By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland doesn’t have the single worst roads in America. But three separate national studies, using three different methodologies, all land the state in roughly the same place: the bottom five to ten states for driving conditions — and the underlying data points to a specific, documentable cause rather than a vague “infrastructure crisis.”
Three separate national studies, using three different methodologies, all land the state in roughly the same place: the bottom five to ten states for driving conditions.
What the Rankings Actually Show
The problem isn’t Maryland’s roads. It’s Maryland’s urban roads, concentrated almost entirely along the I-95 corridor through Baltimore and the Capital Beltway.
WalletHub’s 2026 “Best & Worst States to Drive In” study grades all 50 states across 31 metrics spanning cost, safety, traffic, and infrastructure, and vehicle access. Maryland finishes 46th overall — fifth-worst in the country. The overall number undersells it. Broken into WalletHub’s four component categories, Maryland ranks 50th out of 50 — dead last — in Traffic & Infrastructure specifically. Its Safety score (19th) and Cost of Ownership score (37th) are comparatively unremarkable. Traffic & Infrastructure is where the state collapses.
MoneyGeek’s separate “Best and Worst States for Driving” analysis, using its own weighting of congestion, cost, infrastructure, safety, and weather, ranks Maryland fourth-worst overall. Two sub-scores drive that ranking: Maryland is the single most expensive state in the country for driving-related costs, and it has the second-worst rush-hour congestion in the nation, trailing only New Jersey.
Reason Foundation’s 29th Annual Highway Report is the most methodologically rigorous of the three, because it doesn’t just measure conditions — it measures cost-effectiveness, weighing pavement and safety outcomes against what each state actually spends per lane-mile. On that basis, Maryland’s highway system ranks a middling 34th overall. But the category breakdown tells a sharper story: Maryland ranks 43rd in Urban Interstate Pavement Condition, 43rd in Urban Arterial Pavement Condition, and 43rd in urbanized-area traffic congestion. Meanwhile, its rural roads are fine — 30th in Rural Interstate and Rural Arterial pavement condition — and its rural fatality rate is the best in the nation. The problem isn’t Maryland’s roads. It’s Maryland’s urban roads, concentrated almost entirely along the I-95 corridor through Baltimore and the Capital Beltway.
The Decline Predates Moore — But Continued Under Him
The rankings above are a snapshot. The trend line adds a wrinkle worth being precise about, because it doesn’t split as cleanly by administration as it might first appear.
Wherever the slide started, it hasn’t reversed.
Reason Foundation’s overall Maryland highway ranking — the same 13-category formula, tracked annually since 1984 — read 24th in the 27th report, published April 2023, and built on 2020 data. By the 28th report, using 2022 data and published in March 2025, Maryland had fallen to 32nd. That 8-spot drop happened entirely on Larry Hogan’s watch: 2022 was his last full year as governor, and Moore wasn’t sworn in until January 2023. By the 29th report, using 2023 data — Moore’s first year in office — Maryland slipped two more spots, to 34th. So the larger share of the recent decline predates Moore’s administration. What’s attributable to his first year specifically is smaller: a continuation of an existing slide, not the start of one. Reason Foundation’s own release on the 34th-place finding calls it “a two-spot decline from last year’s ranking of 32nd” — language that describes an ongoing trend without assigning it to either governor.
The physical pavement data is consistent with a continuing decline rather than a one-year blip. Between 2020 and 2022, the share of Maryland’s Urban Other Principal Arterial mileage rated in poor condition increased by 2.31 percentage points — worse than every state except Kentucky (+2.36 points) among the states that report specifically named as deteriorating over that span. That’s a measured worsening of the actual road surface, not just a ranking artifact, though it covers the 2020–2022 window and so, like the ranking drop from 24th to 32nd, reflects conditions mostly under Hogan with the tail end bleeding into Moore’s first weeks in office.
Whatever the split in responsibility, the trend line’s current endpoint is unambiguous: MoneyGeek’s 2026 rankings, discussed above, place Maryland 4th-worst in the country to drive in today, behind only California, Louisiana, and Connecticut. Wherever the slide started, it hasn’t reversed.
Spending Isn’t the Obvious Constraint
It isn’t a story of Maryland being frugal and getting exactly what it paid for; it’s a story of spending at an elevated rate and still finishing near the bottom on urban pavement condition.
What makes the urban-pavement gap notable is that Maryland isn’t a state skimping to make ends meet. In the current 29th report, Maryland ranks 20th nationally on the Capital and Bridge Disbursements cost-effectiveness measure and 32nd on Maintenance Disbursements cost-effectiveness — both in the less-efficient half of the country, spending more relative to its expected costs than most states do, without being the most extreme outlier nationally. That’s a state paying a moderate-to-above-average price and getting a bottom-15 pavement result on the roads that carry the most traffic. It isn’t a story of Maryland being frugal and getting exactly what it paid for; it’s a story of spending at an elevated rate and still finishing near the bottom on urban pavement condition.
That gap between spending and outcome is a meaningful part of why Maryland’s roads test poorly, and it points toward management rather than raw underfunding as a proximate cause.
The Audit That Explains the Gap
In September 2025, Maryland’s Office of Legislative Audits released a report on the State Highway Administration that supplies a documented answer. Auditors found SHA had knowingly charged $358.7 million in costs to federal-fund highway projects without authorization from the federal granting agency, between November 2020 and October 2024 — a 3,523 percent increase from the $9.9 million baseline the practice stood at in June 2020, with $163.5 million of that total added in just the fourteen months before the audit closed. According to the audit, SHA management confirmed the agency did this specifically to minimize the year-to-year deficit in the state’s Transportation Trust Fund, pushing costs onto federal ledgers that were never approved to absorb them. Auditors additionally found SHA could not produce documentation supporting $449 million in accrued federal revenue entries — a figure that includes the $358.7 million in unauthorized charges — or verify how, or whether, that money would ever be recovered. If the federal government declines to cover it, the shortfall falls to the Transportation Trust Fund, which had a projected $400 million balance the year the audit was published, or to the state’s general fund.
Auditors found SHA had knowingly charged $358.7 million in costs to federal-fund highway projects without authorization from the federal granting agency.
MDOT’s formal response disputed the characterization, stating that “no expenses were purposefully miscoded” and that in some cases costs simply exceeded initially authorized amounts, requiring the agency to seek modifications or alternate funding after the fact. Auditors, for their part, said they found no evidence of criminal activity, but stood by the finding that the practice was deliberate and dramatically accelerating.
The same audit contains a second finding that bears more directly on pavement quality than the accounting dispute does. As of March 2025, 25 of the 46 SHA construction inspectors tested by auditors lacked some or all of the certifications required to inspect the materials used in state road and bridge projects — including nine inspectors holding none of the required certifications at all. Per SHA’s own certification standards, an uncertified inspector’s test results may not be valid, meaning a portion of the construction work underlying Maryland’s road system over the past several years was signed off on by inspectors the agency’s own rules say weren’t necessarily qualified to do it. SHA’s response attributed the gap to contract language rather than disputing the underlying numbers.
Whose Watch This Happened On
The practice existed before Moore took office. Its acceleration did not.
The audit period runs from November 2020 through October 2024, meaning it spans the final two years of the Hogan administration and the first two years of Moore’s. But the growth curve is not evenly distributed across that window. Auditors put the unauthorized-spending figure at $9.9 million in June 2020, essentially flat with where it had sat since 2017. By June 2024 — roughly a year and a half into Moore’s term — it had grown to more than $195 million. By August 2025, it had reached $358.7 million: a 3,523 percent increase from the June 2020 baseline, of which $163.5 million in additional spending accumulated in just the fourteen months between June 2024 and August 2025 alone. The practice existed before Moore took office. Its acceleration did not.
Gov. Moore’s public response, after the audit’s release in September 2025, was to say the problems it described “did not begin with this administration” — technically accurate, since the low-level version of the practice predates his term, but a characterization that doesn’t address the specific finding that the growth was concentrated well inside it. His office did not respond to reporters’ repeated questions in the weeks following the audit’s release about a possible connection between the findings and the abrupt, mid-summer departure of his transportation secretary, Paul Wiedefeld, who Moore announced was stepping down in early July 2025 — about two months before the audit became public. Wiedefeld was the fifth cabinet secretary to leave Moore’s administration since the start of that year. Republican legislators, including House Minority Whip Jesse Pippy, raised the possibility that Wiedefeld’s exit and the audit’s timing were connected; Moore’s office did not confirm or deny it.
There’s also a rhetorical wrinkle worth putting on the record. In December 2023, Moore gave a speech defending his own administration’s transportation budget cuts, criticizing Hogan’s handling of infrastructure projects as “late, and over-budget and unfinished” and casting his own approach as a refusal to keep asking Marylanders to pay more for a system that quietly wasn’t working. Twenty-one months later, legislative auditors concluded his own State Highway Administration had been doing something close to that — shifting costs onto federal ledgers specifically to minimize the Transportation Trust Fund’s deficit, by the auditors’ own account — through the accelerating period covering most of his term.
Neither finding proves a direct causal line to any specific pothole or crumbling arterial. But they describe exactly the kind of institutional dysfunction that would produce the pattern the rankings show.
Taken together, the audit describes an agency managing a persistent budget shortfall by shifting costs it couldn’t fully account for, while simultaneously running a construction inspection program with documented certification gaps — and doing so at an accelerating rate that overlaps heavily with the current administration, regardless of when the underlying practice originated. Neither finding proves a direct causal line to any specific pothole or crumbling arterial. But they describe exactly the kind of institutional dysfunction that would produce the pattern the rankings show: elevated spending without commensurate results, concentrated in the urban corridors where the bulk of state highway construction and maintenance actually happens — and getting worse, by Reason Foundation’s own numbers, across the two most recent report years, only the more recent of which falls under Moore.
How This Connects to the Funding Fight
The two stories cover different mechanisms and different timelines.
This isn’t unrelated to the fiscal 2028 Highway User Revenue cliff MDBayNews covered last week. That piece traced how local governments — which maintain more than 80 percent of Maryland’s road miles — are about to lose a larger share of state transportation revenue just as the state’s own highway agency is on record mismanaging the funds it already controls. The two stories cover different mechanisms and different timelines. The funding cliff is a bipartisan failure: a temporary Hogan-era patch, Chapter 240 of 2022, expires on schedule at the end of fiscal 2027, and neither party has moved a fix through the 2026 General Assembly. The SHA mismanagement detailed above is not evenly bipartisan in the same way — the practice existed in small form under Hogan but accelerated sharply and specifically during Moore’s term, per the audit’s own year-by-year figures. Read together, the two pieces describe a highway system where the money is both shrinking by law and being poorly managed by the agency that has it — two separate failures, on two different clocks, that happen to be converging on the same roads at the same time.
Maryland Isn’t Alone, But That’s Not an Excuse
The issue is not funding. It is how the money is spent.
Nationally, the pattern isn’t unique to Maryland. A May 2026 report from Transportation for America and Taxpayers for Common Sense, “Repair Priorities 2026,” found that despite $1.5 trillion in federal transportation spending over three decades, the share of federal-aid roads in poor condition has barely moved — from 19 percent in 2018 to 16.34 percent in 2024 — because states have continued expanding their road networks faster than they maintain the roads they already have, adding roughly 113,000 new lane-miles nationally between 2018 and 2024 and with them, billions in new long-term maintenance obligations. “The issue is not funding,” the report concluded. “It is how the money is spent.”
Maryland’s SHA audit is that national finding made specific and local: not insufficient revenue, but revenue whose accounting the state’s own auditors couldn’t fully verify, spent by an agency whose inspection program had documented certification gaps, on a road system that spends at a moderate-to-above-average rate and still grades out in the bottom third on the pavement that matters most.
Sources: WalletHub’s “Best & Worst States to Drive In 2026”; MoneyGeek’s “Best and Worst States for Driving” and “Road Quality by State” analyses; Reason Foundation’s 27th, 28th, and 29th Annual Highway Reports, including Maryland-specific findings and state pavement-condition data; the Maryland Office of Legislative Audits’ September 2025 report on the State Highway Administration; reporting from Maryland Matters, The Baltimore Banner, WMAR, and FOX45/WBFF Baltimore on the SHA audit and Secretary Paul Wiedefeld’s departure; The Baltimore Sun’s December 2023 coverage of Gov. Wes Moore’s transportation budget remarks and its March 2026 guest commentary on Maryland agency audits; and “Repair Priorities 2026,” published by Transportation for America and Taxpayers for Common Sense.
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