Traffic on the American Legion Bridge by bankbryan licensed under Creative Commons.

The states of Maryland and Virginia announced an agreement Tuesday to rebuild and widen the American Legion Bridge, which carries the Beltway between Fairfax and Montgomery counties. Should urbanists be pleased about fixing a major traffic problem without building an Outer Beltway, or frustrated that states which don’t have money for transit suddenly seem to have billions of dollars for this mega-project?

According to the announcement, the bridge will keep the same number of general-purpose lanes and add two High-Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes in each direction, like those on the Virginia side of the Beltway, which are free for carpoolers and charge a variable rate for solo drivers.

The new bridge will also supposedly have paths for walking and bicycling. Maryland and VIrginia will share the cost under a somewhat complex arrangement that involves each state paying some percentage of various pieces of the project.

Urbanists generally are skeptical of highway mega-projects. While appealing to drivers frustrated in traffic, new lanes usually don’t actually make people’s travel times decrease after the very short run, as this segment on the Australian TV series Utopia illustrated:

Or this viral tweet:

The official press release, not surprisingly, is full of uncritical praise for making highways bigger.

So is this a terrible idea?

Dan Malouff wrote,

It’s not what I would spend my budget on, but toll lanes on the Legion Bridge are the most predictable highway project in the region. Politically this was always a matter of when, not if.

During debates about a potential Outer Beltway bridge from Dulles to Gaithersburg, “expand Legion” was the moderate compromise that Smart Growth advocates got behind to stop the worse alternative.

Legion Bridge is only a few years away from needing expensive rehab work anyway. Nobody is seriously calling to tear it down, so we may as well modify it along the way. We’ll have to see the details of course, but on the scale of big highway projects, this is probably not the one for urbanists to use all our capital fighting.

What about transit?

Malouff continued:

HOT lane projects are never really about buses and nobody should think otherwise, but nevertheless Legion HOT lanes could solve a previously unsolvable transit problem. Despite lots of population and major job centers like Tysons & Bethesda, WMATA has never been able to make a Legion Bridge bus work, because it gets stuck in jams. They tried maybe 20 years ago and it failed badly. HOT lanes aren’t bus lanes, but with congestion tolling they do allow buses to bypass jams, making a MD-to-VA bus practical.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has a history of promising multimodal projects and then cutting the multimodal parts after the road is approved. So transit advocates should definitely try to lock in funding for bus service as a legally-binding requirement for this, as was done in Virginia on Interstates 66 and 395.

Predictably, officials will probably say, “We need all the toll revenue to pay for the new bridge.” Don’t let them. Make them dedicate toll revenue to bus service across the bridge. That bus funding will not make or break their bridge financing.

The Greater Washington Partnership, the business association led by major CEOs in Washington, Baltimore, and Richmond, previously published a set of principles for toll lanes. Those principles include that “Tolling investments should improve the transportation system, not just the tolled facility,” and “Public agencies should conduct robust and broad public engagement to develop goals, performance metrics, and public benefit assessments.”

Principle #5 says, “Tolling revenue should be invested in cost-effective public transportation enhancements.” The region can ensure this project meets these principles.

The Partnership strongly praised this announcement in a press release. In an email, transportation director Joe McAndrew said, “The Partnership has consistently advocated for our Performance-Driven Tolling Principles with all leaders in the region and we will continue to press for adoption of solutions for a regional coordinated toll network, including allocating toll revenues for enhanced public transit options. The region currently has no transit connection across the American Legion Bridge and we strongly support new transit service connecting Maryland and Virginia across the new bridge.”

There are other silver linings, and a warning

Chris Slatt added:

This is so much better than the other potential highway projects that could come out of this area.

  • An outer beltway would have opened massive new land area to sprawl, which this does not. Every time we build a toll road we do a bit more to normalize pricing our transportation infrastructure.
  • The tolling should help limit the amount of public money that is used.
  • The toll money could potentially be used to fund other multimodal projects (Virginia is good at this)
  • This cooperation between Maryland and Virginia may be just the push that Maryland needs to make HOT lanes (where HOV users ride free) their preferred alternative for 270 and the Maryland side of the Beltway instead of straight-up Lexus Lanes.
  • The bike/ped path across the bridge could provide some much needed political pressure to actually build some bike infrastructure in that are of NoVA like the nearly 20 year old study of extending the Mt Vernon Trail (mostly on road)

That said, Virginia’s #1 bridge priority right now should be the Long Bridge [the railroad bridge between DC and Virginia], not the Legion Bridge. If they do manage to get Long Bridge funded, expect a lot more hand-wringing about the cost of that than we’ll see about the cost of the Legion Bridge.”

Ben Ross, who runs the Maryland Transportation Opportunities Coalition, said this is a reversal by Governor Larry Hogan about how much the state would pay for a new bridge. The group’s press release says that the financing announcement “contradicts the governor’s promise that the entire cost of the toll lanes and the new bridge would be paid out of tolls and financed by a [public-private partnership].”

Also, Hogan had previously decided, and the state Board of Public Works approved, that his existing highway widening plan would put Interstate 270 before the Beltway. Ross says ths governor is “backtracking,” and added, “This makes a mockery of previous claims that they can’t look at rail alternatives because there’s no money.”

What do you think?

This article has been updated with comments from the Greater Washington Partnership and Maryland Transportation Opportunities Coalition.