Friday Fun(?) Facts: Transportation Funding in Maryland
September 6, 2024
Category: Transportation Facts, News / Commentary, Resources,
By Tim Smith, MAA President
Published in the August 2, 2024 Weekly Update
Let’s discuss hard facts related to transportation funding in Maryland.
First off, the existing Baltimore Light Rail. It is 30 miles of rail that carries about 14k riders per day. The annual operating costs have risen to about $38M to maintain the Baltimore Light Rail while fare revenue is just over $2M.
For perspective, MD 30 (Hanover Pike) in Baltimore and Carroll Counties carries about 14k vehicles per day near Manchester and Reisterstown and about 18k vehicles per day around Hampstead. We spend about $28k per lane mile for maintenance on state roadways which ranks us 41st in the nation.
So, roughly using the same 30-mile light rail system as a standard, Maryland spends about $846k/year to maintain an equivalent pavement section of MD 30 while supporting the same number of users.
Let’s move on to the Purple Line. As originally planned in 2016, Maryland agreed to pay the contractor group $5.6B to build and operate the system for thirty years. By 2022, contract amendments had increased this amount to $9.5B. The current construction price ticket for the Purple Line light rail line is $3.4B after an original estimate of $2B. That is 16 miles of rail that began efforts in 2017—originally scheduled to be complete in 2022 for $2B—that now is not expected to be complete until 2028.
That converts into about $6B in future expenses for the state to operate over a 30-year period, which then pencils out to $200M a year for the concessionaire to maintain. Keep in mind, the Purple Line is about half the length of the Baltimore Light Rail that costs $38 million a year to operate.
That includes several additional overruns for hundreds of millions of state dollars that have always been approved with thunderous applause. This is all being done with unclear ridership expectations as the previous calculations were done prior to 2020. The best estimate from transit experts is about 70k riders in 2040 – nearly two decades from now.
Now the Baltimore Red Line is still in the planning stages, but it is of similar length (14 miles) and is expected to cost up to $7Bto construct. We have no confirmed approach on how to fund the Red Line at this point.
I will then refer to my message this week which mentioned the full depth of the roadway transportation “pothole” we have in Maryland. We have over a $14B deep “pothole” in our roadway system because of inadequate funding for maintenance and system preservation, in addition to roadway capacity improvements.
I promised Friday Fun Facts, but they did leave me a little baffled when you see the whole truth. So, it may be more like Friday Flustered Facts. That is because I typically have this expression when I see all the facts compared to the direction being taken by our elected/selected officials on transportation decisions.
