ACTION ALERT
Write to your members of Congress today. Tell them to give one clear message to the Federal Agencies that will decide the fate of the toll lane project: NO TOLL LANES ON I-270/I-495!
Click here to send your message directly to Senators Van Hollen and Cardin and Representative Raskin or Trone.
Read below for “why now”, the bigger picture, and quick message ideas. Then see new reasons to oppose the toll lanes, including MDOT’s recent letter to the City of Rockville, Virginia Gov. Youngkin’s toll-lane taunting of Marylanders, and hilarious new takes on the toll-lane project’s most notorious fails.
“Uncongested managed lanes adjacent to congested general purpose lanes.” From Federal Highway Administration report, Sec. 1.0
The right time to reach out to Congress…is now!
The toll-lane project can't be finalized until its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is approved by the Federal Highway Administration. MDOT and Transurban are rushing to get the incomplete, inaccurate EIS greenlighted this fall so they can sign final contracts while Gov. Hogan is still in office.
With the project increasingly on the U.S. government's radar, it's time to send thousands of constituent messages to our members of Congress, urging them to reject MDOT's project.
The big-picture reason for pivoting to Congress
I-270 and I-495 belong to the public. They connect us to the people and places that make up our lives. MDOT and their contractor Transurban want to privatize our highways and control how we and our children and grandchildren will connect for the next 60 years.
Together, we can stop this takeover and make sure transportation projects support the public good. You’ve sent waves of powerful messages before, including an astounding 5,000 comments to MDOT about the toll lane project’s wholly deficient environmental impact statements.
We need to mobilize again, this time to energize our members of Congress. We need them to amplify our messages and carry them to Federal Agencies that can stop the toll lanes.
Plenty of choices about what to say
Click here to tell your members of Congress why you oppose the toll lanes. You can use or edit the prepopulated text. Or you can give your own thoughts in your own words. Speak from your heart. Share your anger and fears. Any approach you take will work.
You can write to our Senators and Representatives about:
Sky-high rush hour tolls up to $50 each way.
Increased congestion due to new and worsening bottlenecks.
Decreased number of free lanes.
Destruction of the $132,000,000 improvements that have eliminated most congestion on lower I-270.
Five years of construction misery.
Decreased safety due to lack of inside shoulders; crowding of trucks into fewer free lanes; dangerous merge points.
Social, economic, and environmental injustice.
Enormous environmental damage at a time of climate emergency.
Significant loss of tree cover, including in our parks.
Huge financial risk to taxpayers; failure of MDOT to conduct/share cost analyses.
Entire Beltway back on the table as a future phase of the toll-lane plan.
Fatally flawed traffic modeling.
MDOT’s refusal to conduct adequate air/water analyses or stipulate mitigations.
Refusal to share key legal documentation, including the Capital Beltway Accord between VA and MD, and contractor agreements.
For more information on toll-lane topics, see “Note on References” below.
The City of Rockville’s powerful letter to MDOT
The Rockville Mayor and Council just sent a masterful response to MDOT’s request for the City to agree that “the impacts of the [toll lane project] on Rockmead Park, Woottons Mill Park, and Rockville Senior Center and Park, which are owned and managed by the City of Rockville, are minor…”
The City did not agree. Instead, the Mayor and Council said, among their many other strong, smart statements, “…the City of Rockville would experience by far the largest proportion of the Proposed 1-495/1-270 Project-related property impacts of any community…” and “We will not repeat our prior comments here. But we incorporate them in larger context of, at a minimum, ensuring impacts to the City of Rockville are fully recognized, analyzed, and mitigated.”
Thank you, Mayor Newton and Council Members Ashton, Feinberg, Myles, and Pierzchala.
Virginia Gov. shovels dirt and tells the truth about MDOT’s Toll-Lanes
The toll-lane happy talk between the Governors of MD and VA may be over. At last week’s groundbreaking for more Northern VA toll lanes -- lanes to be built in part and inexplicably by Maryland -- Gov. Youngkin shoveled actual dirt with the U.S. head of toll giant Transurban and addressed the following toll-lane remarks to Gov. Hogan (who wasn’t there):
“Yes, we’re going to take jobs from Maryland into Virginia. Yes, we’re going to compete to grow faster than Maryland. And yes, Gov. Hogan, we need you to finish your side of this project.”
Unfortunately, our governor is rushing to do just that.
“OOPS! Lanes”: A funny version that’s a lot truer than MDOT’s
Here’s a whole new approach to pointing out fatal flaws in the toll lane project. With MDOT now calling toll-lanes “OP Lanes,” the Maryland Transit Opportunities Coalition, our valued partner, created “OOPS! Lanes, a hilarious and most instructive website. Check out these samples:
Note on references for toll-lane issues
The most authoritative compilation of analyses and citations about the toll-lane project is the Sierra Club’s official comments on the project’s Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement. The document was written by nationally known legal and technical experts with input from local advocates and signed by our coalition of 50+ advocacy groups and the City of Rockville. The comments provide not only the basis for future legal action, but fuel to spur our grassroots efforts. For detailed discussions and supporting evidence, click on specific issues in the document’s table of contents (pp. vi-ix).
To support grassroots efforts
DontWiden270.org does not accept donations. But we strongly support the work of our valued partners. If you’d like to help with the costs of outreach materials about the toll lanes, please consider a donation to Citizens Against Beltway Expansion. Go to https://www.cabe495.com/. THANK YOU!