Re: "Old traffic numbers could stall new roads", Sun, August 22, 1999

This morning, the Transportation Steering Committee – the Baltimore Region’s transportation planning authority – voted to use obsolete data to analyze the impact of new road projects on the Region’s air quality. The Committee members know that the Region’s air quality is worse than the analysis will show. More recent and reliable data are available.

Some of the reasons given by committee members for using faulty data are: other regions are doing it this way; it conforms to how they’ve been doing their analysis in the past; the law does not prevent them from doing it this way.

If other regions abdicate responsibility for the health and well-being of its citizens, they should be criticized, not emulated. If using obsolete data conforms to current and past practices – we should admit that those practices have contributed to nine "code-red" days of dangerous air pollution in the Baltimore Region this summer. The law may not prevent a stagnant bureaucracy from ignoring the facts, but the Clean Air Act certainly does not recommend that elected officials "do the least they can do" to reduce pollution.

The public is starved for leadership from its elected officials. Why doesn’t the Transportation Steering Committee make the right decision on its own, instead of forcing the public to demand ethical behavior from government?