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It’s
time for a parlor game. Let’s pretend we’ve been
tasked to devise the most expensive, most
self-defeating transportation plan that our demented
imaginations could conceive. No solution would be
too unfair or too inefficient to be ruled out. All
that mattered was that we inflict frustration,
resentment and misery upon an unwary public.
What
would such a psychotic plan look like? Let’s see.
… It
would make life easier on the guy who drives a
Beemer to work – and stiff the guy who peddles his
bike to the office.
Our
scheme would subsidize the road hogs who ride solo
in their SUVs – and ignore the saps who schlep to
work in carpool vans.
We
would lavish assistance upon the road warriors who
blaze 100-mile round trips every day -- but
wouldn’t lift a finger for the telecommuter whose
car never leaves the driveway. In sum, we would
obliterate all distinctions between personal
behavior that stressed the transportation system and
behavior that contributed to the solution.
Hmmm.
Perhaps the General Assembly was playing the same
parlor game. It certainly seems that way judging by the
transportation-funding referenda to be submitted to
the voters of
Northern
Virginia
and Hampton Roads voters this fall. Virginians in
these two traffic-congested corners of the state
probably do need to raise taxes to fund new
transportation projects. But they would be well
advised to vote down the proposals offered them in
the hope that legislators will come back with
proposals that do more good than harm.
There
are two very big problems with the way the
transportation referenda are structured. First, they
raise money through the sales tax rather than the
gasoline tax, thus ignoring the fundamental
principle that those who benefit from government
spending should be the ones who pay for it. In
effect, politicians treat the use of public roadways
as a free good which, of course, it is not.
Secondly,
there are many ways to address traffic congestion,
and building more roads is only one of them. The
Northern Virginia
proposal does allocate 40 percent of its revenue to
mass transit, which is probably the least cost-effective of those alternatives. But the
legislation overlooks demand-management strategies
to reduce the number of motorists clogging the
freeways at rush hour. It neglects design tweaks
that would increase the capacity of existing roads.
And it totally ignores the need to change the fabric
of urban/suburban design.
I
don’t minimize the frustrations engendered by
traffic jams. I, too, have found myself stalled in
stop-and-go traffic on Interstate 95 in Prince
William
County
at 6:30
a.m.
I, too, have been trapped in the Hampton Roads
Bridge Tunnel, inhaling exhaust-fouled air from a
hundred idling engines. I agree that addressing
traffic congestion is one of the most pressing
policy issues facing Virginians today. I even accept
the proposition that we need to find more money to
do it.
But
we’re talking about a lot
of money here. The proposals before the voters of
Hampton Roads and
Northern
Virginia
would raise $12 billion between the two regions. We
only get one shot at this. If the voters choose to
impose a tax increase on themselves – hardly a
sure thing – they will do it only once.
We want to
make sure we get it right. If we botch the job, we
won’t get a second chance.
In
an ideal world, Virginians would pay for roads like
any other consumer good: You want to drive on roads?
You pay what it costs to provide that service. Someone who drives 20,000 miles
a year would pay twice as much as someone who drives
10,000 miles. Someone who clogs the freeway in rush
hour, consuming a scarce resource, would pay more
than someone who doesn’t.
It’s
not an ideal world, of course. Even with GPS
satellites able to track every mile a vehicle moves
and to log the time of day, such a scheme is not yet
feasible to administer. But a rough proxy for a user
fee does exist: the gasoline tax. People who rack up
lots of miles – in other words, those who put the
greatest stress on the transportation system -- buy
more gasoline and pay more taxes. Similarly, people
who drive trucks and SUVs, which cause more wear and
tear on the asphalt, also buy more gasoline and pay
more taxes than those who drive two-seaters. The
best thing about the gasoline tax is that people who
don’t use roads – bus riders, metro riders,
bikers, telecommuters, pedestrians – don’t pay
anything toward the maintenance and construction of roads.
But
the General Assembly decided to pay for the
transportation bonds through a sales
tax instead. This was a blatant political
calculation. A half-percent increase in the Northern
Virginia
sales tax sounds less onerous than a 10 cent hike
in the gas tax. Presumably, voters are too obtuse to
notice that it would raise just as much money.
(Hampton Roads would boost its sales tax by one
percent, but I have been unable to ascertain the
equivalent in gasoline taxes.)
By
repudiating the gasoline tax in favor of the sales
tax, legislators would treat all modes of
transportation equally. Such a tax is morally wrong
because it rewards behavior that imposes
social burdens upon others. It is economically
inefficient because it perpetuates behavior that
created the congestion in the first place.
If
the General Assembly wants to counter congestion, as
opposed to build more roads, it
needs to send a loud, clear message to the motoring
public: Yes, we will help you alleviate traffic
jams. But there’s no free lunch. You’ll
have to pay for it. And you’ll have to take some
responsibility for solving the problem by modifying
your own behavior.
By
raising the cost of driving, the gasoline tax
creates an incentive for people to drive less. If
the legislature raised the gas tax high enough, it
would induce some people to car pool, take the bus
or find jobs closer to where they live. If enough
individuals changed their behavior, maybe businesses
would too. Maybe real estate developers would build
more housing closer to employment centers rather
than pushing ever further into the countryside for
cheap land.
By
this logic, the General Assembly needs to undo its
previous handiwork: Roll back the 4 1/2-percent sales tax to 4 percent, and
boost the gasoline tax aggressively. In the 1980s,
the Baliles administration raised money for its
transportation initiatives through a combination of
sales and gasoline taxes. Virginia's political
leadership should kill the ½-cent sales tax
dedicated to transportation funding and substitute a
gasoline tax that raises a comparable amount of
revenue.
At
17.5 cents per gallon, Virginia
has one of the lowest state gasoline taxes in the
country. Only 11 states have lower.
By
shifting the tax burden where it belongs, Virginia
might have to raise its gas tax
as much as 20 cents or more
per gallon, which would make it the highest in the
country. But that would be a good thing if it
prompted people to change their behavior. And the
high gas tax would be offset by a 4 percent sales
tax, one of the lowest such taxes in the country.
Tim
Lomax, an engineering processor at
Texas
A&M
University,
is arguably the most knowledgeable person in the
country on the topic of traffic congestion. He
authored the 2002
Urban Mobility Study, an encyclopedic source of
data and findings on traffic congestion in the U.S.
I had the good fortune to share an hour of his time
last week at the Virginia 2020 conference, where he
discussed his findings.
Broadly
speaking, says Lomax, there are five ways to address
traffic congestion:
-
Build
more capacity (as in roads or mass transit
systems)
-
Increase
the capacity of the existing system
-
Manage
the demand for traffic
-
Manage
the construction process to reduce the impact of
road work on traffic
-
Diversify
development patterns
Building
roads does help alleviate congestion, Lomax notes.
But it’s an expensive and incomplete solution.
Phoenix
is an example of a city that tried to out-build
traffic congestion. The city
tripled the size of its freeway system between 1988 and 1995 yet
traffic delays still increased from 29 hours per
person per year to 33. Without the massive highway
building, he contends, the delays would have been
worse. But the solution was expensive.
Does
Virginia
have the stomach to underwrite a construction
program of that magnitude? I doubt it. And it’s a
good thing, too. Virginia has done a lousy job of exploring alternatives to building more
roads and transit projects.
Traffic
engineers use a variety of techniques --
coordinating traffic signals, metering ramps and
running service patrols to get stalled cars off the
freeway -- to increase capacity of the
transportation system. Lomax is particularly
impressed by the results of ramp metering –
putting stop lights on entrance ramps to efficiently
regulate the flow of traffic onto the freeway.
Demand
management employs creative ways to keep people off
the road during rush hour. Why must everyone work
from 9 to 5? Why can't businesses and government
agencies vary their work hours? Full-time
telecommuting may not be realistic, Lomax concedes,
but if everyone telecommuted just one day a month,
it would reduce peak traffic by 4 percent, saving
billions of dollars of investment.
Lomax
also believes that better urban design can alleviate
traffic congestion. Zoning laws that separate
houses, offices, schools and stores by vast distances and innumerable barriers make it difficult
to walk or ride bikes anywhere. He also sees a role
for congestion pricing. “Right now you have two
options: Sitting there [in traffic] or not making
the trip. We should create more options” so that
someone who just has
to make it to that 9 o’clock
meeting can pay a premium for access to a faster lane.
The
Virginia Department of Transportation has
experimented with a number of these alternatives,
but the big money is going into monster
road-building and transit projects. None of the tax
revenue will go to demand management. None of it
will be used to increase system capacity. None of it
will deploy peak-load pricing. None of it will bring
about changes in land use planning or urban design.
Citizens
should be outraged at the tunnel vision of
Virginia's political leadership, which can conceive of
no other way to address traffic congestion than tax,
tax, tax and build, build, build. Voters should
express that outrage at the polls this fall.
--
Sept. 16, 2002
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