Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley reminds me of Jimmy Carter.
President Carter was so forlorn about the future he went up to Camp David in the middle of his Presidency to contemplate the fading promise of America and what he should do about it. He came down from the mountain, pulled on his sweater and told the American people in so many words that their best days were behind them. They’d better get used to the cold. It was time to buck up, make sacrifices and learn to live with less.
Governor O’Malley sounded like Carter when, according to an August 15th Washington Examiner article, he asked “Marylanders to brace for the delays, crowding and ‘derailings’ that come with mass transit, because the state has no more room for roads.’’ Hayley Peterson quoted him as saying: “There is no more room to build more roads, and I don’t see where we have a reasonable choice other than to dial up mass transit.”
That’s his plan: dial up mass transit.
That article appeared on the same day as a police blotter report about two men who were arrested for fighting outside of the Gallery Place metro stop.
That article appeared on the same day as a Washington Post Dr. Gridlock column in which a Rockville resident wrote that he moved into a new home so he could be closer to Metro, but he’s back in the car now. “Metro,” he concluded, “has become a slow-motion disaster: Crazy fare increases, broken escalators, broken elevators, slow moving, erratically driven trains, crowding, poor security and most disconcerting, the fatal accidents.”
The same report contained a complaint from an Annapolis resident about broken SmarTrip Card readers, and a requirement that riders fill out a form promising to pay their parking fees before they can leave the parking lot. “The line at rush hour is ridiculous!”, the rider snarled.
That article appeared just days after one about a gangland-style brawl on a metro on August 6th that put families on the train in fear of their lives and sent some passengers to the hospital.
Good answer, Governor. Let’s dial up more mass transit.
Gov. O’Malley is no doubt sincere in his Carteresque conclusions. He is, after all, a social engineer, a government-centric progressive planner and thinker who believes that government is not just an instrument of change, it is the change.
Martin O’Malley is a link in a long chain of governmental administrators in Maryland and the District of Columbia who, when it comes to transportation, have sought to transform their ideology into government policies and impose them on the public in the name of progress. In that process, they have destroyed the transportation system in the metropolitan area, causing gridlock, wasting energy, inciting road rage, detracting from home life and crippling the economy with lost productivity and efficiency.
They have stuck to the misguided notion that if pressured hard enough with inconveniences, added costs and a load of guilt, the public would simply one day, leave the keys on the counter, the cars in the garage and walk like lemmings to the bus stop , or hop on their bicycle or set out walking to work.
They have locked themselves into a state of perpetual denial about the critical nature of the car to our socio-economic way of life. So, today, the jammed up roads are producing pollution, accidents and anxiety; the buses are half full; bicycle laws and regulations are a bad joke; and metro is rapidly building a reputation as unsafe and unusable.
Maryland and the District of Columbia need traffic experts who drive to work. The elected leaders who hire them need to insist on transportation plans with more lanes of traffic, more major arteries and more parking. Smart growth does not mean no growth. It means employing 21st Century technologies that minimize gridlock, reroute traffic, mitigate congestion and give commuters more options. New technology can be used to monitor roads and bridges for safety and minimize the impact of incidents that now cause more than 50 percent of traffic delays, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.
New technology can measure demand more accurately. Wall Street Journal columnist Carl Bialik, quoting transportation official Robert Bertini: “The first step is to measure demand more accurately. In the 1930s, traffic engineers stood on the side of the road, clipboard and stopwatch in hand. Today they have tools such as radar, lidar, detectors embedded in roads, and video…”
If Mr. O’Malley wants to encourage people to walk or ride bikes or hop on a metro train–if they’ve got the guts–okay, but walking, biking and buses do not a transportation policy make. They are options. They are not solutions. They are sideshows.
New technology, common sense, a good grip on reality, and a higher priority for infrastructure must serve as the basis for future transportation policy in our area.
