Steve Burns
WMAL.com

ROCKVILLE – (WMAL) Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s recently released plan to relieve the prodigious delays on Interstate 270 through Montgomery County already has a critic in that county: the County Council President, Roger Berliner, who called the plan “not all that innovative” at a Monday press conference.

“This is the much-ballyhooed $100 million ‘innovative approach’ that many of us thought was not going to address what needs to be addressed,” Berliner said. “This is trying to do something on the cheap.”

Hogan’s plan calls for reconfiguring some entrance and exit ramps, adding lanes in some short distances, and explores adding ramp metering to stagger the timing of cars entering the highway. The plan also looks at variable speed limits depending on traffic conditions.

“We have seen nothing with respect to travel time savings, so how are we to assess the merits of the proposal without understanding actually what it does?” Berliner said.

Berliner again floated a solution county leaders have long sought – additional High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes.

“We asked for HOV lanes heading south to be provided from Clarksburg on down,” Berliner said. “That easily could’ve been accommodated in this kind of proposal.”

Additionally, Berliner said he was taken aback at the lack of communication from the Governor’s office.

“I confess I was surprised that I heard about it through a press release…as opposed to any direct communication with our county,” Berliner said.

Another Montgomery County-based public transportation advocacy group, the Action Committee for Transit, sent a scathing press release calling Hogan’s plan a “double-down on proven failure.”

“When I-270 was widened to 12 lanes from Germantown to the Beltway in the early 1990s, the State Highway Administration promised that travel times would go down by half an hour or more,” the release said. “Instead, within a few years the road filled up with more traffic, and the backups were as bad as ever.”

Berliner said he is drafting a letter to send to his colleagues on the council, asking both for more information on travel time savings and more investment in transit and carpooling.

“The Governor needs to be much bolder in addressing this issue,” Berliner said. “It can’t happen on the cheap in our judgment.”

Copyright 2017 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)