Transportation chief seems cool toward I-270 notion
During a wide-ranging interview this morning with Maryland Transportation Secretary Beverly Swaim-Staley, I had the opportunity to ask her whether a $4.6 billion proposal to widen Interstate 270 between Shady Grove and Frederick was in line with the O'Malley administration's priorities.
Swaim-Staley diidn't really answer the question directly, but the way she replied gave me the impression she has little enthusiasm for the idea -- which is being promoted by the Montgomery County Planning Board and local business interests as the cure for congestion in the corridor.
I'm not faulting her for dodging. The corridor is now undergoing a traffic study, and high-ranking department officials generally try to avoid comments that might prejudice the process. But she brought a certain vehemence to her insistence that transit comes first in the corridor that I found reassuring.
"We really are focused on the transit aspects in that corridor," she said -- referring to the proposed Corridor Cities Transitway project that would serve many of the employment centers along the interstate. Any consideration of a wider interstate, she emphasized, is far in the future.
Readers of this blog may be well aware that the $4.6 billion plan to add two express toll lanes in each direction has found little favor here. To Baltimore eyes it appears to be an enormous expenditure that would encourage sprawling development in northern Montgomery, Frederick County and even Pennsylvania while diverting growth that might otherwise go to the center of the state. It is, in fact, a very 1970s solution to a 21st Century problem.
Swaim-Staley rattled off a series of O'Malley administration priorities -- the Baltimore Red Line, the Washington-area Purple Line, the Corridor Cities transit line, accommodating military base expansion -- and pointedly left I-270 off the list.
What she said was nothing that hadn't been said before by others in her department. But it was good to hear it from the boss -- and so forcefully.
