You’re a Clarksburg parent of two young children. You spend your first 20-minute commute dropping them off at Snowden Farm Elementary School, and now you start your next 60-minute commute into Tyson’s Corner (total 80 minutes). After a day of “work” (in the DC sense of the word), you start your 75-minute commute back to Clarksburg. On this day, however, a stall on the American Legion Bridge turns the journey into a 90-minute gantlet (daily total: 2 hours 50 minutes; annual total 566 hours). When you finally walk into your home, you’re so disoriented you feel like you’re still driving.
How can we alleviate the situation of up-county commuters? Here are two alternatives and their primary features.
| Governor Larry Hogan’s Solution & Features | Sierra Club’s Solution & Features (view) |
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If you’ve been commuting for five years into NoVA or DC, which solution provides you with relief and sooner? Does the Sierra Club’s solution mention anything about reduced commute times? Do you even know where Plummers Island is?
There is also the issue of standing. How many of the Sierra Club’s advocates do the upcounty-NoVA commute? How many of them live anywhere close to the impacted area? How many of them already have quick access to Metro? If they have no standing, why are they involved?
Citizens Against Beltway Expansion, one of the Sierra Club’s partners in opposing the expansion, states one of their objectives quite clearly:
If there are delays in the project, the 2022 elections could usher in a new governor and comptroller ready to block the toll lanes.
There you have it. This organization’s objective is to block toll lanes, and nothing more. (There is a toll for using the Metro, and this group expresses no opposition to that.) They offer no relief for the commuters, no compassion, no empathy. It’s all about control. All this group wants is to block an improvement that another group needs.
MoCo Sierra Club’s behavior, and that of all other organizations blocking road expansion, would be understandable if they were equally forceful in promoting alternative solutions, such as bringing jobs into MoCo and thereby eliminating the need for three-hour commutes each day. You won’t find any Sierra Club initiative in that regard.
As Winston Churchill said (among several other historical figures), “I no longer listen to what people say, I just watch what they do. Behavior never lies.” How true it is. Blocking a needed improvement, and not promoting an alternative, means the Sierra Club’s objective is control.
Personally, I’m opposed to forcibly expanding the I-270 or the Beltway. Property rights are human rights, and we cannot allow farces such as “eminent domain” to force people off their land for some nebulous and arbitrary greater good. In this sense, objections by homeowners along the impacted route are completely justified. Those homeowners don’t need to promote alternatives because they have undeniable standing.
