P3 Considered for American Legion Bridge, Again

A productive meeting between U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Maryland Governor Wes Moore in January yielded an interesting, though certainly not novel, idea: a P3 to deliver the reconstruction of the American Legion Bridge.

The joint statement released after the meeting reads, in part: “Specifically for the American Legion bridge, we agreed about the need to speed up the reconstruction and leverage innovative approaches like a public private partnership (P3) that will ensure Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. commuters can soon experience some much needed traffic relief from the most congested corridor in America.”

The Department of Transportation, for its part, appears interested in a P3 beyond just the American Legion Bridge, but also on the potential to deliver express lanes along I-495 and I-270 on the Maryland side of the DC beltway. In December, it published a Request for Information (RFI) on both the bridge replacement and express lanes projects.

The RFI includes questions like the following: “What are the most significant challenges or barriers preventing the timely completion of the I-495 & I-270 Managed Lane Project?”

Blast from the Immediate Past

It is promising that both the state and federal governments are interested in a P3 for the American Legion Bridge, and maybe even Beltway express lanes in Maryland. Also, RFIs are never a bad thing.

However, the best source of information on how to deliver, and how to not deliver, a P3 to address traffic congestion on that corridor would be to simply dust off the plans that Maryland spent $200 million developing, permitting and procuring for the exact same project between 2017 and 2023. That effort produced more than 50,000 pages of environmental studies.

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