County Executive Ike Leggett on Wednesday proposed $12.75 million in additional planning, design and marketing funds for bus rapid transit and said the county hopes to open its first corridor on Route 29 within four years.
The announcement, which came in a press conference in Rockville, showed Leggett’s scaled-back strategy for implementing bus rapid transit (BRT) after his proposal for an independent county transit authority to help fund the system met resistance last year.
BRT would consist of bus routes that in some stretches on some of the county’s biggest thoroughfares would run in dedicated bus-only lanes to provide faster service than existing bus routes that operate among other vehicles.
The $12.75 million in county funding must be approved by the County Council this spring in the county’s next six-year capital budget and includes $6.5 million for planning the Route 29 corridor, $5 million for planning a Rockville Pike corridor and $1.25 million to brand and market the system.
Leggett said the county chose an 11-mile stretch of Route 29 from Burtonsville to the Silver Spring Transit Center for the first corridor because it won’t require building additional lanes and buying extra right-of-way, making it potentially the cheapest and fastest to implement.
For some stretches of the route, the buses would run in existing shoulder lanes.
“The reason I selected 29 for the first one is you could do it faster, you could do it cheaper, you could do it with less disruption and I believe we can fit it in our capital budget as well,” Leggett said.
Al Roshdieh, director of the Montgomery County Department of Transportation (MCDOT), said the county hopes to have a cost estimate for implementing the system next year. MCDOT will take over all planning of the Route 29 corridor from the state to accelerate the process.
Leggett also said he has met with Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman, who has been receptive about extending the Route 29 BRT corridor into Howard County.
Last year, Leggett pushed for state legislation to allow the county to create its own transit authority, independent from the state and county governments and with oversight from the County Council.
County officials said the transit authority would allow the county more flexibility in borrowing money to build the first four corridors of the proposed system—MD 355 North from Clarksburg to Rockville, MD 355 South from Rockville to Bethesda, and Route 29 and Veirs Mill Road from Rockville to Wheaton—at an estimated total cost of $1.6 billion.
But opponents worried the transit authority would be an instrument for raising property taxes to help pay for the system.
Leggett assigned a task force to examine the concept last year and it presented a variety of funding scenarios that included broad property tax increases, property tax increases on commercial properties on bus rapid transit routes and a new 0.5 percent sales tax.
Council member Marc Elrich, who Leggett and other county officials credit with first proposing the concept of bus rapid transit in the county, said Wednesday that the billion-dollar cost estimate and others like it assumed “a gold-plated” system beyond what he’d envisioned with added dedicated bus lanes on each side of major roads and stations in intersections that would require significant reconstruction work.
“It was all two tracks and they put stations at intersections, which automatically meant that if you were going to preserve turning lanes, you were blowing up the intersection and blowing up the intersection meant lots of property takings,” Elrich said. “I always felt that the construction prices were way, way overinflated.”
Roshdieh said MCDOT anticipates about 45 percent of the Route 29 BRT corridor will run in existing shoulder lanes, 30 percent would be managed high-occupancy-vehicle-style lanes and the rest would put the buses in mixed traffic—mainly in already developed sections of Route 29 south of New Hampshire Avenue and around the Capital Beltway.
“BRT doesn’t have to be 100 percent in a dedicated guideway, it can be partially there,” Roshdieh said. “My expectation is that a lot of people who are in a single-occupancy vehicle are going to get on BRT because they’re going to see that they can get faster to their destination without driving their car.”
In January, after Leggett released his recommended six-year capital budget with just $2.6 million in bus rapid transit planning funds, seven County Council members penned a letter in which they wrote they were “concerned that we are losing momentum on this critical issue.”
Elrich and council members Nancy Navarro and Roger Berliner were among that group. A county spokesperson said county officials were still finalizing their plans when Leggett released his budget recommendations.
On Wednesday, Navarro said she was pleased the Route 29 corridor would move forward because the increased public transit access will open up opportunities for many residents in the eastern part of the county.
Leggett is asking for the state to match the $5 million in additional county planning funds for the Rockville Pike corridor, which would run from Clarksburg to the Bethesda Metro station. The county’s plan is to get to the “locally preferred alternative” stage of planning for that corridor in 2018 or 2019.
At that point, the county would have a more clear cost estimate and be able to start formal environmental studies that would gauge the impact of the corridor on traffic and existing property owners.
The county published cost estimates last summer that showed the portion of the Rockville Pike corridor from the Rockville Metro station to Bethesda Metro station could cost as much as $422.8 million. The section from Rockville Pike north to Clarksburg was estimated to cost $619.6 million.
“I really feel like this is the comprehensive approach that we have been urging [Leggett] to do,” Berliner said. “We can move forward with 29 relatively easily. [Rockville Pike] is more complicated, but equally important. So you move forward with what you need to do to get to that locally preferred alternative and then you know what you have to do next. I feel like on every level, this is a comprehensive, good plan.”
