After a statute was enacted in April 2017, the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) is conducting its first round of evaluating projects for funding and inclusion in the state’s annual transportation investment program using a new project-based scoring system to evaluate all highway and transit capacity projects exceeding $5 million.³ Equitable access is one of nine criteria for the scoring model and measures each project for how it will impact job accessibility and economic development for disadvantaged or low-income populations.⁴ MDOT will also score projects more favorably if they enhance the safety, attractiveness, and accessibility of existing communities for transit riders, cyclists, and pedestrians.⁵ Currently, funding decisions for the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) are made using an obscure process at the state level.

The District, Baltimore Metropolitan Council (BMC), and the Richmond Regional Transportation Planning Organization (RRTPO) do not have a project scoring process for both planning and investment programs. The Washington metro area has placed a significant level of trust in Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) to deliver maximum benefit from the historic agreement in 2018 to dedicate $500 million in additional funding for the system.⁶ However, the agency does not have an outcome-focused decision making process. WMATA’s 2017 10-year strategic plan prioritizes projects based on a limited set of criteria.⁷ This plan serves as a broad list of transportation needs and not a list of funding decisions; project costs are not factored into the prioritization process.

As outlined in other sections of this Blueprint, consumer access to opportunity in the Capital Region varies widely based on the consumer’s transportation mode, income, and race. The average Capital Region resident can access more than 1,320,000 jobs by vehicle, 109,000 jobs by transit, 203,000 jobs by bicycle, and 25,000 jobs by walking within 45 minutes from their home.⁸ Within this frame, transit provides access to 11 percent of the total number of jobs available by vehicle region-wide.⁹ Black residents in the Capital Region are almost three times as likely as white residents to live in areas with poor transit access to jobs as well as low vehicle ownership rates.¹⁰ Households in poverty are nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to live in areas with poor transit access to jobs and low vehicle ownership rates.¹¹

Maryland, Virginia, and the District—alongside their MPOs, transit agencies, and local governments—should move beyond mitigating negative impacts to low-income and majority-minority communities from transportation decisions, and take steps to incentivize plans and investments that will measurably improve communities with lower levels of mobility and access.

Benefits

Virginia’s Smart Scale system is already allowing the state to stretch limited transportation dollars further and make measured progress toward key issue areas. With unfunded transportation needs expected to rise, adopting similar objective scoring systems in Maryland and the District could help lessen negative impacts.

In the near term, improving equitable access will increase the workforce that can reach available jobs. Over time, the region would realize the inclusive benefit to the local labor market from greater participation in the economy by all residents, as well as improved access to education, healthcare, and key activity centers.

Barriers

The Capital Region must take an honest look at its transportation investments and the extent to which they are achieving the region’s stated goals, including their impact on equitable access. Politics often derail rational transportation decisions at all levels of government in this region and throughout the country. The Capital Region’s transportation agencies should acknowledge this and incorporate sound business practices to ensure each dollar achieves stated goals and expected outcomes.

Next moves

The Capital Region’s jurisdictions and transportation agencies should establish clear, transparent measures and metrics to guide transportation plans and investments, and take a coordinated approach to incorporating equitable access into transportation decisions to intentionally overcome historic transportation inequities for select communities in the region.

Next moves are:

• The DC government, the RRTPO, and the BMC should establish a transparent performance-driven project scoring program to prioritize plans and make transportation investments
• MDOT should publicly review of its performance-driven project scoring program (Chapter 30) after its first funding cycle to ensure it delivers the intended outcome
• WMATA should develop a transparent performance-driven project selection program that focuses on regional benefit and removes politics from significant funding decisions
• MDOT, District Department of Transportation (DDOT), Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), the MPOs, and transit agencies should establish regionally aligned performance criteria incorporating equitable access as a primary performance measure for plans, investments, and project development

Costs

Federal regulations require states and MPOs to measure the performance of their transportation investments using measures such as safety, congestion, state of good repair, and connectivity.¹² The benefits from more effectively using limited transportation dollars would outweigh the costs of creating a transparent project scoring system at every level of government in the Capital Region. In Virginia, the cost to develop the Smart Scale prioritization process is estimated at $1.4 million, with $770,000 in staff and consultant costs and $800,000 for technical services associated with the web-based application portal.¹³ The annual operating costs for the Smart Scale process are estimated to be $800,000, which includes staff time, consultant support, and technical maintenance costs.¹⁴

Benefits

Greater accountability for the performance of Baltimore’s public transportation system is expected to improve outcomes for consumers. A more regionally focused decision making process that prioritizes the goals of the Baltimore area will increase consumers’ confidence in the system and encourage greater use of it.

A 2014 study of transit governance by the Eno Center for Transportation and TransitCenter found that regional priorities are best advanced when there is regional representation in decision making.³ The research showed that states should have a stake in regional transit decisions, but note that too much control and too little accountability from local leaders can lead states to make decisions that are not in line with regional priorities.⁴ While Baltimore’s transit system was not reviewed in the report, the researchers analyzed Boston’s, which is also run by a state agency. In this case, the study found that, while the state has a strong self-interest in the economic success of the Boston metro area (which includes its capital and largest city), the transit system’s governance structure would be improved by increasing representation from riders and residents in the region.⁵

Barriers

Changing the current governance and funding structures for public transportation in the Baltimore metro area will require legislative action—potentially at both the state and local levels. Strong, bipartisan political leadership, focused on delivering better outcomes for consumers, will be needed to enact such legislation. Moreover, should a new regional entity be created, care must be taken to structure it in a way that avoids or mitigates common problems with such entities, such as city-suburb tensions.

Next moves

The Maryland General Assembly, in coordination with the governor, should create a new governance structure for the Baltimore metro area transit system that more equitably distributes governing responsibilities and shared funding contributions between the state and local governments in the Baltimore metro area. The new structure should insulate Baltimore’s public transportation decision making process from election cycles to ensure plans and projects can be delivered as promised to the public.

Next moves are:

• With support from the governor, state and local elected officials, and stakeholders, the General Assembly should establish a blue-ribbon panel to recommend reforms to MTA’s governance and funding structure
• The blue-ribbon panel should make recommendations to the General Assembly within 16 months regarding key issues and necessary next steps, including:
  • Examples from peer regions of successful structures for shared public transportation funding and oversight;
  • Recommendations for a more effective distribution of responsibilities for public transportation planning, oversight, operations, and funding among state and local governments to achieve a high-performing public transportation system in the Baltimore metro area;
  • Whether a new regional entity should be created or existing entities should be given new responsibilities;
  • If a new regional entity is created, how its members should be appointed;
  • Potential local or regional funding sources for public transportation, including opportunities for local governments to incentivize transit-oriented development (TOD)—development patterns near rapid transit stops that induce greater ridership and increase tax revenues—as part of their funding contribution; and
  • Additional steps needed to improve coordination among all public transportation services in the region

Costs

Creation of a blue-ribbon panel would have modest administrative costs, as would a new governing or oversight body. While some funding responsibilities may eventually shift from the state to the local governments, there should be no changes in the cost of providing public transportation service that directly results from the change in governance.

In addition, the region can more effectively collaborate to increase our rate of return from existing competitive grant programs to fund critical investments. The federal government provides more than $6 billion annually in competitive grants for broad multimodal surface transportation projects, as well as targeted projects for specific modes (e.g., rail, highway) or categories (e.g., mega-regional planning, transit-oriented development planning).⁷ These transportation programs are competitive and are consistently oversubscribed. The federal grant program now known as BUILD (previously called TIGER) is oversubscribed by 20 times the amount available for disbursement.⁸ The most successful regions securing federal transportation grants have prioritized their applications to ensure single coordinated and targeted bids are submitted for each grant cycle. This presents a strong partnership and agreement from the submitting region that the grant is warranted and that it will be successful if awarded funds. The Capital Region does not have a federal grant-coordinating strategy—and, in many instances, multiple grants are submitted within the same metro area for the same grant cycle. By working together, our region’s transportation leaders can submit innovative, competitive applications to these federal grant programs and successfully win limited federal transportation dollars.

Concurrently, the Capital Region should explore federal grants to pilot user-based alternative revenue mechanisms to be in position to offset projected declines from gas tax revenues over the next 20 years. One approach is to charge a fee for the amount of driving consumers do—often called a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) fee. This approach uses technology or manual review of vehicle odometers to charge drivers based on the number of miles they travel rather than the amount of gasoline consumed. VMT fees may also improve the transportation system’s performance.

A 2007 study of the Washington D.C. metro area found that a VMT charge would also encourage many people to move to more central locations⁹—lowering congestion levels and increasing the use of public transit and non-vehicle travel options.¹⁰ Overall, the study’s model showed that a 10-cent-per-mile VMT charge would improve average weekday car speed inside the Washington Beltway by 56 percent—and by 80 percent outside the Beltway.¹¹

Benefits

Investing in regional transportation systems achieves widespread, national benefits. Federal support for the Virginia Atlantic Gateway multimodal I-95 corridor congestion relief program is projected to provide nearly $3.5 billion in economic benefits—leveraging federal, state, and private investments more than 3:1—and improve the highway and rail corridors that move over 350 million tons of freight each year and more than 400,000 people a day.¹² Strengthening federal support for the Capital Region’s transportation projects will benefit both our local communities and our national economy.

Creating a VMT fee could allow for proactive traffic management, reduced congestion, and increased revenues to support improvements to the Capital Region’s transportation infrastructure. Studies of the District’s metro region indicate that a VMT charge could reduce total vehicle miles traveled by 11 to 14 percent.¹³

This reduction in total VMT would also achieve reductions in harmful greenhouse gas emissions. One study of the District modeled that a nine-cent-per-mile VMT charge could reduce daily vehicle emissions of volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide by nearly 18 percent.¹⁴

Barriers

Getting Congress to successfully raise the federal gas tax has been a major endeavor for elected officials, transportation agencies, and stakeholders for decades. The next significant opportunity comes in 2020 when federal lawmakers will reauthorize the federal surface transportation programs.¹⁵ When Congress was writing the current surface transportation authorization in 2015, transportation advocacy groups demonstrated widespread public support for strengthening the nation’s transportation fund. Yet, despite this, Congress did not address the transportation deficit in a sustainable way and did not raise transportation revenues. Instead, Congress transferred over $75 billion¹⁶ from the nation’s general fund meant to support other government programs to pay for a slight increase in transportation funding over five years.

In Oregon’s pilot of a VMT fee, the general public initially expressed privacy concerns—given the use of technology to gather travel data used to implement VMT fees.¹⁷ After the pilot, survey results showed that 83 percent found road usage charges to be “a lot more fair” or “somewhat more fair” than gas taxes,¹⁸ and 91 percent of pilot participants supported expanding the VMT fee statewide.¹⁹

Next moves

With a growing transportation funding gap, the region needs a reinvigorated federal partner, and should increase the rate of return from federal transportation grants, including leveraging federal grants to advance alternative sources of transportation funding.

Next moves are:

• The U.S. Congress should increase revenues raised for transportation investments, starting with a significant increase in user-fees, such as the federal gas tax
• Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT), District Department of Transportation (DDOT), Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), and the region’s MPOs should coordinate regional applications for competitive federal transportation grants to increase the region’s success rate
• MDOT, DDOT, and VDOT should jointly seek federal funding to deploy a Capital Region VMT fee pilot

Costs

For our region to remain globally competitive, it must invest in the region’s transportation system at all levels of government. Raising transportation revenues at the federal level will increase costs for consumers in the Capital Region. The Capital Region’s transportation agencies must work together to advocate for an increase to federal transportation revenues, but also work together to maximize the region’s return on their investment by securing more competitive grant funds. These grants come with varying levels of state or local match (20 to 50 percent or more), but the federal funds can be the difference between a project advancing or sitting on the shelf for years, if not decades.