Scoring transit projects, state ranks Baltimore Red Line last
After Republican Gov. Larry Hogan killed Baltimore’s proposed $2.9 billion Red Line light rail project in 2015, Democratic lawmakers in the General Assembly tried to fight back — passing legislation mandating that the Maryland Department of Transportation create a metric-based scoring system to rank capital projects.
The idea, they argued, was to prevent the governor from killing major projects on a whim or prioritizing cars over public transportation without supporting data.
In response, the Maryland Department of Transportation produced a scoring system that ranks Hogan’s favored project — a privately financed road-widening plan
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in the D.C. suburbs — as the top project in the state, giving it a perfect score of 500.
Finishing last? Baltimore City and Baltimore County’s request for a light rail line that runs east and west through the city — a proposal known as the Red Line.
State transportation officials awarded the Red Line a score of just 1.45.
Transit advocates are crying foul.
“The General Assembly passed this law in an attempt to be more open and transparent in how we’re spending our transportation resources. MDOT has complied with the law to the minimum extent possible,” said Eric Norton, director of policy and programs for the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance. “Projects they want to fund get perfect scores and projects they don’t want to fund get low scores. It doesn’t pass the smell test that they’re faithfully executing this law.”
The Hogan administration said it is complying with the law, but argues it’s the price tag associated with the projects — more so than the project’s merit — that is causing the large disparity in scores. The law requires state officials to rank all requests from local jurisdictions for transportation projects costing $5 million or more that expand highway or transit capacity.
Hogan’s plan to add hundreds of miles of express toll lanes on the Capital Beltway and Interstate 270 between Washington and Frederick — which critics deride as “Lexus Lanes” — received a perfect score of 500 because state officials said private contractors will pay for the lanes, costing taxpayers nothing.
Meanwhile, the Red Line proposal — which scored high in the metric’s categories of providing “equitable access to transportation,” promoting “safety and security” and contributing to “community vitality” — was harmed by its $2.4 billion price tag for state taxpayers. (Hogan returned $900 million in federal funds for the project when he killed it in 2015.)
State officials divided the Red Line’s score on merit — in which it ranked second-best of all transportation projects requested last year — by its price tag, which was by far the most expensive of any project listed. The cost made it finish last, state officials say.