It is a privilege for me to kick-off the Vision 2030 Process here in the Baltimore Region. My task today is to present an overview of the Baltimore region's future, with emphasis upon transportation policy. However, you cannot reasonably consider the future of such policy without taking account of your region's future development and land-uses.

So I will start by looking at some basic population and development trends in the Baltimore region. Here, as in all American metropolitan areas, growth produces two sets of problems.

One set is directly growth-related. It includes traffic congestion, air pollution, absorption of open space, rising infrastructure costs, and affordable housing shortages. This set of problems mainly affects suburbanites in your five outlying counties.

The second set of problems arises from the concentration of poor minority house- holds in older core areas. Your region is hard hit by such problems, especially in Baltimore City. They include high crime and drug addiction rates, poor quality schools, low levels of worker skills and many female-headed households. These conditions motivate many middle-class households of all races to abandon the city.

The basic cause of these problems is the concentration of low-income households within older areas that inherently arises from our metropolitan-area development process. This is caused by (1) local regulations that require all newly-built housing to be of high cost, (2) not paying for public subsidies to allow the poor to live in new units, thus new areas, (3) exclusionary zoning practices in many growing suburbs, and (4) pervasive racial segregation. These causes are all present here.

The most important growth trend in your region is relatively slow growth - which generates regional population stability. From 1990 to 2000, Maryland gained just over half a million persons, a compound annual rate of growth just over 1%. The Baltimore Region grew only two-thirds of 1% per year, vs. 1.24% for the whole U.S.

The non-Hispanic white population of Maryland as a whole actually declined by about 40,000 during the 1990s, mainly due to net out-migration. The 2000 Census indicated that about 179,000 whites net moved out of Maryland in the 1990s. In contrast, about 228,000 African-Americans, net, migrated into the state, in addition to their natural increase here, for a total gain of 287,000. Within the Baltimore Region, the white population rose only 0.2%; whereas all other groups increased by 24% B including 12% among African-Americans and 45% among Hispanics. Outside Baltimore City, the total non-white population rose 74%.

If these trends continue, the white population of Maryland will fall from 62 percent in 2000 to about 51 percent in 2010, and be less than 50 percent by 2012. However, I am not certain these Census data are reliable, because the national figures on race are definitely inaccurate. But I am sure your region is growing relatively slowly compared to many other regions like Phoenix, Atlanta, and Washington. That has big implications for your future economic development.

A second key trend is continuing movement of both people and jobs of all races out of Baltimore City into the suburbs. This is caused by both pull and push factors, some of which I mentioned in discussing concentrated poverty within the city. The city lost 84,000 people - 27 percent of its 1990 whites and 3.9 percent of its blacks.

My own studies show that such concentration of poverty is not caused by "sprawl," which means low-density development at the region's edges. Therefore, shifting to a more dense form of growth - which Maryland's "smart growth" program involves - will not reduce the concentration of poor people in older areas.

The third key trend is increasing problems in older suburban areas similar to problems within the city of Baltimore. These include higher proportions of public school children eligible for school lunches, more crime, and more female-headed households.

This is leading to social polarization between high-need, low-resource places and low-need, high-resource places, as the Citizens Planning and Housing Association said in 1997. The average per capita property tax base for the entire region in 1994 was $168,000. But it was only $90,000 for the city; $170,000s for Baltimore and Harford Counties; $269,000 in Howard and $230,000 in Anne Arundel.

This polarizing is aggravated by "fiscal zoning" by higher-income communities designed to keep lower-cost and multi-family housing out of their areas. If an area excludes all new housing that costs more fiscally than it pays in taxes, it will exclude most multi-family units and affordable single-family units - which forces poor people to live in older areas. Thus, the problems caused by concentrated poverty are gradually going to spread farther out from the city into the suburbs.

The fourth key trend is continued racial segregation in housing markets, both city and suburban. This is a fundamental national problem, not confined to Maryland. Racial segregation has several causes, but the most crucial one is the unwillingness of most whites to live in areas that are more than 25 to 33 percent African-American. This bias not only produces segregation, but also reduces the demand for housing in African-American areas. That prevents residents there from building up equity in their homes as fast as whites can. That helps keep most African-Americans poorer than most whites, thus reinforcing the unwillingness of whites to live in African-American areas. Even when African-Americans move to the suburbs, they still find themselves mainly in racially segregated neighborhoods. Your suburban counties are 79 percent white.

The last growth trend is that Maryland's "smart growth" strategy is directing most growth close to built-up suburban areas and keeping many farther-out areas as open space at the edges of the suburban counties. This strategy may succeed in preserving open space, but it does not reduce concentrated poverty in older areas, or its ill effects.

Now let me discuss some basic present and future transportation trends in your region.

The first trend will be continued dominance of ground transportation by private vehicles rather than public transit. As your population increases, it will continue to rely mainly upon private vehicles for movement because they are in most cases faster, more comfortable, more convenient, more flexible in combining multiple stops on one trip, and often cheaper, than public transit. In 1990, the shares of commuters using transit in this region were 22.0% for Baltimore City, but only 2.8% for the outlying counties; hence 7.9% overall. These fractions may be somewhat larger today because of your new transit systems. But the vast majority of commuters use private cars.

You will be unable to persuade any large number of commuters to use public transit no matter how much better transit becomes, unless you get the rest of the nation to subsidize a huge regional system like the one built in Washington. Making the use of cars too costly through gas taxes, etc., is politically impossible.

A second trend is the focus of road spending in your region on the high-income, fast growth outside counties - Howard and Anne Arundel. From 1985 to 1995, $1.55 billion was allocated to roads for the region, and $880 million or 56.8 percent was spent in those two counties, although they contained only 29.3 percent of the region's 2000 population. But they did gain 74 percent of the region's growth in the 1990s.

A third trend is the relatively disconnected nature of your public transit. Your heavy rail Metro system is not closely linked to your light rail system, and parking at Metro stations has not been expanded to maximize its use. There are also poor linkages between inner city and suburbs. This shows disjointed planning and operation.

A fourth trend will be the rising importance of your BWI Airport as other major terminals in the region become increasingly overcrowded. But this may take a while.

What are some of the key future growth and development Implications of these trends?

Baltimore City is likely to continue to empty out unless major changes are made there that seem unlikely. Those changes would include measurable school improvements, increased drug prevention and rehabilitation, lower crime rates, and further extensive gentrification around the Inner Harbor and Johns Hopkins University.

The increasing social polarization between high-need, low-resource areas and low-need, high-resource areas will get worse until corrective regional policies are adopted.

There needs to be some rebalancing of fiscal resources so that high-need places have more access to public resources. This could be tax-base sharing or some other type of resource redistribution. This would benefit many suburbs, not just the city, which already has 40% of its budget covered by State of Maryland funds.

Successfully attacking urban decline would require reducing present core-area concentrations of poor minority-group households by making it possible for more of them to live in the suburbs near where most job growth is occurring and where better neighborhoods and schools are available. That would require portable vouchers or other subsidies, and a lowering of regulatory barriers to construction of more lower-cost and affordable multi-family units in the suburbs. This type of policy has been bitterly resisted by suburban residents, and is still controversial.

To promote economic development, the region should emphasize stability and its low-tension atmosphere, rather than fast growth. Slower growth can create a more relaxed, non-frenetic, more healthful pace of life. Play up the advantages of slow growth.

One advantage is lower housing prices and costs of living than in fast-growth areas. The median home sold here in the third quarter of 2000 was priced at $160,800, vs. $188,800 in Washington, $231,400 in New York, $356,000 in Boston, and $452,300 in San Francisco. Other living costs are also lower here.

There will be smaller increases in traffic congestion and commuting times here than in areas with faster growth, such as Washington, San Jose, San Francisco, and Atlanta. The average commuting time here in 1990 was 25.9 minutes.

Your region has excellent access to recreation and cultural activities. You also have strong health care and medical research industries.

This area is less likely to have fewer shortages of workers than faster growth areas in periods of intense prosperity such as that we had in much of the late 1990s.

I have been told that public officials and citizens in this region don't like to talk about regional governance arrangements. It is true that you have large-scale county governments, not small fragmented ones; hence you are somewhat less susceptible to extreme parochialism in land-use policies than places with lots of small suburbs. Also, your smart-growth strategy by-passes central coordination, using financial incentives.

Even so, your region's major problems are caused by trends acting across the entire region, so trying to deal with them without some type of overall planning and coordination will not work. This is particularly necessary because of the rising social polarization between the "have" and "have-less" elements of your region.

If your top priority is preserving local autonomy and power, rather than solving problems, then keep on ignoring the need for regional coordination arrangements. But if you want to improve the quality of life in your region by grappling with your problems more successfully, you should consider adopting regional arrangements. The vision process presents an opportunity to create such a regional consensus.

Now let me focus on transportation policies.

Public transit is most important to low-income residents. Some experts believe the poor are concentrated in older cities because they can get better access to public transit there. In most regions, existing transit authorities bolstered by transit unions want to maintain monopolies of very inefficient large-scale systems that cannot achieve flexible approaches to serving low-density residential areas B the vast majority of all new areas we will build. We therefore need to deregulate or even privatize at least parts of our public transit systems and allow more small-scale operators who will serve low-density and low-income areas on demand and be more flexible in poorer areas.

Some deregulation would permit jitneys and other smaller vehicles to operate economically. A key purpose is linking the city to suburban job centers. In addition, your region could use better linkages between the existing elements of its public transit systems, plus more outlying parking to stimulate Metro's ridership.

The most widely-resented of all growth-related problems - traffic congestion - is essentially insoluble. There is no feasible solution to rising traffic congestion that most American citizens will accept. So your congestion is surely going to worsen.

Americans will not shift into public transit in large enough numbers to prevent rising traffic congestion. In 1995, 90% of all commuting was done in private vehicles, and only 3.5% by public transit - 2.2% outside of New York City. In Maryland, you have been adding more than one private vehicle for every one person added to the human population since 1980. You will keep on doing this.

The Texas Transportation Institute says that Baltimore drivers wasted 31 hours per person in traffic in 1999. But spreading those 31 hours over 240 working days and 2 trips per day amounts to losing only 3.9 min. each way each day.

Public transportation is important and needs to improve. But no matter how good it gets, it cannot reduce future increases in auto traffic congestion.

Building more roads or adding lanes is often a good policy in growth areas, but it will not relieve traffic congestion in a region once it has appeared there. If a major expressway is widened, traffic speeds up for a while, but soon drivers converge on it from other times, other routes, and other modes - until traffic in the peak hour is just as slow-moving as before. And growth soon fills up new roads.

Traffic congestion is the balancing mechanism we use to pursue conflicting objectives, such as having a wide range of choices about where to live and work, combining many purposes on each trip, having multiple workers per household, working during the same hours so firms can interact efficiently, and separating our homes from households poorer than we are. Congestion is a world-wide problem.

So you had better get used to rising congestion. Get yourself a comfortable air-conditioned car with a stereo radio, a tape deck and CD player, a telephone, a fax machine, and even a micro-wave oven, and commute with someone you really like! Congestion is here to stay.

Traffic incidents and accidents are major causes of day-to-day congestion. One of the few tactics that can ease future congestion is putting resources into rapid incident-response teams roaming major expressways and the beltway. Your existing Maryland CHART Operations Center already performs this function for the region; perhaps it could be strengthened even more.

Since Maryland's "smart growth" strategy encourages in-fill and compact development, it is desirable to allocate a high fraction of transportation funds to better maintaining existing roads and public transit in older areas where in-fill is desired. At present, $12 billion of the region's $16 billion transportation budget does for system preservation. This should be reexamined in light of your existing system's condition and needs.

Transportation policy needs to be linked to specific long-range land development and growth strategies. The "smart growth" approach adopted by Maryland avoids regional or centralized planning, leaving land-use plans entirely to local areas. Experience shows that will not work well in the long run. As more low-income households move into suburban communities, they will need more public transit that works in lower-density circumstances. More transportation spending should be allocated to this need.

Admittedly, it is not clear that a regional approach will produce greatly superior results; we don't have enough experience with such approaches. But we know for sure that disjointed relations between land-use and transportation won't work.

A key problem with a regional approach is the fundamental short-term conflict of interest between the high-resource, low-needs communities that are experiencing rapid growth - such as Howard and Anne Arundel Counties - and the older low-resource, high-needs communities that are suffering from intensifying problems.

If it is not possible to persuade all areas to work together, it might be possible to create a political coalition of the low-resource areas in the state legislature to wrest some power and resources from the high-resource areas through tax-base sharing. That approach would take political courage and entrepreneurship of the highest order, and a tolerance for controversy among those leaders. In particular, it would require the city and some of the poorer outlying counties to work closely together in defining tax-base sharing or other resource-reallocating arrangements. The city now gets a lot of aid from the state, but many weakening suburbs could use it too.

It is obvious to everyone that transportation planning requires region-wide coordination because the systems involved are clearly regional in nature. But development and land-use planning do not inherently require a regional approach because many wealthier sub-areas can use purely local powers to avoid their "fair share" of regional responsibilities and costs - such as providing affordable housing to the people who work in them. Yet transportation systems won't work well without being tied closely into land-use plans.

How can you get regionally-coordinated transportation systems to work effectively if they are tied into disconnected and conflicting land-use plans? That is a dilemma facing you and all other regions in the nation. How you resolve it depends upon the vision and social consciences of you leaders. The Vision 2030 process challenges you to develop and promote a regional consensus concerning these difficult issues.

I realize that my assessment of the future of ground transportation may sound pessimistic. But I have not mentioned one very positive factor. It is the adaptability of our population if given enough freedom from government rules and regulations. As congestion and other undesirable conditions worsen, people and firms will react by moving their homes, their jobs, their firms, and even their regions of residence to minimize undesirable conditions.

The key goals of public policies should be to remove the political and institutional barriers to this adjustment process that now block it at so many turns. These include local zoning barriers to new affordable housing development, unwillingness to consider region-wide planning and decision powers, and the excessive regulation and monopoly powers of public transit.

Your region has many great assets, such as an outstanding port, a world-class health care industry, a mild climate, access to excellent cultural and recreational amenities, a location near huge markets, large-scale governmental units, and a healthy pace of life.

But it also has many of the most serious problems in our society, now spreading outward from Baltimore City. The most important ingredients needed to overcome those problems to take advantage of your assets are the quality and courage of your region's leaders, the imaginative nature of their vision, and their willingness to take risks to achieve that vision. Providing those ingredients is the challenge facing you.

Your region's leaders have commissioned Vision 2030 to help you design a guide for your future. So use it to let your voices be heard in ways that will craft a consensus for this region concerning how to maximize its great potential.