The City of Greenbelt filed its comments on Monday, May 24, on the Baltimore-Washington SCMaglev Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). Greenbelt’s comments, which were endorsed by the City of College Park and the Town of Landover Hills, uncovered 222 pages worth of errors and omissions in the DEIS. Chief among these is that the project’s ridership estimates and related projections are grossly over-inflated, leading to further inflation of estimated congestion relief and projected revenues. These fundamental flaws are apparent despite the fact that the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) failed to provide key information to the public, including the project’s ridership modeling reports, which are the foundation for much of the information in the DEIS.
Norman Marshall, president and founder of Smart Mobility, Inc., who assisted Greenbelt with its review, states, “The supposed congestion relief for non-SCMaglev travelers will not materialize. Instead, construction of the SCMaglev will create a two-tier system with a fast ride for the affluent and negative consequences for everyone else.”
Marshall’s report concludes that, “the DEIS overestimates travel time savings and reliability benefits by a factor of five or more. Three quarters of the purported economic benefits of SCMaglev are travel time and reliability benefits and these are overestimated by a factor of 15 or more…. The other significant economic benefits calculations in the DEIS rest both on inflated ridership and on unreliable vehicle miles traveled (VMT) multipliers.”
Further, the DEIS does not address who will pay the billions of dollars needed to construct the project and does not demonstrate that operating and maintenance costs will be offset by revenues, leading to unanswered questions regarding the financial viability of the project and the possible need for public subsidies.
The theme of deficient or hidden information runs throughout the DEIS. The review also found that the DEIS relies on limited geological information to evaluate the proposed routes, even though tunnel location and design is dependent on that information, and fails to explain how and why the FRA eliminated other routes – which may have been safer or better suited to the project – from consideration early in the NEPA process.
These issues are in addition to the toll the project would have on the natural environment, which has been well-documented by local jurisdictions and advocacy groups, including the Maryland Coalition for Responsible Transit, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
As Mayor Colin Byrd summed up: “The project would harm human health and the environment, destroy parkland, adversely affect the true public transit options that serve the area, and generally reduce the quality of life of Greenbelt … and other Prince George’s County residents. These negative impacts would disproportionately fall on environmental justice communities along the proposed routes, while the project would provide benefits to only a small minority of people who are wealthy enough to afford the high fares and fortunate enough to live near one of its stations, of which there are only three.”
The inaccurate information and inflated benefits portrayed in the DEIS – as well as the information entirely hidden from public view – has added fuel to years-long local opposition to the SCMaglev Project. In their letter to the FRA, Greenbelt, College Park and Landover Hills voice staunch opposition to the SCMaglev and request that the agency halt its consideration and stop wasting taxpayer dollars on this harmful and unnecessary project.
Greenbelt submitted the results of the review to the FRA and the Maryland Department of Transportation on the day the public comment period ended. The comments were also sent to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Governor Larry Hogan, U.S. Senators Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, and U.S. Representative Steny Hoyer, as well as state and local officials. The full comments and associated materials, including the cover letter and attachments, can be found at greenbeltmd.gov/maglev.