God, when will policy makers learn that highway expansions never work and can often serve to make things worse?
Spend the money on public transit if you want to fix traffic. Or build alternate routes. Anything but expanding an already too big highway.
I don’t think this project is completely bad. One upside is it should help enable reliable bus service between VA and MD if dedicated HOV/HOT lanes are part of the final design.
In a separate article, there appears to at least be mention of transit in this corridor (which, we’d all prefer action, but…):
“Initially, it is through bus and vehicle and carpool, but we’re not going to eliminate the possibility of doing something greater on the transit side in the future,” said Wiedefeld. “So, whatever we would do would support that.”
Virginia and Maryland couldn’t play nice to build a real purple line. Maryland is building it on their part of the beltway, but if you read the article, you’d see that part of the issue is the bridge over the river. Part of this is a political problem, rather than Maryland not seeing the value of public transit (which to a relative degree the state has).
The article even explains that transit is part of the plan after all.
Great more highways…
