By GERALD NEILY
The MTA spent years, millions and endless hours meeting with communities to produce the voluminous technical documents to support Tuesday’s decision by Gov. Martin O’Malley to build the Alt. 4C Red Line. Then agency officials sharpened their pencils, eliminated two stations, narrowed the Cooks Lane tunnel to a single reversible track and extended the other tunnel to avoid narrowing Boston Street, which is expected to have a huge increase in traffic.
But somehow, the transit ridership projection in the MTA’s just-released five page summary became a whopping 28 percent higher than the figure calculated in the lengthy Alternatives Analysis-Draft Environmental Impact Statement which forms the technical basis for the project — growing from 42,100 to 54,000 riders per day.
If the MTA had revealed during the extensive planning process that all those extra riders were out there, the proposal could have turned out much differently. But Tuesday’s selection of a “locally preferred alternative” is the formal end of the planning process.
Next comes preliminary engineering, which is mostly devoted to detailed design issues and attempting to control cost overruns that tend to plague projects such as this. Only a year and half ago, the cost of the preferred 4C alternative was estimated at $300 million to $500 million more than it is now.
Next comes preliminary engineering, which is mostly devoted to detailed design issues and attempting to control cost overruns that tend to plague projects such as this. Only a year and half ago, the cost of the preferred 4C alternative was estimated at $300 million to $500 million more than it is now.
The extra riders would have made an all-surface line look especially attractive. It was already far less expensive and more cost-effective than the “preferred” 4C. The additional ridership potential would have provided great justification for investment in the kinds of transit-oriented infrastructure that could truly transform the city, such as the City’s Inner Harbor street re-invention project, the Highlandtown Loft District, Leakin Park gateway and the BaltiMorphosis.com plan for Franklin-Mulberry.
The political impact is easy to see here. O’Malley announced the Purple Line in Montgomery and Prince Georges counties the same day as Baltimore’s Red Line. Spending in the Baltimore and DC metropolitan areas must be balanced to achieve political consensus.
But the Red and Purple Lines will be competing against each other for federal transit funds. It is crucial that one of these projects not look better than the other “on paper”, to prevent federal officials from approving one and axing the other. The sudden estimated ridership increase is a convenient way to accomplish that equanimity.
The governor also needs political cover for his anticipated tax increases to pay for all of this. Federal funds are only expected to cover about half.
