By Billy Owens
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Bob Sittinger is not an ordinary suburban Maryland commuter.
Sittinger is a longtime resident of Montgomery County’s Upcounty region about 20 miles northwest of Washington. He doesn’t drive to work on Interstate 270, the county’s primary and often congested expressway. On weekdays, he barely drives at all.
“I really don’t go anywhere, unless I’m putting gas in the car for another family member,” he said. “On the weekends, maybe I’ll go out to the store.”
On weekdays around 8 a.m., Sittinger walks from his home in Montgomery Village to the Ride On stop a block away and waits for the No. 58 bus.
He’ll ride to the Shady Grove Metro station, then take the Red Line to the Bethesda station six stops away, which is adjacent to his workplace.
In the evening, he’ll do the reverse to get home.
“It’s really about 45 minutes each way, almost every single day,” Sittinger said. “If I were driving, it’d be 45 minutes just on 270.”
His transit-only commute may not be perfect, but he prefers it to dealing with the inevitable headache of highway traffic.
What he doesn’t know is that his commute could be drastically shorter if the county had followed through with transportation projects that have been on the table for up to 50 years.
Maryland’s most populous county still faces terrible traffic
Montgomery County’s Department of Transportation, MCDOT, planned for several projects and upgrades decades ago to complement the county’s booming development and minimize congestion for its 1 million residents.
Many of those projects, such as the M-83 Midcounty Highway extension and the Corridor Cities Transitway, don’t exist yet. Unless they’re transportation experts, commuters who spend countless hours stuck in traffic wouldn’t have known that the county had planned — but never implemented — several improvements to make their commutes much easier.
“The main problem is that a lot of plans have been approved, but then the county didn’t fund or build everything that was supposed to go with the development,” said Susan Swift, executive director of the Suburban Maryland Transportation Alliance.
Much of the development over the past 50 years has been concentrated in the Upcounty region along the I-270 corridor, in places like Germantown and Clarksburg. They currently boast estimated populations of 100,000 and 20,000, respectively.
“They developed a lot faster than they were originally scheduled to, and the planned upgrades to the highways didn’t come,” said Alex Tsironis, creator and editor of The MoCo Show, a Montgomery County-centric news blog.
M-83, a controversial 5.7-mile extension of the Midcounty Highway, has been on both communities’ master plans for decades. M-83 would run from its current terminus in Montgomery Village northwest to Snowden Farm Parkway in Clarksburg, paralleling I-270.
“It’s been planned for 30 years since Montgomery Village was built,” Swift said. “The county has control of it, and the county actually owns 80 percent of the right-of-way and could move forward on it with the next steps immediately.”
Its major opponents have been proposed transit solutions such as the Corridor Cities Transitway, a 15-mile bus rapid transit, or BRT, system that would run from the Shady Grove Metro station in Gaithersburg northwest to Clarksburg.
“As Montgomery County continues to grow, BRT gives travelers another option to avoid congestion,” said Corey Pitts, project manager for MCDOT. “BRT provides a new alternative that can move more people through the roadway network than single occupancy vehicles. It allows us to make more efficient use of the transportation network we have.”
A 2017 report by MCDOT compared M-83 to a similar BRT system along Maryland Route 355, which parallels I-270 throughout the county. The report concluded that both projects, if implemented together, would support each other without interference and cumulatively benefit the entire county.
The Montgomery County Council acknowledged this report, but went ahead and approved a resolution in November advising the county’s planning board to disregard M-83 in future development plans. M-83 remains on the county’s master plans which date back to 1966, but the project is effectively dormant.
The county has made progress with some projects, such as the completion of the Intercounty Connector and the Gov. Hogan-backed future I-270 traffic relief projects. However, these have taken much longer to be approved and implemented than the county originally planned.
One example of a recently-approved project is the currently under-construction Watkins Mill Road interchange on I-270 in Gaithersburg, which was originally proposed in a 2002 I-270/U.S. Route 15 corridor study. The interchange, which will become Exit 12, only broke ground last summer.
“I lived off Exit 11 growing up and getting off took as long as the rest of the commute,” Tsironis said. “It’d relieve traffic a bit on 355 and 270. It’s a little thing, but it will be very helpful.”
Troubled bridge over water
Montgomery County isn’t the only region in the state that faces crippling congestion. But even Maryland commuters who know about — and contribute to — the state’s transportation plans aren’t immune to gridlock.
Michael White, a traffic engineer for the Maryland State Highway Administration, commutes between his home in Queenstown on the Eastern Shore to the District 5 offices in Annapolis.
It’s about a half-hour drive in the morning, but in the evening, it sometimes takes nearly three hours.
The congestion culprit? Surprisingly, it’s not the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It’s the much smaller Severn River Bridge a few miles west that carries U.S. Routes 50 and 301 and Maryland Route 2.
“The Bay Bridge will back up in the summer, but the Severn River Bridge backs up all the time,” White said.
He said that for the past eight months, the state has been working to add a fourth travel lane in each direction to the bridge. This would eliminate the weaving and merging that eventually leads to daily bottlenecks.
“When they add that extra lane, then it’ll just be four all the way through,” White said. “Hopefully that will make my commute amazing.”
State projects still stuck on drawing board
Beyond Montgomery County, the state of Maryland has planned many other highway and transit projects. The implementation of these projects, like in Montgomery County, has been similarly spotty.
The Red Line, a 14.1-mile light rail line that would run east-to-west through Baltimore, was one of these projects. After 13 years of studies and evaluation, the project was effectively killed by Hogan in June 2015 after declaring he would not allocate state funds to it.
“We spent $300 million and countless peoples’ hours for nothing. It kind of backfired,” said Brian O’Malley, president and CEO of the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, in a December 2017 story for the Baltimore Watchdog. “Instead of being careful with money, we were being wasteful.”
The funds from the Red Line project were instead delegated toward future highway and road improvement projects throughout the state, including the I-270 traffic relief projects in Montgomery County.
While Hogan killed the Red Line, he approved construction of another light rail project, the Purple Line, that same month. The 16.2-mile Purple Line would connect both ends of the Washington Metro’s Red Line in Montgomery County with the Green and Orange Lines in Prince George’s County.
“Being from Upcounty, I didn’t view the Purple Line as much of a need as many people down-county do,” Tsironis said. “It benefits people in the Bethesda and Takoma Park area and doesn’t solve the problem coming from this way.”
A June 2016 news release stated that 75 percent of Maryland’s urban Interstate highways are congested during peak travel hours, according to independent transportation research group TRIP. This makes Maryland the second-worst in the nation, behind California’s 85 percent.
TRIP also released a list of Maryland’s top 40 transportation projects in April 2012, which includes projects currently in progress such as the Purple Line and Watkins Mill Road interchange, projects still in various stages of planning such as the Corridor Cities Transitway, and defunct projects such as the Red Line.
At the top of the list were two projects involving the American Legion Memorial Bridge in Montgomery County and the Governor Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge in Charles County, two heavily-congested Potomac River crossings between Maryland and Virginia.
A replacement for the Nice Bridge was approved in November 2016, but nothing has been approved for the American Legion Bridge aside from a study in July 2017 regarding constructing another bridge upriver.
“The American Legion Bridge and other parts of the Beltway are so congested,” Swift said. “There’s no rush hour anymore since it used to be two and a half hours, and now it’s three to four hours.”
[pullquote]Interactive map of Maryland’s top 40 transportation projects, color-coded by project status. Green is complete, orange is under construction, blue is design, yellow is planning and red is inactive. (Created by: Billy Owens using data from TRIP [source])[/pullquote]
Commuters continue coping with congestion
If there’s even a slight Metro delay, Sittinger sometimes arrives at Shady Grove just minutes after the No. 58 bus leaves, forcing him to wait a half-hour for the next one.
That is, if the Ride On bus arrives on time.
“They arrive early sometimes, sometimes they arrive a little late,” Sittinger said. “When they’re running late, the biggest problem is when you hop on the bus, the driver’s almost instantly on the gas right up to the stop, and then he slams on the brake trying to make up time.”
As for White, he’s still at the whim of Mother Nature when it comes to the Bay Bridge.
“They reverse that one lane on the westbound bridge for going home for p.m. traffic,” he said. “But if it rains or it’s windy, they close that lane down for eastbound, so you only have two eastbound lanes going for all the people that are trying to go home, and it’s absolutely miserable.”
Anne Arundel County is the fastest-growing county in the state in terms of development, White said. With that development comes an increase in traffic, as well as the need for improving existing transportation infrastructure to handle that traffic.
White also said that the new development brings a different sort of convenience for motorists in the area.
“We’re growing crazy fast,” he said. “Royal Farms are going up left and right, all that good stuff. They come across the desk non-stop, you’d be surprised how many of them.”