Our Comments on the FY2024-2029 Capital Budget

Today Bikemore provided testimony to the Baltimore City Planning Commission on the FY2024-2029 Baltimore City Department of Transportation Capital Budget. You can check out the budget yourself by clicking here. Our formal remarks are pasted in their entirety below, and we will update this post with answers to additional questions we sent in as they are answered.

Chairman Davis and members of the Planning Commission:

Over the years Bikemore has testified in CIP hearings critiquing Baltimore City Department of Transportation’s spending priorities and ability to execute, while also advocating that despite this, they need more money. 

Last year Bikemore worked with fellow transportation advocates, MACo, Baltimore City, and peer jurisdictions to advocate for increased Highway User Revenue shares for the city. One critique we heard in Annapolis was a fear that Baltimore City would ultimately redirect increased funds away from transportation. Despite this critique, we were successful, and DOT is supposed to be armed with significantly increased funds to spend on the massive backlog of deferred needs presented by Interim Director Johnson today.

Yet Finance is not issuing bonds this year for Baltimore City Department of Transportation, and are allocating Highway User Revenues for non-transportation purposes, ultimately resulting in a budget decrease over prior year. We urge the Planning Commission to condemn this approach. We can't stress this enough: this is money for transportation and the city is poised to completely embarrass itself in Annapolis by doing exactly what critics claimed it would do with these increased funds in diverting them elsewhere.

Looking at this year’s CIP, as in years past, we are concerned that legacy streetscaping and bridge division projects may be overbuilt and require subsequent extensive safety retrofit once constructed. The opportunity is now to fix those things before these projects go in, or even consider canceling projects that we can't fix and directing those funds to better projects. Retrofits of Harford Road and Central Avenue were expensive, and had our stated concerns been incorporated during 15, 30, 60, or 90% design, these concerns could have been addressed more affordably.

We are also concerned that the Baltimore City Department of Transportation continues to bear the burden of all ADA retrofits in the city, which is in part a product of their own unfortunate street cuts policies and franchise agreements. 

But largely, we are impressed with this CIP. It continues a trend of shifting investments toward ADA, Transit, and other critical complete streets safety retrofits. It preps us for large scale, transformative infrastructure changes on some of our most dangerous corridors that are barriers between disinvested neighborhoods and parks, jobs, and opportunity, with the existing Reconnecting Communities Grant Application and planning projects in the CIP for a subsequent application for Druid Park Lake Drive. We encourage the commission to prioritize these complete streets projects in ranking, specifically those advancing transit.

This brings us to the matter of execution. This year's departures of the BCDOT Director Steve Sharkey, Chief of Staff Adrea Turner, Data Analyst Brian Seel, Capital Planning Chief Lysh Lorber, Complete Streets Manager Graham Young, Lead Bike Planner Matt Hendrickson, and Interim Transit Bureau Chief and Shared Mobility Coordinator Meg Young are deeply concerning, and many of these departures are related to the lack of political will to execute projects. The short summary is, we're at a tipping point. There's a lot of good here. But will it be executed? 

We’ll give an example. The Eutaw Place separated bike lane is in this year's CIP. Funds have been banked for this project in the CIP for years. It was in the 2017 Separated Bike Lane Network Plan adopted by this commission, at the time slated for priority install within two years. Today, four years after it was supposed to be installed, we're finally at the finish line with a funded project for installation as soon as the weather warms.

Yet this week we've learned it's on indefinite hold–despite broad community support–over concerns from a vocal minority about mild parking loss, something that can't even legally be prioritized under our Complete Streets Ordinance. This decision may force us to return Maryland Bikeways grant funding, and affect millions of dollars in potential future awards. 

We fear transit projects that will require significant parking sacrifices to be truly transformative, like our North-South and East-West RTP corridors, could suffer a similar fate, negatively impacting hundreds of thousands of transit riders. 

This example shows we have a choice to tip forward, but it looks like we may tip backward. Even if we fix the money problem, we need real leadership and adherence to our laws to see these projects cross the finish line. 

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

Sincerely,

Jed Weeks
Interim Executive Director

Update on the Bike Budget (It's Bad)

Bikemore Executive Director Liz Cornish, Councilman Leon Pinkett, Councilman Ryan Dorsey, and MBAC Chair Jon Laria testifying at Planning Commission.

A month ago, Baltimore City Department of Transportation released a FY2020-2025 Capital Improvement Program that totally eliminated the line item for bicycle infrastructure for all six years.

Three weeks ago, we testified at the Planning Commission alongside Councilman Dorsey, Councilman Pinkett, and Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Commission Chair Jon Laria about this disparity, and members of the Planning Commission suggested BCDOT come back with a budget that reflects the adopted plan.

Yesterday BCDOT did the opposite, by presenting a plan to the Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Commission to build only about six miles of infrastructure by 2025.

BCDOTs revised CIP at a meeting yesterday. The 12.7 miles listed are “lane miles” not road miles, which means DOT is counting bike infrastructure in both directions on a street to inflate their numbers.

The Separated Lane Network Plan calls for building 77 road miles of infrastructure from 2018-2022, using $5 million in local dollars to match federal and state grants totaling about $27 million dollars over those five years.

BCDOT instead proposes building 6.35 road miles of infrastructure from 2020-2025, using just $3 million of local and federal dollars total. About 3 miles of this proposal are facilities that should have been built back in 2017.

If we’re being generous and count all 6.35 miles of infrastructure, BCDOT plans to ignore 92% of the plan they paid to develop and asked the Planning Commission to adopt. At the pace they propose, it will take over 70 years to implement the 5 year Separated Lane Network Plan.

After overwhelmingly negative feedback at the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Commission yesterday, it’s possible BCDOT will again revise their CIP request for today’s Planning Commission hearing.

But here’s where we’re at right now:

• A BCDOT budget that blatantly ignores adopted city plans

• A bicycle program over 20 miles behind schedule and a clear plan to fall further behind

• Constant threats to downgrade and remove existing bike infrastructure

• A missed deadline on the very first Complete Streets Ordinance update

• A mass departure of talented BCDOT staff

• Rising injury and death on our roadways

Even if the CIP is revised to show everything we want on paper, how can the Director be trusted to faithfully implement it, given these past two presentations, where we were told there was no capacity or intent to do that very implementation? How can we trust this agency to act in good faith when all the signs listed above prove they’re failing on nearly every front?

Baltimore City Department of Transportation will present their revised CIP at 3:00PM today, with public comment to follow. We plan to be there to highlight our concerns, and welcome citizens to join us.

Baltimore City DOT CIP Follow-Up | 417 E. Fayette Street, 8th Floor | 3:00PM until comments conclude

If you can’t join us, you’re also welcome to send an email expressing your concerns and the meaningful affect of bicycle infrastructure on your choice to live, work, and play in Baltimore to the Planning Department for inclusion in the Commission file (deptofplanning@baltimorecity.gov) and BCDOT Director Pourciau (michelle.pourciau@baltimorecity.gov).

It's the first budget after Complete Streets, and there's $0 for bikes.

The 2017 Separated Lane Network Plan. To stay on schedule, everything in Purple should be constructed this year, but none of it will be.

You read that right.

It’s been just over a month since the passage of Baltimore Complete Streets, the nationally recognized Complete Streets ordinance that legally mandates Baltimore design streets through an equity lens, and prioritize pedestrians and bicyclists to the greatest extent possible. Baltimore City Department of Transportation was required to provide an update to the Baltimore City Council Land Use and Transportation Committee on day 30 after enactment, but no such update came.

Instead, we were greeted with the FY2020-2025 Capital Improvement Program, the city’s latest budget documents. Traditionally, Baltimore City DOT includes line item 508-019 Citywide Bike Infrastructure, which details proposed funding for bike improvements over the following six fiscal years, breaking down revenue sources by general/local funds, state grants, and federal highway grants and allocations.

FY2019-2024 CIP showing the line item for Citywide Bike Infrastructure. It was removed in this year’s CIP.

The 2017 Separated Lane Network Plan, adopted by the Baltimore City Planning Commission under Mayor Pugh, specifically calls for $1,000,000 per year of General Funds for five years. By leveraging Maryland Department of Transportation Bikeways and Federal Transportation Alternatives Program grants that require a local match, this approximately $5 million in local dollars could build the entire Separated Lane Network in five years. Building this network would connect 85% of Baltimoreans to low stress bicycle infrastructure. It’s one of the lowest cost, highest return bike plans in the country.

2017 Separated Lane Network construction timeline, budget, and revenue sources.

It’s pretty simple. Win big grants with small matches of local dollars. Build 17 miles of high quality separated and supporting infrastructure per year for five years. End with one of the best networks in the country.

Instead, we have no money for design and construction this year. Baltimore City Department of Transportation will tell you they plan on building 17 miles of infrastructure in 2019, and that everything’s fine. But let’s take a look at what that infrastructure actually is:

BCDOT’s proposed timelines for bike facilities

Every project listed for “Proposed 2019” is a prior year project. Every single one of these projects was already counted in lane mile totals in 2017 when the Separated Lane Network plan was adopted, because all of these projects were supposed to have been constructed by then. Delaying projects by anywhere from 3-7 years doesn’t mean you get to count them again.

The “Proposed 2020-2022” projects include MLK Jr, Eutaw Street, 20th Street, and Baker Street. If you refer back to the Separated Lane Network Plan map at the top, you’ll see these projects are supposed to be completed this year, in 2019, not proposed for 2022, the year the entire network plan is supposed to be built.

In short, Baltimore City Department of Transportation has budgeted zero dollars of new bike design and construction money for the next six years. The projects they’re double counting as mileage are projects that were already counted in prior years. And the new projects they’re proposing are coming years late, if at all since they haven’t promised funding alongside them.

We will be testifying at the Baltimore City Planning Commission on Thursday, January 10th about this disparity between city-adopted plans and the Capital Improvement Budget.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll also highlight some planned and ongoing infrastructure projects that are costing or will cost the city millions of dollars while making streets less safe for people walking, biking, and taking public transit.

Baltimore City Department of Transportation knew this Complete Streets ordinance was coming. They knew it was going to pass. This budget was an opportunity for them to show that they were making preparations to right their ship, but instead they continue to fire cannons at their own sails.