Rapid bus edges light rail in debate

Planners say flexibility of CCT options will be key to funding, timing

‘‘If it it’s light rail, the flexibility is much reduced,” said board Chairman Royce Hanson. ‘‘... On the other hand, if it’s bus rapid transit, you could have your collector bus be the main-line bus once it hits the guide way. ... It could be local for a while and then become express.”

By having rapid bus, main-line buses could run the circuit while locally focused lines could circulate around Clarksburg, Germantown and the Life Sciences Center, he said.

‘‘The other advantage that I see in it is that, from a timing perspective, we could get something going fairly fast. And secondly, you can grow the service with the population,” he said. ‘‘If we go to light rail you’re really making an upfront investment that ...[for] the first several years of that operation ... will probably be operating at well less than its capacity. ‘‘

Also at issue is whether the first stretch of the CCT, from the Shady Grove Metro station through the King Farm area to Metropolitan Grove in Gaithersburg, would be slightly realigned from its proposed route to make stops in the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center.

Early projections show that doing so would add 15,000 to 20,000 daily riders, a boost of more than 50 percent over current projections, according to Rick Kiegel, who has led the Maryland Transit Administration’s CCT project team for past five years. But doing so would not come without a downside.

‘‘We have to recognize that while the potential for additional ridership is great ... there are additional negative aspects that have to be considered. Primarily is the cost of the additional alignment length. Secondarily is the travel time associated with added length of the line,” Kiegel said.

‘‘Any additional travel time for those riders that have got on, say at Comsat or Germantown, will be a ... great negative to the ridership,” he said.

Kiegel also noted that if state planners determine that changing the alignment poses a significant environmental impact, it could delay the timeline by as much as two years. The project could be within four years of breaking ground, according to state planners.

Getting the realignment is crucial to the long-range plans of Johns Hopkins University, which envisions a research campus in and around the Life Sciences Center with more than 10 million square feet of laboratory and office space, more than 300,000 square feet of retail space and more than 10,000 homes.

The university wants a stop planned at Decoverly Drive to be moved south, near Medical Center Drive, as well as new stops at the site of the current county-owned Public Safety Training Academy and the current Belward farm, the core of its planned research center, near Muddy Branch and Darnestown roads.

Hopkins representatives have no preference between light rail and rapid bus, noting that several of the leading research centers in Asia use various combinations of mass transit.

‘‘Either option would be preferable to single occupancy automobiles in an era of rising gas costs,” David McDonough, a senior real estate planner for Hopkins, wrote in an e-mail.

County officials will be able to suggest their preferred mode and alignment. The decision ultimately will fall to Gov. Martin O’Malley and Transportation Secretary John Porcari. A determination is due by spring.

Once the mode and alignment questions are settled, the CCT will have to compete for federal dollars not only on a national level, but against two other Metro projects in Maryland: the Purple Line connecting Bethesda and New Carrollton and the Red Line extension to Baltimore.

The three projects are at similar points in their planning.

‘‘Those three projects are going to be generally competing for the same state funds for the state matching portion of the projects,” Kiegel said. ‘‘... There will be a point where in the future where we’ll have to evaluate the benefits of the CCT vs. the Purple Line vs. the Red Line in Baltimore. Realistically speaking, to have two major transit projects invested in Montgomery County may not sit well with the rest of the [state’s] delegations,” Kiegel said.

Jean B. Cryor, a former state delegate who is now a member of the Planning Board, did not disagree.

‘‘This is important for planning, but also important for the political will and political skill to pull together the kind of support that this needs, both on the state level and on the federal level,” she said. ‘‘... So a lot of people are going to have to give up on some of the smaller ideas they have on how it should be, where it should be, what it should be.”

She said that ‘‘to get this thing as a project all the way through, there has to be real cooperation and real giving in on all sides.”

The CCT is planned in two phases. The first could be under construction as early as 2012. The second, from Metropolitan Grove to the Comsat building in Clarksburg, ‘‘would likely occur ... within the next five to 10 years after that,” Kiegel said. He noted that extending the CCT to Frederick, as has been discussed, could take another 30 to 50 years.