Maryland needs to replace the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, as everyone who has driven on it knows. Yet construction to replace the structure is only scheduled to begin in 2032. The most shocking aspect of this story is that locals aren’t more shocked.
Tens of thousands of drivers cross the Bay Bridge every day. It’s a vital link to the Eastern Shore. The bridge has no shoulders. No new lanes have been added in more than half a century while the populations of the counties it connects have grown by 82 percent and 175 percent.
Authorities began to study how to replace the bridge in 2016. The board of the Maryland Transportation Authority approved a proposal to build a new bridge last Thursday. This is yet another important infrastructure project Americans needed yesterday that will take decades to complete — and only in the unlikely event that it stays on schedule.
People have become numb to the absurdity of these timeframes and the language around them, but the consequences of this delay are too real. While government officials spent the better part of a decade studying the project, the existing bridge grew older and more overburdened. The proposal that has finally been approved is twice as expensive as previous estimates.
That nine-year process didn’t even produce a complete design for the bridge. And the proposal requires federal approval, even though it’s a state-owned, state-operated bridge completely within one state. Massive environmental reports still need to be written, which will require expensive consultants.
But isn’t the environmental review actually quite simple? It’s never great for the environment to build a giant bridge, but there’s already a giant bridge there that carries about 80,000 vehicles per day. MDTA should be as clean as reasonably possible during construction, but ultimately human civilization needs the bridge, and it needs to be better than the one that is currently there.
The expansion to eight lanes with a clearance high enough for large cargo ships to pass under, as the proposal outlines, is the right idea. It’s already a toll bridge, so raising money should be easy as well. In addition to the current toll revenue and capital budget, MDTA can issue bonds against the value of the future toll revenue.
America has the technical talent and money to make projects like this happen. The originalBay Bridge went from authorizing legislation in 1947 to construction starting in 1949 to opening for traffic in 1952, and it was the world’s longest continuous over-water steel structure at the time. It should not take four times as long to repeat that accomplishment with better technology and more money.
The problem is that politicians and bureaucrats only study some of the costs during their onerous review process. It’s a safe bet that lawyers for radical environmentalists, backed by NIMBY donors, will dredge up some “expert” with impressive sounding credentials to testify about some theoretical “harm.” They won’t take into account the inconvenience of the status quo to Marylanders. All they’re really doing is making the project take longer and cost more.
The fundamental problem is not incompetent bureaucrats but a system of overlapping laws and overcautious regulations that enable endless rounds of activist scaremongering. The actual purpose of the project — safely and efficiently transporting people and goods — gets left by the wayside. Complacent Marylanders who accept that this is just the way things work in 2025 are complicit in the state falling further behind.
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