It is vitally important for the General Assembly to shift our State to creating a 21st Century, climate-friendly, clean transportation sector. Significant highway expansion is antithetical to accomplishing this, and the Maryland Sierra Club opposes Governor Hogan’s wrong-headed highway building plan and supports action by the General Assembly to address it.
Expanded highways encourage more people to drive, which produces more climate-damaging CO2 emissions from vehicle tailpipes. The transportation sector is now the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Gas and diesel-powered vehicles also are a major source of toxic tailpipe emissions linked to cancers, heart disease, asthma, emphysema, and other respiratory diseases, and expanded highways encourage more sprawl with all the negative consequences associated with that.
The threat of new, substantial highway building is real. Governor Hogan is actively promoting an $11 billion plan to add toll lanes to the Capital Beltway, I-270, and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which would result in 436 miles of new roadways. The proposal calls for the toll lanes to be paid for by what would be the largest public-private partnership (P3) for highways in North America.
We support legislation to require any P3-funded transportation project to be preceded by a comprehensive study of its impact on CO2 emissions, including its impact on the State’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act goal that Maryland reduce its CO2 emissions by 40% by 2030. The legislation also should ensure that expanded highways will not lead to Maryland exceeding federal air quality standards.
In order to address the dire threats of climate change, our State needs to redirect transportation funding to increasing mass transit, electric vehicle infrastructure, and car and van-pooling, and promoting walkable, bikeable communities. The goal should be getting more people to where they want to be in a reliable, sustainable manner versus enabling more vehicles to travel faster.