Posts about Induced Demand

You can see where this is going. People start going out of their way to get the free hamburgers, and planning their day around that trip. The city has to keep providing more and more free burgers—eventually millions a day—to keep satisfying the demand for free hamburgers. The competing food markets crater, because who would pay $2/lb for apples when you can get as many free burgers as you want (although maybe you have to wait in a 30-minute line).

Public health goes to hell, because everybody's eating six burgers a day. And yet, everybody likes their free burgers and the Hamburger Department is an untouchable political powerhouse. Proposals for a 10-cent hamburger fee to cover the huge costs of hamburger provision get shot down by public outrage.

What's the problem here? The problem is that food is indeed a necessity, and yes, people seem to like McDonald's hamburgers—but the fact that people will take free burgers does not prove that they are "highly valued" by the market. We are not seeing actual demand for burgers. We are seeing induced demand for a good which is being provided at artificially low prices.

But for some reason, replace hamburgers with roads and everybody goes nuts.

In short, the fact that a new lane or road immediately fills up with traffic does not "prove" that there was a high demand for that road—it proves that people will use way too much of something that's free.

Cars take up space when they're moving and they take up space when they're parked, and even though they can't be simultaneously moving and parked, you have to plan for both states and plan for peak demand; so you have to set aside some multiple of the real estate actually occupied by the car at any given time.

That's just a practical observation about the spatial geometry of cities that doesn't bow to my ideology or yours. And it would still remain true even if cars ran on nothing but recycled newspapers and emitted nothing but rainbows and unicorn tears.

In the past, our policy response has been to just set aside more and more space for cars: More freeways, more roads, more lanes on existing roads, more parking garages and surface lots. This approach hasn't worked, and there are two very practical reasons why:

First, you can never build enough. There's a phenomenon called "induced demand" that is very well understood by now. A new lane or a new freeway never reduces congestion in the long run: People respond to new capacity by driving more or by living or working in previously remote places, and you're very quickly back where you started and have to build still more. The same phenomenon applies to increases in the supply of parking. It's a game you can't win.

Second, when you do make more space for cars you quickly start to crowd out any other potential mode of transportation, especially walking. All those parking lots and freeways and roads spread everything else out so that the distances become too great for walking. And the more you optimize any given space for cars the more hostile that space is for pedestrians. Very quickly you get to the point where it becomes impossible—or prohibitively depressing—to get things done on foot.

And this last fact has huge quality-of-life implications for human beings—not just because driving to a distant strip mall for a gallon of milk is less pleasant than walking to a corner store, but also because for many people driving simply isn't an option.

Some people can't drive because they're not old enough, others because they're too old. Some people are blind. Some people don't know how to drive. Most of all, plenty of people can't afford a car. And it's really, really not fun to be in one of those categories and live in a place where you have to drive to get anything done.

The District government has very belatedly come around to the realization that instead of focusing narrowly on cars, we need to focus more broadly on mobility. Cars will always a big part of that, but one third of DC residents live in households that don't own one, so it can't be the only part.

Some drivers have reacted to that shift with outrage that they're no longer the center of the universe, like only children who have acquired a baby sibling. That's not a mature or reasonable or productive reaction. As DC's population continues to grow, the population of cars can't keep growing at the same rate. Not because cars are bad but simply because we don't have room for them.

So we have to take steps to increase the market share of non-driving modes of transportation. That's not a pro-car policy or an anti-car policy, it's just a sensible response to the way the world is.

What does this have to do with zoning? Well, you don't take "everyone drives" as a starting point or as an end point. As a matter of fact, not everyone can drive; and as a matter of principle, we want people to have other options. So we allow corner stores so people can run simple errands without driving. We allow alley dwellings and garage apartments so a few more people can live in walkable neighborhoods and near metro stops. And we stop forcing developers to build more parking than the market demands. These are very modest but obvious common-sense steps.

Meanwhile, I'm going to keep driving when I need to, and so are you, and that's fine. Nevertheless it's in all of our best interests for DC to make sure that that's not the only choice we have.

Maryland officials explained that an outer Beltway isn't a priority and conflicts with smart growth and environmental principles. But they were the only ones saying that in the original article. They got scant attention. The broadcast audio paraphrased a few objections, but in nearly every case followed up with a sentence beginning with "But," implying that the arguments against the Outer Beltway deserve only rebuttal, not serious consideration.

The idea that arguments against the Outer Beltway are inconsequential is dangerously wrong. An Outer Beltway would primarily serve the large landowners in rural Virginia who want to fill their property with more cookie-cutter subdivisions. It actually won't help current commuters. VDOT's own 2004 study showed that 92% of drivers in the I-270 and Dulles corridors travel to and from the core, or along the current Beltway. An outer crossing wouldn't serve them.

Even for those who could use an Outer Beltway, a free or subsidized road would just induce its own demand, spurring new development in current farmland and filling up the road with new drivers stuck in new congestion. A toll road would have to charge a lot of money to pay back its costs. AAA would subsequently whine, as they are doing with the ICC, that it's too expensive and not enough people are using it.

The region needs better transit solutions between Bethesda and Tysons and the Metro lines in each corridor, not the failed Outer Beltway ideas of 50 years ago. The region has turned down these highways, over and over, because they simply won't solve our transportation troubles.

AAA is not a neutral source

It's not surprising that Bob Chase and AAA are still pushing an Outer Beltway as a transportation panacea, but it is disappointing when reporters fall for their pitch. Sadly, too many transportation reporters view AAA as some kind of neutral party.

AAA's helpful press releases on gas price trends and holiday weekend traffic let reporters fill column space without doing a lot of work. There's nothing wrong with those stories, but many reporters then fail to question when the organization's press releases attack officials on policy grounds, like AAA's broadsides against Mayor Gray's traffic safety camera initiative, or Governor Martin O'Malley saying that an Outer Beltway is not the priority for Maryland.

Bob Chase has a high-powered, expensive PR firm, Dewey Square, pitching far and wide his aggressive push for more and more highway lanes at the region's edge. Nonprofit advocates voicing alternative views, like the Coalition for Smarter Growth and Sierra Club, have to make do with much thinner resources. Good reporters put pitches from PR firms in their appropriate context and realize that they represent the interests of well-funded groups, not necessarily truth.

Unfortunately, we've seen several cases of journalists falling short on balanced coverage of late. WAMU stepped over the line recently with a brief morning story that only quoted AAA, and no pedestrian safety advocates, on traffic cameras. Reporter Armando Trull adapted an AP story which unquestioningly repeated the slant from The Washington Times.

AP reporters don't sign their articles, so we don't know who broadcast this biased story out on the wires without thinking. Besides WAMU, Fox5's Will Thomas also rewrote the traffic camera story, and the Washington Business Journal aggregated it, both without questioning its one-sided premise.

There's nothing wrong with opinion journalism—our articles are all opinions—but people know it. The Washington Times is mostly opinion, too, and so is anything from AAA, but many reporters and others mistake both. Running editorials on the Outer Beltway is one thing, but news reporters can and should stop regurgitating AAA's line on policy questions, and should look more critically at other outlets' stories when they don't.

WAMU worked to fix its mistake

After getting an earful from myself and a number of environmental and smart growth advocates on Friday, WAMU agreed with the criticism. Metro Connection Editor Tara Boyle told me on the record, "In looking at story a second time, we think the critique that we needed a bit more balance is real, and there is merit to these critiques."

The reporter, Martin Di Caro, spoke to Stewart Schwartz of CSG and myself, and added a section to both the audio and text versions with quotes from both of us. Di Caro has written many other, good-quality transportation stories in his 2 months at WAMU thus far, and I look forward to many more from him.

During our discussion, Di Caro mentioned that he's currently working at WAMU thanks to a grant. Their former transportation reporter, David Schultz, was also only at WAMU for a short time. It's terrific that WAMU is getting money to cover transportation issues, but it would be far better if they could rustle up more consistent funding to keep a single reporter more permanently. Transportation is not a trivial subject, and it's very helpful to have reporters able to develop some expertise in the beat. When a reporter is new, they're more likely to fall victim to AAA-itis or the related affliction, PR-rep-itis.

Meanwhile, WAMU deserves praise for looking at the story, recognizing that it was one-sided, and taking steps to do better with coverage now and in the future.

But the state's forecast also assumes that gas will cost $2.50 a gallon, adjusted for future inflation. If instead, gas costs $10 a gallon in 2030, traffic on the ICC is projected to be about 40% below the $2.50/gallon forecast.

With higher gas prices, the overall drop in driving would be smaller, but rising gas prices would take cars off all roads. With parallel routes less congested, fewer drivers would be willing to pay the high ICC tolls. The project consultants make an educated guess that a $2.50 increase in the price of gas would cause people to drive 10% less. Their model calculates that a 10% drop in miles driven on all roads would cause a 16% drop in traffic in the ICC.

Moreover, the forecast assumes more sprawl development. To their credit, forecast authors Wilbur Smith Associates adjusted the official population projections from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, putting a little more future growth in DC and less in outer suburbs. But the forecast still projects outer suburbs to add more people and jobs overall than inner areas.

The forecast also assumes that wealthy and poor neighborhoods will be in the same places in 2030 as they were in 2000. Yet today, the affluent are migrating inward, while the population farther out—which is the ICC's potential market—is becoming less affluent and thus less likely to be willing to pay high tolls.

Over the next 2-3 years, traffic on the ICC will almost surely increase as drivers get more familiar with the road. But even then it will be half-empty. And what happens after that depends on events that no one can predict with certainty.

If the price of gasoline stays where it is now, the migration of the affluent into DC and Arlington halts, and McMansions spring up like weeds again in exurban counties, the road will indeed be filled with traffic in the evening rush hour 20 years from now. But if the demographic trends of the last five or six years continue, and gas keeps getting more expensive, the outcome will be very different. The ICC will stand forlorn, half-empty at its busiest moments; a $3 billion relic of a policy mistake.

There's nothing at all wrong with building for the future. The planners of Metro thought big, and we are all better off as a result. The question about the ICC is whether it was built for the future, or for a past age of cheap gasoline and sprawl that is gone forever.

Scare-quoted words include "investing" (money on transportation projects) and "livability," which apparently is code for "using government funding to force people now living in the suburbs to move back into densely packed central cities where they would have to depend upon mass transit rather than privately owned vehicles." That's instead of the previous policy of using government funding to force people to live in places where they would have to depend on cars even to cross a street without being killed.

That's far from the most comic of the faux-free market arguments, where people actually seem able to argue with a straight face that the government spending money on one mode of transportation is totally just markets at work while spending public money on another mode is socialism.

The most extravagant argument comes from Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, who actually writes this:

If the law of supply and demand were operative, we'd see a smarter approach to improving transportation in America. The supply of cars would create a demand for more roads and bridges to accommodate them, just as food lines outside a grocery store create demand for more grocery stores.

Meanwhile, Barnes obviously hasn't been on the Northeast Corridor Amtrak trains, or any of the subway systems in dense cities where people are clamoring for more trains and better service. Why doesn't that create demand for transit programs?

Because Barnes is sure they're not useful to anyone. "The simple fact is most people prefer to travel by car because it's convenient, which mass transit rarely is," he claims. Rarely in his experience, perhaps. Sure, driving is more convenient for many people in many cases. Transit is more convenient for other people in other cases.

Barnes argues that all the transit hasn't taken cars off the road, and that transit's mode share has declined. I have to assume he's just being disingenuous and trying to feed red meat to his base, because he must be smart enough to recognize that if you build very little transit and a lot of roads while the nation grows significantly, maybe the overall amount of cars will increase faster than the amount of transit ridership.

What's most frustrating about this argument from "conservative" commentators is that they're doing exactly what they accuse others of: coercing people to take only one mode. Barnes' argument isn't that we need both roads and transit. He only wants roads and nothing else. How does taking away choices create more freedom?

It's just like the groceries. Some people like milk. Others like orange juice. The government is subsidizing the growing of both in this country. But we aren't hearing "conservative" commentators argue that all orange subsidies have to end because adding a few new orange groves hasn't succeeded in curbing obesity all on its own.

Another Barnes assertion claims transit in Washington hasn't curbed congestion. Yet that Texas Transportation Institute report, which tautologically proves that if you build a lot more roads people spend more of their long commutes driving long distances fast instead of short distances slowly, showed that the Washington area has grown a lot since 1999 but without traffic actually getting worse.

The strange logic continues with a piece by Fred Utt of the Heritage Foundation criticizing transportation borrowing by Barack Obama and by Barbara Hollingsworth praising the same borrowing by Bob McDonnell.

Hollingsworth writes, "In order to take advantage of low construction costs, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and the General Assembly agreed to incur $4 billion in debt in order to expand and maintain the commonwealth's extensive highway system, which has become seriously degraded after years of neglect." But Utt decries federal transportation programs as "borrow-and-spend policies" and a "political slush fund."

What's the difference? It's simple: One has some transit, the other doesn't. Also, one executive is a Democrat, the other a Republican. Utt can't abide transit because some people belong to a union. He seems to forget that so do highway builders. Hollingsworth, meanwhile, just hates the Silver Line.

She has three main criticisms: It's expensive, there aren't a lot of people nearby, and the number of people who will take a train to the airport doesn't justify train service. Actually, there's some difference of opinion among transit advocates about the Silver Line's phase 2, from Wiehle Avenue through Dulles and into Loudoun County.

Starting with the third argument, Hollingsworth feeds off the common misconception many people have that this is primarily a "train to Dulles." It's really a train to Tysons and then to some park-and-rides near Dulles as well as the airport itself. Some people will use the train to go to the airport, but most riders in that section will be residents of the area using it to commute.

The Silver Line is expensive, but so are highways; it takes more local dollars because the federal government doesn't contribute as much money to such a project as to an equivalent highway. As with Barnes' claim that the little transit we've built hasn't reduced traffic enough, this argument uses circular reasoning. Because the feds don't pay much for transit, it's expensive; therefore, the feds should stop paying anything at all.

As for there not being a lot of people nearby, as Richard Layman explains, heavy rail transit creates its own population density. The Silver Line will trigger more development in the areas where it will go.

While phase 1 of the Silver Line serves Tysons, an already-dense area that's one of the largest job markets in the nation, phase 2 will primarily serve future development in western Fairfax and in Loudoun. To some, that's an argument against it, since like a rural highway, it's subsidizing far-flung development.

The fifth article, by Jonathan Last from the Weekly Standard, attempts to debunk the idea of induced demand, which he can't abide. It reads like one of those polemics from evolution deniers, full of statements that the "experts" insist something is true, but it can't possibly be.

Last cites 7 separate studies that back up induced demand, but then says it can't be true because if you ask the average person on the street, they'd tell you that of course building highways makes traffic better. Oh, and there was once one study that said perhaps it's overblown. Proof!

One group, he says, even went "spinning off into outer space" by trying to apply game theory. Because we all know that relatively new branches of mathematics never have any real application to existing problems.

Ultimately, this is all a lot of arguing over specifics. Individual studies or cost projections aren't going to change minds. The fact is that road building interests, suburban development interests, and the "conservative" mouthpieces they fund are going crazy that a long-standing, enormous funding imbalance in their favor might be shifting back, even a little bit.

These two pie charts, one from Transit Miami in 2009 and one from Streetsblog yesterday, tell it all:

Few scream more loudly than an interest group used to getting the entire pie, especially during a time when the pie is shrinking due to static gas tax revenues.

Hazel's comments perpetuate several longstanding myths.

Myth: Traffic congestion can be "solved."

Hazel said, if Virginia had three Beltways, "We'd have minimal traffic congestion, we wouldn't have people fighting to get north-south, we wouldn't have the Beltway jammed up." Nope.

The only places without traffic congestion are places where few people drive. The dominant planning paradigm of the mid-20th century was to build more roads when roads filled up. Then planners discovered "induced demand," where road development simply triggered even more exurban housing growth leading to even more traffic.

New highways in metropolitan areas fill up in as little as five years. Neither Atlanta nor Houston's multiple Beltways have erased congestion, and studies of the Outer Beltway here have shown that it has little to no effect on reducing Beltway traffic.

Yes, traffic in Northern Virginia is a problem. But it's not really a problem that's going to go away. At best, it can be managed, and directing growth in ways that generate little traffic, such as putting housing near jobs and both near Metro, as Arlington did, is the best way to manage it.

Myth: Traffic just moves somewhere else if you don't widen roads.

Hazel is really angry that I-66 isn't twice as wide as it is.

[Fairfax] took all the highways off the map in the '70s and they refused to build them. And we had the big shootout over [Interstate] 66, which is now inadequate because the Arlington crowd said, "Who wants to ever go to Fairfax? We don't want all that traffic," not realizing that it would be on Lee Highway and Arlington Boulevard if it wasn't for 66. They defeated a decent 66. It should have been eight lanes instead of four.

Myth: We need more freeways because transit can't serve everyone.

Hazel feels that the Silver Line will be inadequate because it only goes east-west:

[Y]ou ride it from Reston to Tysons or you ride it to Tysons from the District. But look at where the people come from. They come from the south, the north, they come from the west, they come in a car.

When you look at where people come from to Tysons, they come from all points of the compass, and Metro's not going to do that. If Metro was a big solution, why isn't 66 in better shape than it is today?

Yes, some people have to drive. Many people don't live near transit or can't use it for various reasons. Some also want to drive. That's fine. But today, those people already drive, and we don't have these Beltways Hazel wants. Right now, the transportation infrastructure serves (not always perfectly) the people who commute now.

New infrastructure is not really for them. It's for the new people. If we build Beltways and Potomac River crossings, the new people who work at Tysons will live in Frederick. If we build transit, they'll live in Falls Church, Vienna, Reston and the District.

The biggest planning fallacy is assuming that new people will live in the same places, do the same jobs, and travel the same ways as the existing people. New roads aren't for you, they're for them. Where do we want them to live and work?

Slightly more odd is how Hazel says the Silver Line won't relieve congestion along I-66 because people come from the north and south. Last I checked, I-66 didn't go to the north or south.

Myth: Because some people want suburban houses, we need lots of new suburban houses.

Tysons is a political cop-out for where people are going to go. The best they say Tysons can handle is 100,000 residents all in high-rises. Young people all think living on the 10th floor of a high-rise is great, but as soon as you get a couple of kids, you want to live in a place with a back yard. Where do the other million people who are coming into the region live?

National data show that by 2025, only 28% of households will be families with children. Yes, many families are having kids, and while some want to stay in the city, many want to live in suburban houses. But at the same time, there are many empty nesters living in suburban houses who want to go to the city. The solution is simple: Have the people who want the suburban houses buy the ones that are for sale.

Housing prices have stayed higher in urban than suburban areas, suggesting that more people want to go to the city than go away from it. The question is not how many people are going to want to live in houses, it's how many more people will want to in future decades than do today. For our region, which is growing, that number is probably positive, but how much?

It's not so high that Northern Virginia has to double or triple its sprawl. And since the urban housing is even more desirable, Virginia should be developing more housing in walkable areas than housing in sprawl areas. Hazel's transportation vision would put all the infrastructure in the sprawl areas, which makes sense to him since he's a sprawl developer, but shouldn't to anyone else.

Myth: Metro didn't relieve congestion.

This isn't so much a myth as a bizarrely ridiculous assertion from Hazel:

If Metro was a big solution, why isn't 66 in better shape than it is today?

Instead, both spur growth. The only question is whether we want mostly transit-oriented growth or mostly sprawl growth. At least Hazel isn't shy about admitting he wants sprawl growth. His vision for Northern Virginia is to fill all the farmland for 50 miles with housing subdivisions. It's not anti-growth to argue that this isn't the right future.

Myth or reality: The 2030 Group is serious about its desire for "good sustainable growth"?

I have always had a fundamental commitment to growth, prosperity and people, and the antis are against all three. I don't make any apologies, I don't defend it, if you don't like it, don't listen to me.

So, we don't have to listen to him. But he's behind a new group that claims to be for "good sustainable growth." The site sounds good. But the question for the staff and other leaders of the 2030 group is: Are you seriously interested in sustainable growth, which Hazel is not? Or are you just a front group for the freeway lobby?

Vortex Junction. Image from Jalopnik.

Commenter gregtivo pointed out, "This is great!... if you have the intersection of 3 freeways in the middle of nowhere... and I think we've got that covered. Now, how much of New York City would this consume to cover the intersections at Times Square?" Other commenters noted how drivers would almost certainly get confused, have a hard time switching lanes while continuously curving, or make a "mad dash" across the lanes to get to an exit.

As a purely theoretical exercise, it can be fun to design complex patterns of lanes that would move cars smoothly. When I was younger, I did that too. But in reality, road infrastructure is very expensive, land is valuable in the metropolitan areas where interchanges are most crowded, and induced demand causes most capacity increases to simply drive sprawl and create their own congestion.

The free-flowing expressways of 1950s GM fantasies simply don't exist. We can have cities with more car use and more car congestion, or with more transit use and both transit and car congestion. There's never enough infrastructure. The grown-up question is how to prioritize our limited infrastructure resources, and to figure out how to pay for more infrastructure recognizing that it still won't be enough.

Two-hour commutes are common, and families where both parents work, often in places many tens of miles apart, are fed up with all the driving. The more freeways we build, the worse traffic becomes. Transit, transit-oriented development, and Smart Growth have become phrases that almost every planner and politican utters, no matter what their plan.

There are people, however, who spent decades lobbying for the endless extension of 1950s suburbia, who simply don't recognize that there can be any other way. To them, economic prosperity means more of the same.

Rich Parsons is one of these people. He used to head the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce, and headed government relations for the Greater Washington Board of Trade. He's now lobbying hard for the $4 billion "Sprawlway" project to widen I-270, and wrote to Montgomery County state Senators, trying to stop them from signing on to Brian Frosh's letter recommending Maryland study a transit alternative.

From his exasperated letters, it's apparent that he just can't conceive why anyone wouldn't want more roads leading to more distant houses and more strip malls covering more of the state of Maryland. Further, he apparently can't believe that economic vitality could actually come from a different pattern of growth.

Parsons' central argument boils down to this: Since we've always grown by highways and sprawl, we have no choice but to continue. Most people drive today in the area; therefore, we need to keep developing so that new people drive.

[Frosh] is incorrect in asserting that the expansion of I-270 is anything new in this corridor study. ... In fact, widening I-270 north of Shady Grove Road is already part of Montgomery County's officially adopted 10-year transportation plan (and has been for many years, since around 2002, I believe). ... Besides, last time I looked at the current MARC ridership, it was underperforming estimates and the current rush hour service was underutilized.

What about the freight rail that shares tracks with passenger rail?

There continue to be significant issues with competing freight traffic on the CSX lines (which may require adding a third track through a big part of the County, taking out homes and businesses in places like Kensington, Garrett Park Silver Spring, Rockville and Gaithersburg). ... Adding managed toll lanes between lower I-270 and the Western end of the Beltway at the American Legion Bridge (to connect with Virginia's HOT lanes already in construction) ... ought to be among your top priorities over the next decade.

MARC, by the way, believes they can improve service while coexisting with the freight railroads. They have a plan for expansion that's only waiting for funds, not tracks. Plus, because trains run fewer vehicles that carry more people than cars, more capacity could come from adding passing tracks in key areas instead of the whole way.

On the other hand, the Montgomery Planning Board's recommended Sprawlway alternative would displace 251 families, and adding more lanes from Rockville down to the Beltway and over to the American Legion Bridge would surely condemn many more.

Parsons' letter also contains some assertions which are either false, or based on information which nobody possesses except him. For example,

The highway portion of this project is likely to be paid for largely with the added toll revenues that the new managed toll lanes will generate. This is "new money" that would not be there if the lanes are not added. In the case of the ICC, tolls provided well more than half the total project cost and 270 could be even more.

Perhaps ACT's data is wrong. If so, SHA needs to release some actual revenue estimates. The Montgomery County Council sent them a letter before the recess asking for this information, along with other questions. When SHA responds, we can better judge whether this project will actually pay for itself as Parsons claims.

The cost alone should not be any reason to kill this project. The dramatic traffic relief it provides—61% reduction in congestion, 60% reduction in travel times, and up to 84% improvement in peak-hour speeds ... are among the other reasons we cannot afford to kill it.

This project isn't for the existing residents, or the existing truck traffic to Ohio which Parsons argues is so important. No, this project is for the new residents, the ones who will fill up the lanes after they're built. The question is not what existing people need, because new infrastructure won't generate more economic growth from them or relieve their congestion. New infrastructure will bring in new residents and new jobs.

The only question is where those residents and jobs should be. Parsons doesn't give any good reason why they should live on I-270 in Frederick County and drive through Montgomery to DC, except that it's the logical extension of the public policy of the past. That's not a good reason.

There's a lot of room around Shady Grove and Glenmont Metro stations. Montgomery County wants to create a dense urban neighborhood at White Flint. Silver Spring still has numerous lots still undeveloped, and coffee-shop owners dying for the new residents and businesses to patronize them. There's a big bioscience research facility at White Oak with plenty of room for more jobs, and the County has already looked into a Purple Line spur to reach it.

And none of this considers Prince George's County, with its many underutilized Metro stations, Baltimore, or the rest of the state. Maryland Politics Watch has been hammering at the idea that Montgomery County, and the I-270 corridor in particular, is the economic engine of the state.

But this also reflects the past infrastructure investment decisions. There are more jobs on 270 because East County fought new jobs for many years. There is more housing than jobs on the east side; if Maryland put some investment into that area, it could become more of an economic engine. So could Prince George's County and Baltimore.

This project definitely would detract from infrastructure investment and job growth in other areas. Parsons even reveals that he'd like the state to dump multiple years' worth of transportation funding into this project. He writes, "I would expect the project would be broken up into smaller segments that would be manageable within any given capital budget cycle for whatever public funding may be needed." To him, that's actually an argument for the project. It's not too expensive to build, as long as the state dedicates a period of time—say, a decade—during which they don't do anything else.

Parsons further argues that it's not appropriate for elected officials to weigh in on the best ways to spend $4 billion of public money. Doing so would be "blatant political interference in the study process," as happened with the ICC, delaying it 20 years. That assumes, of course, that the ICC was appropriate to build. Parsons thinks so, we know, but most of the Maryland state legislature now wishes there had been a little more political interference.

Why take so much ink to rebut Parsons' letters? Because changing the way we look at public policy is hard and takes time. Just look at President Obama's major initiatives, which are slogging through a very difficult process in Congress. We've thought about energy and health care in a particular way for decades if not longer, and there are many people committed to the status quo.

Likewise, once-influential business leaders come out of the woodwork to fight for more sprawl because they see it as the only way, as a choice between more of it or stagnation. That's a false choice. Senators Jennie Forehand, Rob Garagiola, Nancy King, Rona Kramer, Mike Lennett, Richard Madaleno, and Jamie Raskin are smart enough to see through Parsons' "the only way is the highway" rhetoric that is more appropriate to 1939 GM executives than Maryland's leaders of 2009.