Six environmental groups released a study yesterday showing ways to improve travel between Montgomery and Prince George's counties that they say would be cheaper, reduce more traffic and create less air pollution than a highway.
The groups said the Maryland State Highway Administration has failed to adequately study such options while analyzing the environmental and community effects of building an 18-mile, toll highway -- known as the intercounty connector -- outside the Capital Beltway.
The 85-page study was commissioned by the Sierra Club, Audubon Naturalist Society, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Environmental Defense, Coalition for Smarter Growth and Solutions Not Sprawl.
Instead of focusing solely on building a highway, the groups said, the state should study building more rail links, creating toll lanes with express bus service and shortening commutes by encouraging job development closer to homes, particularly in Prince George's. The options examined in the groups' study cost between $626,000 and $2 billion. The state has estimated that an intercounty connector would cost as much as $2.4 billion, not including financing costs.
Stewart Schwartz, of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, said the state's environmental impact study "started with their concern that they want to build a new highway" and overlooked alternatives.
The state is studying three options: building a highway along one of two routes or not building it at all. Maryland Transportation Secretary Robert L. Flanagan said state and federal agencies, including environmental agencies, agreed to limit the study to those proposals.
"What they're promoting -- improving transit, balancing development so jobs are closer to where people live, and improving the local road network -- are all things we support," Flanagan said. "Where we differ is we think those should be done in addition to building the ICC. . . . We need all these improvements."
The state released a draft of the environmental impact statement in November. The study examines the two proposed routes, which would link Interstate 270 near Gaithersburg and Interstate 95 near Laurel. State officials are scheduled to choose one in the spring. Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) has said he wants to break ground next year.
But Schwartz and other environmentalists said they want the state to consider first the non-highway options they reviewed with help from Smart Mobility Inc., a Vermont traffic engineering firm. For example, the groups' study found, the state could spend $1.9 billion to build rail lines between Bethesda and College Park and between the Shady Grove Red Line Metro station and Clarksburg. The same plan would convert existing lanes on the Beltway, I-95 and I-270 into high-occupancy toll lanes in which motorists could pay a toll to use free-flowing carpool lanes.
More buses would provide express service, and Prince George's residents would have shorter commutes as the number of jobs in the county grows, according to the groups' study.
Compared with a new highway, the study states, the proposals would cut the amount of time people spent in traffic, reduce congestion on local roads and create less smog -- all for less money.
Flanagan said previous research has shown that a light-rail line would not carry as many people or move goods as reliably as a highway would. A highway, combined with new express bus service, also would generate more jobs, reduce collisions on crowded side roads and save more driving time, Flanagan said.
"The benefits of a [connector] far exceed the costs of building it," Flanagan said.
Schwartz said the environmental groups will ask state officials to expand the impact study to consider transit and other alternatives. If the state doesn't, he said, "We have legal options."
Flanagan said he has no plans to expand the study.
"We'll certainly consider all their proposals," he said, "but we're not going to accept a proposal that would do nothing but delay construction of a highway."
