Maryland officials are suddenly worried that traffic on the American Legion Bridge will worsen when Virginia’s High Occupancy Toll lanes open next year. Twelve lanes of traffic will be forced to squeeze back into 10 upon entering the Free State. But as with their ongoing angst over long-expected military base-closings, such belated concern does not let them off the hook. In both cases, state and Montgomery County officials knew about these major traffic problems more than five years ago and did practically nothing to ameliorate their impact.
HOT lane construction began in 2008, but plans to add new toll lanes to the Capital Beltway were underway long before the first bulldozer appeared. In 2006, the Maryland State Highway Administration launched its West Side Mobility Study “to evaluate a managed lane system connecting Virginia’s HOT Study, Maryland’s Capital Beltway Study, Maryland’s I-270 Multi-Modal Study, and Maryland’s Intercounty Connector.”
Traffic engineers knew that an expanded Beltway in Virginia would force traffic to merge into fewer lanes in Maryland, creating inevitable slowdowns on both sides of the Potomac. But Maryland made no plans to add capacity on its side of the 60-mile Beltway, even though traffic congestion in one state directly affects the other. The 2006 study included recommendations to deal with the inevitable bottleneck, including a proposal to convert High Occupancy Vehicle lanes on Interstate 270 to HOT lanes. But Maryland didn’t even do that.
Virginia’s HOT lanes will charge variable tolls for low-occupancy vehicles, but will be free for buses, motorcycles and carpools. They will offer a faster commute for drivers willing to pay for the convenience and take vehicles off the Beltway’s free lanes. However, due to Maryland’s inaction, the original plan to extend them to Georgetown Pike had to be scaled back. The HOT lanes will end abruptly at Old Dominion Drive, to allow vehicles more time to merge before they reach the Legion Bridge.
Montgomery County officials recently met with their counterparts in Fairfax County to discuss charging tolls on existing lanes of the Legion Bridge, but this will not solve the real problem of mismatched lanes on a contiguous highway. Legion Bridge backups will continue to worsen until Maryland officials do what they should have done all along, and match Virginia’s new HOT lanes with express lanes of their own.
