The
January 13 The
Shape of the Future column
("Smoke and Shadows") last year explored
the role of The
Washington Post in providing
information on mobility, access and human
settlement patterns.
A
year has gone by. Traffic congestion has grown
worse. Mobility has become an evermore hotly
debated issue, especially during last Fall’s
election season. One would hope the National
Capital Subregion’s major print media outlet
would have altered its position. The
Washington Post documents that
mobility is a major regional problem, and
editorials, news stories and columnists say
that they want to help improve it. However,
that does not appear to be the net result.
The
editorial side of The Post
continues to support the delusion that just
building more transport facilities will
improve mobility and access.
The
news side, as it did in 2002, provides useful
and often insightful perspectives in stories,
columns and features. However, in order to
make sense of this input, readers need to
understand the overall context. Without this
framework, citizens cannot fit the stories
into a comprehensible whole. The news coverage
and columns focus on stories -- vignettes and
fragments -- that lack an overarching context.
In addition, there is a trend to focus on
short-term “fixes” without a tie to
longer-term strategies.
This
column examines The
Washington
Post’s
editorial treatment of access and mobility.
The next one will address the news side of
transport coverage.
One-Theme
Editorials
The
one-note editorials which attempt to sell the
position that “more money to build transport
facilities is what is needed to improve
mobility” continued throughout 2003.
Sometimes the “just build it” theme is
coupled with the suggestion that a
“regional” agency to spend the money would
be a good idea.
While
the editors talk about the need to create a
regional agency to spend money, they do not
mention the need first to have regional and
subregional plans and strategies to create
transportable human settlement patterns. These
plans, if implemented, would shape the
distribution of travel demand and thus
determine what new facilities, if any, are
needed. There
must be a balance between land-use and
transport that does not exist.
Editorials
focused on transportation facilities appear
nearly every week. It would be pointless to
single out one or two. Hundreds of column
inches of valuable editorial space that could
have built regional and subregional
understandings have been wasted on one-theme
opinions.
Beyond
Editorials
The
editorial staff also puts together
“substantive” material in the form of
carefully screened and scripted op-eds and
“community feedback.” Typical of the op-ed
material was a set of items in the Sunday, November 16, 2003,
Outlook Section. “Getting In Gear About
Traffic...” and “...A Tale From The
Trenches” took up nearly half a page. An
“authoritative” item by John Mason is
paired with an entertaining vignette by John
Kropf.
John
Mason is a well-known politician with years of
experience as a military officer and a senior
executive of a Beltway Bandit consulting firm.
This firm, SAIC, has done millions of dollars
worth of government and developer
transportation consulting work. Mason, also
the former mayor of a village-scale
municipality within
Fairfax
County, was
defeated for reelection recently by a
candidate who professed to support more
intelligent policies impacting settlement
patterns in the jurisdiction. The op-ed page
caption bills Mason as “a former Mayor of
Fairfax City and a former member of the
National Capital Region Transportation
Planning Board.” This is true, but there is
no mention of his employer SAIC and its work.
John
Kropf has experience living in Alexandria
and
abroad but now drives to a VDOT park and ride
lot just east of the town of Warrenton
in Fauquier
County
to
catch a ride to his job in the core of the
federal district. This park-and-ride lot is
40-plus miles from the Memorial
Bridge.
Two
things would have made better use of the ink
and paper consumed by this November feature. I
develop these recommendations in some detail
because they could do much to cure what ails The
Washington
Post’s
editorial position on mobility and
transportation.
Reality
One
The
Washington Post
could offer substantive help to John Mason and
fellow former municipal and state
officeholders along with those now in office.
This assistance should extend to the staffs of
U.S. DOT, VA DOT, MD DOT, WV DOT, PA DOT and
DC DOT plus the academics and consultants who
provide advice to these agencies. The Post
needs to provide a special forum and the
incentive for all these parties to clearly
state:
As
long as millions of individuals in the region
believe it is in their families’ and their
organizations’ best interests to live
wherever they want, work wherever they want
and then seek services and recreation wherever
they want, there can be no solution to the
National Capital Subregions mobility crisis,
period!
There
can be little professional disagreement with
this statement. It is, however, painful for
elected officials, road builders or
consultants to admit this axiomatic truth. The
truth is hard to state now because they all
have been silent for so long. It not possible
to design or build a transport system for a
large New Urban Region that provides mobility
and access to dysfunctionally scattered trip
origins and destinations. This point has been
made repeatedly since the 1970s by those who
recognize the need for a balance between the
travel demand generated by the settlement
pattern and the transport system created to
provide mobility and access.
The
fact that a dysfunctional distribution of
origins and destinations cannot be served by
an economically feasible and physically
effective mobility system is not a matter of
policy or politics: It is a physical reality
based on the Natural Laws that govern the
known Universe and the market-driven democracy
that now exists in the
United
States.
The
only response to the statement of
trip-distribution reality by governance
practitioners is silence. This silence allows
conditions on the demand side to grow worse
and worse as documented by measures such as
“person hours of delay” on roadways. When
mobility becomes a matter of public debate,
officials in one agency blame those in another
agency rather than the core reason for
congestion. When immobility gets so bad that
citizens are willing to change their pattern
of activity, they are given no guidance or
help in understanding what changes will
improve access and mobility. If citizens
understood the truth at the outset, they could
make intelligent decisions that would benefit
all.
The
Myth Behind Ill-Advised Location Decisions
Most
citizens act as if they believe the Private
Vehicle Mobility Myth which would be
refuted by the joint declaration suggested
above. This myth is reinforced daily by auto,
oil and development industry advertising and
lobbying. There are several variations of the Private
Vehicle Mobility Myth; here are two:
Individuals
and families can live wherever they can afford
and work wherever they can find a job. In
addition, they can seek services and
recreation wherever they choose. After
citizens make these choices, the myth holds it
is their right to have government build a
roadway/highway/expressway system that would
allow everyone to drive a private vehicle
wherever they want to go, whenever they want
to go there and arrive in a timely manner.
Entrepreneurs
believe they can start an enterprise wherever
they want, hire employees from wherever they
want, seek customers wherever they want, and
then it is their right to have government
provide them with a roadway/highway/expressway
system so that employees can get to work and
company vehicles can deliver goods and
services wherever the enterprises want them to
go whenever they want them to go there.
Additionally, these entrepreneurs believe they
entitled to have their employees and the
company vehicles arrive at their destinations
in a timely manner.
So
long as citizens and their organizations
believe these and/or other variations of the Private
Vehicle Mobility Myth and they make
location decisions based on this belief, all
the things John Mason warns against in his
November op-ed will happen. Traffic congestion
will get worse, air quality will get worse,
and citizen frustrations will continue to
grow. John Kropf and his family will continue
to suffer, and eventually the Subregion will
sink into economic stagnation, social conflict
and physical gridlock. This future scenario is
sometimes termed “
Bangladesh
on
the Potomac.”
Inappropriate
and uninformed location decisions by a few
citizens does not present a problem, but these
same actions by thousands upon thousands of
individuals, families and organizations spell
GRIDLOCK.
Making this fact clear is the first
step to securing access and mobility.
Reality
Two
The
Washington Post
editors and those who write items that the Post
editors favor need to better understand the
role of transport facilities in providing
mobility and access. For instance, in the
November op-ed, John Mason spends five and
one-half paragraphs in a discussion of
short-term and long-term goals to achieve a
balanced transportation system. One might disagree with the priorities
outlined, but they are points worth making.
Mason then jumps into the abyss of confusion
with the sentence: “At the same time, we
must ensure that there will be more crossings
of the
Potomac
and
that new highway capacity ensures a balance of
transportation network ...”
Having
made the point detailed under REALITY ONE
above and having listed all the grave
consequences of not improving mobility, the
same voices that spoke out to refute the Private
Vehicle Mobility Myth must next call for
fundamental changes in land use to create
functional human settlement patterns.
Only
with functional patterns and densities of land
use can an efficient and effective transport
system be provided. Without fundamental change
in human settlement pattern to achieve the
creation of Balanced Communities in a
sustainable New Urban Region, more river
crossings and more highway capacity will just
make mobility worse.
Once
this fundamental truth is understood, then
Mr. Mason and others can advocate the evolution
of a transport system to provide mobility and
access to the settlement pattern that has been
planned.
It
is often noted that the last time the core of
the National Capital Subregion had a plan that
balanced land use with transportation was the
L’Enfant Plan of 1791. The last attempt to
create such a plan was the 1960 Plan
for the National Capital. One needs
to study the schematic sketches of land use and
transportation that accompanied the 1960 plan to
understand the vast difference between where the
National Capital Subregion is now and where it
must evolve to be transportable.
The
Need for Post Policy Revision
It
appears The
Washington Post editorial policy does
not fairly present views contrary to the company
position on transport and land use. They
newspaper has been accused of going so far as to
use misleading headlines on items that might
raise questions about the viability of a “just
build more transportation facilities”
strategy. For
example, see “Dense Solution for VA’s
Transit Ills” (November
2, 2003, page
B 8). Who would want to read about a “dense
solution” to “transit” ills? A quick
reading indicates that the op-ed is about much
more than “transit,” and that “dense” is
tossed into the heading as a red herring.
The
editorial staff is obsessively single-minded in
its “build more facilities” approach.
Perpetuation of transport myths makes a few rich
folks richer, but does nothing to improve
mobility for millions in the National Capital
Subregion. The major stockholders and
advertisers of The Washington Post may be short-term winners.
Business-as-usual
is a tiger no major media owner wants to
dismount. Business-as-usual may generate ad
revenue and get publishers and editors invited
to nice parties, but it impoverishes the
citizens and their region. They and all the
citizens and enterprises in the region are the
long-terms.
In
our next column, we examine the news side of the
Post's
transportation coverage.
--
January 19, 2004
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