Transportation panel has more to say than raise gas tax
The Blue Ribbon Commission on Maryland Transportation Funding made news Tuesday by recommending a 15-cent increase in the gas tax, along with other revenue-raising measures. But the draft report goes far beyond that in making recommendations on how Maryland should go about paying for highway, transit and other projects in the future.
Some of its recommendations seem unlikely or ill-timed, but others could find their way into the state's transportation strategy.
One controversial recommendation would be to establish a mechanism for regular review of transit fares, with future increases driven by indexed formulas rather than administration decisions. This is a recommendation that is likely to face fierce resistance from lawmakers from low-income districts, whose constituents have benefited from the O'Malley administration's policy of holding the line on fares even as costs have ridden. The panel also urged the Maryland Transit Administration to achieve the statutory goal of recovering 35 percent of its costs at the fare box, but this section has a pro forma quality about its raises questions about how serious the commission was on this point. It's not unlikely that there will be a modest fare increase over the next year -- largely because of General Assembly pressure -- but it seems unlikely that increase would get the MTA to the 35 percent level.
The commission also made some recommendation about tolls, even though the state's toll facilities are financed separately from the Transportation Trust Fund, which was the main thrust of the report.
One recommendation is to impose tolls on parts of the Maryland Transportation Authority system that it maintains but for which it doesn't collect tolls. Those would include the stretch of Interstate 95 to the east and north of Baltimore; Interstate 395 leading into downtown and I-95 south of the Fort McHenry Tunnel. Many of us now enjoy free rides on those roadways, letting the users of the state's toll bridges and tunnels carry the freight. (Of course, the users of the toll facilities are often the same people using the free facilities.)
There are two big barriers to this recommendation. The first is that motorists are used to having them for free and likely under the impression their gas taxes are paying for the maintenance of these roads (they aren't)). The second is the logistical question of how the authority would collect tolls on major commuter routes into the city without bogging down traffic. The technological challenge of collecting tolls at highway speed can likely be met, but without near-universal adoption of E-ZPass, it's hard to see such a scheme working. Billing people for tolls using cameras might work on a new road such as the Intercounty Connector, but it's doubtful it would work efficiently on a mass scale on an existing corridor.
Meanwhile, the recommendation -- coming on the heels of the largest toll increase in the state's history -- seems peculiarly ill-timed. Such toll collection schemes were discussed and discarded by the board of the transportation authority, and that body is unlikely to have much appetite for reopening the debate for several years. Mark this one down as the non-starter of non-starters.
A recommendation that the state explore the use of tolling on new facilities or to add new capacity to existing highways could get traction in the long term. So could a suggestion that the authority look at variable pricing on some existing facilities. (Charging extra to use the Bay Bridge at peak beach travel times makes sense from the perspective of congestion management.) But any such schemes are far in the future. It will probably be at least four years before the authority looks at raising revenue again. And there really isn't much prospect of new highway building in the foreseeable future. Perhaps some future governor will get behind the idea of adding express toll lanes to Interstate 270 or some other road, but Maryland has learned that new mega-projects can force toll increases at other facilities. It's hard to see any future project sliding through without a major fight, as the Interstate 95 ETL project did.
One recommendation that might get some traction is the panel's suggestion that the state eliminate free passes for certain users of the MTA system, including state employees. Superficially, this has appeal both on the basis of equity and revenue recovery, but there are flaws to the logic. One is that it is by no means clear that state employees and others who might lose the free passes wouldn't switch to driving rather than begin pitching more money into the fare box. The other is that state employees have been through years of pay freezes and furloughs, and a break on transit fares was a small way of making it up to them. It's also doubtful the little bit of extra ridership put much strain on capacity. So any gains from this recommendation would be more symbolic than practical. The panel has a point when it questions the wisdom of financing an employee benefit through the trust fund, even if the impact is minimal, but there's a shallowness to the analysis that doesn't give lawmakers much guidance on the costs and benefits of this policy change.
There's still a lot more to the report, including recommendations on sharing transportation costs with developers whose project derive benefits from them and on guidelines for establishing public-private partnerships. More on those later.
