region.
The ride from Frederick into the District was typical on Monday during the height of the morning commute: long and slow.
Traffic was stop-and-go nearly the entire 34.4-mile length of the southbound lanes of Interstate 270 onto the Beltway. Vehicles rode their brakes, with cars backed up in the southbound lanes from before 7 a.m. until at least 9 a.m.
And it involved the usual shenanigans. A driver witnessed one crash in the rearview mirror, a motorcyclist who used the left shoulder to soar past the congested lines, and a sedan that crossed two lanes of traffic to illegally scoot into the high occupancy vehicle lane despite having no passenger.
All told, it took about an hour to travel just 30 miles of the highway.
“It’s hell on Earth, five days a week,” said Frederick County Commissioner Charles Jenkins.
Now, as local officials try to find ways to detangle the drives on the Capital Beltway and Interstates 66 and 95 with toll lanes and other measures, they also are eyeing I-270 and Route 15. Maryland has studied a $4 billion set of proposals that could widen I-270, add toll lanes and create a transit line of bus or light rail.
Frederick County and Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett have weighed in with their preferences. Gaithersburg officials offered their wish list this week, while the Montgomery County Council, Frederick, Rockville and other localities plan to give their views in coming weeks. Ultimately, Gov. Martin O’Malley will take in all the views, then decide what to do with the corridor.
But communities along the route and those who use it don’t agree on the solution. It’s a politicized issue that pits inner suburbs against farther-flung jurisdictions, communities that would receive transit against those that wouldn’t.
That highlights a tension that already exists. Although the length of I-270 extends for 22.5 miles in Montgomery County, compared with 10 miles in Frederick County, the highway is the primary funnel for Frederick County’s many commuters to get to their Washington-based jobs. Montgomery County has at least four lanes in each direction, while Frederick County has two. Montgomery County has several transit lines, but Frederick doesn’t.
“This isn’t a new problem,” Keough said. “And this isn’t a Maryland problem.”
Drivers from Pennsylvania and West Virginia also rely on the corridor for their marathon slogs to work.
But some say widening the road won’t solve the problem, creating instead a bigger pipeline that encourages more sprawl farther away. A group of transit advocates recently threw a new option into the discussion, offering transit options to avoid widening the highway.
“If you put the money into widening 270, all it is going to do is dump more traffic onto other roads and create more problems,” said Ben Ross, president of Montgomery County’s Action Committee for Transit. “The last time they widened 270, it filled up in a couple of years.”
But while the debate continues, none of the solutions will provide any relief soon. Jenkins warns that workers who now make the drive won’t see the benefits of the state plans in their working careers. And the cash-strapped state has no money for the proposed improvements.
“Just because it’s there doesn’t mean funding can be identified,” Jenkins said. “There is no inevitability.”
