Virginians
had not gotten past the long, hot days of July when
the media become caught up in reporting on the 2005
statewide election campaigns as horse races. Even
worse, some daily newspapers have run front-page
articles on a public opinion survey about a
hypothetical contest in 2006 between U. S. Senator
George Allen and Gov. Mark Warner for Allen’s
seat.
This
type of media coverage crowds out reporting about
the candidates’ policy positions and trivializes
politics. It matters. Our republican system of
governance can’t function properly if the
electorate is generally ignorant or unconcerned
about policy when choosing their leaders.
The
system also doesn’t work well when voters don’t
demand clear choices and fail to hold politicians
accountable for campaign promises.
There
are important policy decisions to be made in
Virginia over the next four years. Voters should be
encouraged to focus in depth on these questions.
Candidates should be pressed to address them.
We
might discover that election campaigns begin to have
substance again. Who knows? Voter participation
might actually return to levels not seen for a
half-century.
Transportation
is and will likely remain high on the policy agenda.
Let’s examine a transportation issue that
candidates have failed to address satisfactorily
even though it cries out for resolution: How can we
properly link land use and transportation planning?
For
years, politicians have talked vaguely about the
need to consider impacts on land use caused by
transportation facilities. Some have pledged to
achieve it without saying how.
Had
candidates been pushed in the past to explicate
full-blown policy positions on the subject, we might
by now have found solutions or at least partial
solutions. Sadly, we are no closer to linking
transportation to land use than we were decades ago.
Are
candidates afraid to go there? Probably so, because
if they do, they will confront tough political
choices.
Any
serious effort to link land use and transportation
should involve the merging of responsibility for
decisions in those two areas. A realignment of
responsibility in these governmental functions will
meet stiff resistance. If we want effective linkage
between the two, we must either give a state agency
such as the Virginia Department of Transportation
the power to make land use decisions or give local
governing bodies the power to decide when and where
transportation facilities will be built, as well as
the responsibility for funding those facilities,
even if that means giving localities a share of the
Highway Maintenance Fund.
Thoughtful
debate about this issue during a campaign might
prompt us to conclude that the problem is not simply
the impact of transportation facilities on land use,
but also the effect of local land use decisions on
the cost of providing transportation facilities to
support the resulting development patterns.
We
have not adequately controlled the cost of
maintaining our secondary roads. One reason is that
most local governments approve developers’
proposals for residential and commercial development
without adequate regard for the long-term cost of
maintaining the road network that developers
construct and turn over to VDOT to become part of
the state highway system.
If
responsibility for maintaining the secondary system
were transferred to local governing officials, they
might be more inclined to shape their development
decisions to minimize the future maintenance costs
they must bear.
Under
the current system, VDOT can’t control those costs
because decisions about where development will occur
are left to local governing bodies. If we care, now
is the time to find out where candidates stand.
--
August 8, 2005
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