Issue Position: Transportation Funding

Issue Position

Maryland has a serious highway congestion problem and needs major infrastructure improvements; however, the Transportation Trust Fund is starved for money because Governor O'Malley has raided it. He has used over $1 billion of money earmarked for transportation needs to balance his operating budget. Higher gas taxes would not be needed to replenish the Trust Fund if the State merely were to repay the money previously removed from the Trust Fund. Moreover, the huge gas tax increases coming out of Annapolis do not constrain O'Malley or any future Governor from again raiding the Trust Fund. Leaders in Annapolis say that they will not raid the Trust Fund again, but do you "trust" them? I don't. So there is no guaranty that the higher gas taxes actually will be used for infrastructure improvements.

There are other problems with the higher gas taxes. Maryland drivers currently pay 23.5 cents per gallon on top of the 18.4 cents collected by the U. S. government, a total of 41.9 cents per gallon. Virginia's gas tax is 17.5 cents, and D. C.'s gas tax is 23.5 cents, the same as Maryland. 75,000 Maryland cars commute to Virginia each day and 145,000 Maryland cars commute to D.C. Maryland drivers commuting to Virginia can already save money by refueling in Virginia. With the enactment of new, significantly higher gas taxes in Maryland, the difference in per gallon state fuel tax between Maryland and Virginia could be over 33 cents per gallon by 2016. As a direct result, the over 200,000 Maryland drivers who commute to both D. C. and Virginia daily all will find it cheaper to refuel outside of Maryland. This is going to hurt Maryland small business service station owners and the small business owners of the convenience stores associated with the service stations.

Another serious issue: over half of the Maryland's total highway and transit spending in recent years has been spent on buses, light rail and subways; yet 87% of commuters in Maryland use cars (and 100% of freight movement in Maryland is on the highways). Under 9% of Marylanders use public transportation. The reason is that only 10-20% of the employment locations in this region are in downtown Baltimore and Washington, which are well-served by public transit. So even if everyone who conceivably could use public transit to commute to work used it, still over 80% of the region's populace would commute on the roads and highways. In addition, one key reason why the 10-20% of Marylanders who could use public transit do not is that the average one-way trip to work on public transit takes 53 minutes v. only 28 minutes using private cars. Therefore, regardless of how much money is spent on transit, public transit is not a viable option for the overwhelming majority of Maryland's workers. Yet most of the extra income from the higher gas taxes will not be used to improve the roads that most Marylanders use but rather for mass transit that very few Marylanders use.

Governor O'Malley has released his transportation priorities for Maryland. It turns out that no transportation projects are listed for the Towson area or northern Baltimore County. In fact, a high percentage of the new gas tax revenues will be used to plan and construct two light rail projects, the "purple" line in the D. C. suburbs and the "red" line running from Security Sqare Mall to Canton. I haven't talked to a single resident of District 42B who expects to use either of these light rail lines.

Have you seen the plans for the propsed "purple" light rail line in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties. Talk about a "Toonerville Trolley"! It wanders all over the landscape, stopping about every quarter mile, from Bethesda to New Carrollton. How many pedestrians want to travel from Bethesda to New Carrollton anyway? If I should be elected, I would like to spend some serious time reviewing all of the data supporting this new line. I have serious doubts that it will come close to breaking even. I was the President of the Ruxton-Riderwood Association at the time that the Baltimore light rail line was proposed and developed serious doubts about the financial viability of that line, doubts that I think have been borne out by its skimpy ridership.

The bottom line: I will support measures to ensure that the money in the Transportation Trust Fund is used in the most cost-effective way possible to benefit as many people of Maryland as possible. In some cases, more mass transit may make sense, but in many cases, including north central Baltimore County, it makes far more sense to use Trust Fund money to pay for road maintenance and improvement. The Baltimore Beltway, in particular, between I-83 and I-95 is a continuous traffic jam every afternoon. I believe that solving the traffic congestion along the Baltimore Beltway should be a much higher priority than building a meandering trolley line in the D. C. suburbs..

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