Save The Trail Petition

Testimony before the

COG Transportation Planning Board

July 17 , 2009

Kristin Schneeman, Bethesda

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today.  My name is Kristin Schneeman, and I am a regular user of the Capital Crescent/Georgetown Branch Trail, and a concerned taxpayer.  I am here to urge this Board to demonstrate that it has a strategic vision for addressing the urgent transportation needs of this state and region.  The Governor has not yet made a decision about the route and mode of the Purple Line.  Please don’t allow yourselves to be caught up in a process that has been proceeding on its own internal logic for more than twenty years.  We live now in a very different world than when this project was first conceived, with many transportation and environmental needs and not a lot of resources. 

What will the people of Maryland sacrifice in order to build the Purple Line?  Most likely the Corridor Cities Transitway – which was written about in today’s Washington Post – which would alleviate the intolerable congestion along Route 270 and to which there is no organized opposition.  Certainly the specific road projects which the State has asked this Board to remove from the CLRP due to foreseeable Purple Line cost increases before the project has even broken ground.

As the costs of the project continue to escalate – which we all know is inevitable – many of us in the community fully expect the things being offered up as benefits to go by the wayside, including the grass tracks, the attractive landscaping and fencing.  Perhaps even the trail itself; there has been no stable, predictable source of funding for building and maintaining the trail identified; it is explicitly not part of the project costs.  The broken promise of a trail near the Intercounty Connector is cautionary.

By the state’s own admission, this project will not remove cars from the road and hence will not improve current conditions for drivers trying to get across the county.  It will result in the permanent loss of thousands upon thousands of mature trees and wreck a precious environmental resource.  That is not consistent with this region’s commitment to the preservation and enhancement of open space and to smart growth.

I urge you to evaluate this project with a completely open mind – and just as importantly, in the context of all the other pressing transportation needs this region has at a time of economic distress.  Please don’t become enablers of the Purple Line juggernaut.