If Maryland wants to build the Baltimore Red Line, replace the American Legion Bridge across the Potomac River on the D.C. Beltway or even just maintain a steady flow of smaller projects that keep roads in good shape and buses going, it needs a long-term plan.

The Commission on Transportation Revenue and Infrastructure Needs, known as TRAIN, was supposed to help come up with one.

Assembled by Maryland lawmakers two years ago, the team had officials, business leaders, lawmakers and advocates — a real transportation who’s who of more than 30 public- and private-sector minds. Their mission was to help answer what some called an existential question: How does the state pay for its transportation infrastructure needs in coming years?

But after just a handful of meetings and a set of modest recommendations, lawmakers mysteriously disbanded the group before it could issue a final report.

Gov. Wes Moore and Annapolis lawmakers have spent the past two legislative sessions plugging budget holes, but cuts at the federal level — and the threat of further ones for blue states like Maryland — continue to shift the calculus for state spending. And President Donald Trump’s volatile tariff saga continues to shroud construction supply chains and therefore project pricing in uncertainty.

Beyond federal aid, Maryland has long relied on gasoline taxes, as well as vehicle registration and titling fees, to pay for its roads, bridges and public transit. But officials say that revenue is waning even as the cost of transportation work grows, and that yawning funding gap threatens the state’s ability to maintain and expand the public assets Marylanders rely on to get around.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Transportation said that Moore and the General Assembly have worked to “stabilize” funding.

“MDOT continues to identify and implement solutions to maximize the use of available funding,” MDOT spokesperson David Broughton said. “This includes leveraging the use of federal grant opportunities through discretionary grant applications and advancing innovative finance and delivery methods to deliver projects.”

The Baltimore Banner spoke with nearly a dozen former TRAIN commissioners for this story. Some didn’t want to be named for fear of professional consequences. Other members declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.

Nibbling around the edges

After just a handful of meetings in 2023, the commission issued a preliminary report with a series of funding recommendations — low-hanging fruit stuff like fee adjustments to address how electric car owners don’t pay gas taxes.

The state legislature ran with many of those recommendations during the 2024 session, and they helped turn a roughly $3 billion shortfall into a balanced budget.

Meetings were set to continue into 2024 — that’s when commissioners expected the work to get more serious. But slipped into the budget that year was a provision to shut TRAIN down and restart it as a smaller group.

“Ultimately, we did not solve the underlying problem,” said Mike Sakata, president of the Maryland Transportation Builders and Materials Association and a former commissioner. “TRAIN provided a good background, but it did not provide the underpinnings of anything substantial to provide long-term funding.”

This past legislative session, there was more money McGyvering, this time without the help of TRAIN. Still, MDOT managed to keep some big-ticket projects like an overhaul of the Baltimore Light Rail and widening two Western Maryland highways.

Still, many of the revenue raisers are just “nibbling around the edges,” said Josh Tulkin, director of the Maryland Sierra Club and another former commissioner. Many commissioners thought they would be laying groundwork for a paradigm shift, but they were disbanded before they could.

“I thought we were going to dive in and debate difficult policy choices, but instead most of the time was spent on presentations and pre-packaged solutions that were fairly tame,” Tulkin said. “Proposals were so tame compared to the scale of the problem the General Assembly was wrestling with.”

Consensus

Multiple former commissioners said that a benefit of a group such as TRAIN is to build political consensus around big ideas, doing so out in the open with data and research to support recommendations. And that in Maryland, with its three-month sprint of a legislative session, building consensus early if not before the session begins is critical to getting anything done.

Coping with declining gas tax revenue is perhaps the biggest issue facing state transportation funding. The gas tax has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars less over the past five years as vehicles get increasingly fuel-efficient. A state comptroller’s report from 2023 said fuel sales have declined since a pre-pandemic peak in 2019, though they remained over 3 billion gallons per year in both 2023 and 2024.

One idea TRAIN eyed to address this was replacing the gas tax with a “vehicle miles traveled,” or VMT, fee. Instead of paying a tax based on how much fuel is bought at the pump, drivers would be assessed a fee based on their vehicle’s weight and an odometer reading. That would tailor the tax to the amount of wear a vehicle causes to the roads. MDOT even started a pilot program with volunteer drivers willing to opt in.

But TRAIN was shut down before it could explore the idea fully, and it sparked proposals in Annapolis to ban the state from implementing a VMT tax in the future.

TRAIN had other charges, too, like examining how MDOT prioritizes projects to make sure spending aligns with the state’s goals. Another was to explore a restructuring of the department.

Two bills in Annapolis this year took aim at these issues. One regarding project prioritization and sponsored by the department didn’t pass. The other, which addressed establishing a new transit authority in Baltimore to replace the MTA, a move that some say would give Baltimore more control over decisions, did — but it didn’t actually create the authority.

Instead, it established a commission to study the possibility.

Some former commissioners received letters last year inviting them to serve as advisers to the TRAIN 2.0 reboot legislators approved in 2024. But since then, no word on any meetings. Questions regarding whether the new commission would meet that were directed to MDOT, Moore, and Senate President Bill Ferguson, who appointed members alongside Moore, went unanswered.

“Working to fix a broken business model of relying on funding from a declining revenue source, Governor Moore and the legislature increased and diversified transportation revenues to ensure that MDOT can continue to deliver critical transportation services and projects across the state,” MDOT spokesperson Broughton wrote in response.