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State Officials Say Extending Rail to Columbia Too Costly
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That makes extending the Green Line to Columbia impractical, said Jack Cahalan, a spokesman with the Department of Transportation.
The fate of the Green Line extension might be determined by a state study of the Baltimore-Washington corridor that's examining multiple forms of transit over the next 20 years. That study will be completed in mid-2008, Cahalan said.
The Maryland Transit Administration recently told Bobo that it could cost $1 billion to include Columbia on MARC's commuter Camden line, which runs through Laurel, Savage and Jessup several miles east. Adding a spur to Columbia "is not financially feasible at this point," Cahalan said.
MARC plans to add trains in the next two years and increase service during weekends, late evenings and midday that would help improve transit service in the area, he said. Public transit advocates were not surprised by the latest word on rapid transit but were disappointed.
"Other pieces of infrastructure in the county have made progress -- schools, the hospital," said Judy Pittman, a member of the local group Transportation Advocates. "Public transit hasn't kept up with the growth of the rest of the county."
The intra-county Howard Transit bus service reported 750,000 riders last fiscal year, an increase of 63 percent since 2002. Its riders in September rose to 67,300, 7 percent more than its ridership for September 2006, said Carol Filipczak, chairman of the county's Public Transportation Board.
But the growing bus system struggles with equipment breakdowns, rider complaints and wait times of up to an hour between buses. Furthermore, the system does not help the nearly one-third of county workers who commute outside of Howard. Their transit options are MARC trains or private commuter bus services that run weekdays from Columbia to Baltimore and Washington.
Increasingly, "we've been getting questions about regional transit. We need a major change in how we look at transportation," said Filipczak.
County Council member Mary Kay Sigaty (D-West Columbia) said that bus transit might be Howard's best option.
"I see it as a much more viable regional answer than rail," said Sigaty at the end of a Tuesday meeting of Transportation Advocates. "It works with our existing road system. We should be looking at ways to capitalize on resources we already have."
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