American Dream

Md. panel begins look at another bay bridge

Plans are in earliest stage, but opposition heating up

By Chris Guy
Sun Staff

July 18, 2005

Quotes:

There is no good place to build a new Chesapeake Bay bridge, no place that won't cost billions, no place that won't take 20 years to plan and construct, no place that won't prompt a tooth-and-nails battle with nearby residents, slow-growth forces and environmentalists.

But leaving things the way they are with one crossing would make current rush-hour tie-ups seem like child's play, and weekend backups could routinely stretch 12 miles in the doomsday gridlock predicted by traffic experts, who foresee more than a 40 percent increase in the number of vehicles using the existing bridge by 2025.

More than a half-century since the Bay Bridge spanned the Chesapeake and 30 years after its three-lane twin spurred a quickening march to and from the Eastern Shore, a 19-member state task force is taking tentative steps to find another crossing.

To transportation planners, those look like a baseline for state officials who eventually will have to choose a site. To residents in counties that could be affected, the diagrams seem to be aimed at them.

In Kent County, Chestertown Mayor Margo Bailey began making a stink when she heard that Kent County was included in the northernmost bay zone. She has already started distributing an incendiary petition that says state officials are considering a "massive bridge and interstate-like corridor ... the biggest threat in the 363-year history of our county."

Republican Del. Richard A. Sossi -- who represents Kent County as well as Kent Island, where the current 4.35-mile spans make life difficult for him and constituents who live on the island -- says jokingly that he plans to nominate Bailey for a state "Chicken Little, the sky is falling, award."

"I just do not see anything more for Kent Island," said Sossi, who has lived there for 30 years as traffic gradually increased to the point where islanders are left virtually housebound on weekends. "You can't put 20 pounds of feathers in a 10-pound bag."

Sossi says the alternative is to build somewhere south of the current bridge, which links Sandy Point and Kent Island, a choice that he says could siphon traffic from Southern Maryland, the Washington suburbs and Northern Virginia. That leaves zones 3 and 4, which include Talbot and Dorchester counties
on the Eastern Shore and Anne Arundel and Calvert counties on the west side of the bay.

Environmentalists such as Dru Schmidt-Perkins of 1000 Friends of Maryland have barely begun to look at the
issue. Still, they worry that any new bridge will generate a new round of development in rural areas that are ill-equipped to handle it.

The state's Reach the Beach campaign of the late 1980s, a series of road improvements aimed at speeding the trip to Ocean City, clearly shows the unintended impact of improving access to the Eastern Shore, she says.

"Any [additional] crossing, north or south, and there will be an explosion of growth, beyond what we're already seeing on the Shore, on both sides of the bay," Schmidt-Perkins said. "This is a long way from happening, but it would not reduce
traffic anywhere. It would increase traffic."

Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun

For readers not familiar with Maryland's geography, Kent County and Kent Island are both part of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But Kent Island is in Queen Anne's County (not Kent County), and is where the current Bay Bridge spans touch down on the Eastern Shore side - Kent Island, thanks at least in part to growth restrictions in the Baltimore and Washington suburbs, has become a de-facto suburb of both, and of Annapolis, which lies not far from the western end of the Bay Bridge.