Maryland transportation agencies, along with the Purple Line Transit Partners entity, have finally selected a new contractor to replace the one that quit before completing the light rail project. Maryland Transit Solutions (MTS) - a partnership between Dragados USA, Inc. and OHL USA, Inc. - won the bidding war, Purple Line Transit Partners announced today.
The announcement states that the final financial agreement should be signed by February 2022. Construction would then resume next spring. Jane Garvey, chair of PLTP's board, praised the fact that the search for a new partner took less than the 18 months typically needed to complete the bidding process on a project of this complexity. Only two bidders were ultimately in the running. The collapse of the construction process left a large swath of incomplete infrastructure and shuttered public amenities across Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Silver Spring, Long Branch and Prince George's County.
9 comments:
The purple line is just a great reset line to being crime into Chevy Chase and Bethesda
They ripped up Columbia country club
Wait to the crime goes up 10x
^^LOL, what a load of nonsense.
I can believe that anyone can truly believe that frequent and reliable east-west mass transit is not a very good idea. Once again the presence of well designed mass transit has often been proven to reduce crime by offering enhanced employment and housing opportunities for all races, creeds and socio-economic groups.
On the other hand, your point about the way they needed to do construction near the county club might mean some club members will need to turn to a life of crime, by purposefully targeting passing Purple Line cars with their drives.
Wait until the ease and convince of east-west travel goes up 10x.
11:45 Sorry, but I can't find much sympathy for the poor souls who now have to walk through *gasp* a TUNNEL, to get to the rest of their golf course.
@11:45 It was Columbia CC whose membership/leadership withdrew their objections --and legal challenges-- to the PL after receiving assurances the transit project would be modified to minimize damage/disruption/degradation to the golf course. The club is a collective Benedict Arnold to area residents who chose the community for what it offered: a quiet, safe, *suburban* environment in which to live and raise family. If we'd wanted to live proximal to high-density, "vibrant" urban enclaves, we'd have chosen DC.
While I'm not against good public transportation, the Purple line was originally slated to cost 5.6B. Now with current cost overruns of almost 800M, (frankly this figure looks to be far short of the actual amount they'll need to finish), no one is asking the real question of value. Personally, I ride the J2 & J4 busses to Silver Spring and they're fast and cheap. People who tout the benefits of the Purple line should have tried riding the bus instead of pushing this huge boondoggle waste of taxpayer dollars which was sold as a private/public partnership but we all know who gets the short end of the stick.
So when the final bill comes in closer to 10B, (as some are estimating), the people who love spending other people's money will throw a party also at taxpayers expense when they could have simply added a few more buses.
Glad to hear this project is going forward again.
We've always had a tunnel - 2 of them - to get to each side of the course. MD just paid us off....
@3:47 -- Don't kid yourself that the PL has anything to do with improved transportation, as 7:23 might have you believe. Do you actually think the Powers That Be, the "Deciders" who bulled this project to realization give/gave a fig about "well designed mass transit...offering enhanced employment and housing opportunities for all races, creeds and socio-economic groups"? Puh-lease. The allure that made this an irresistible draw was, as it always is in such matters, money, the hundreds of millions of dollars to be had by developing vast expanses of --in the developer's eyes, underutilized-- land, of developing myriad high-density, mixed-use sites where many score residents can be jammed atop each other to reach out their back windows and fairly touch the passing trains, mere feet away. Most of those new residents will bring with them taxable income to inflate the county and state coffers, so nary a whisper of caution, reserve, or hesitation would dare usher from the lips of any elected official.
Whether or not the project's Pollyanna declarations, of improved commutes for the [several hundred] beleaguered New Carroltonians in Dantean torment of their east-west travels and travails to Bethesda-centric jobs, is ultimately realized is altogether immaterial to those who have lobbied for, funded, and legislated on the PL's behalf. To those centers of local and state power, the Alpha and Omega of this adventure has been the riches promised at the far end of the track, and if it costs $10 billion to get there, so be it.
For a knee-slapping, rib-tickling good time, search Google for "WAMU How Governor Hogan Slimmed Down The Budget For The Purple Line," where you learn the new Silver Spring station will require a longer transfer for commuters, thus erasing the championed time savings the PL was claiming as its raison d'etre; you'll marvel at quotes like, “It’s really important to think of this investment in the context of where the market is going now. The demand to live in urban, walkable, and transit-accessible areas is booming and there is no end in sight." (Don't tell them that Covid has warped the housing market, sending residents of high-density cities fleeing for the suburbs, where there is, for the time being, at least, grass and space and an escape from your upstairs' neighbors clomping around at all hours); and my favorite, "“The important thing to keep in mind is we don’t build transportation to move people. That is not the goal. The goal is economic development. The means is by moving people." In other words, the PL is sort of the transportation equivalent of tortilla chips: an inconsequential means of delivering the actually important stuff. For the chips, it's guacamole or salsa; for the PL it's promise of trainloads of delicious cash all the attendant construction will bring to fill the circus clown-like, cavernous pockets of the developers and their elected vassals.
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