|
One
of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's greatest legislative victories this year was
enacting a law requiring the Virginia Department of
Transportation to analyze the traffic impact of
rezoning cases in fast-growth counties. The
expectation is that county officials will curtail development in places
where added traffic would overwhelm the transportation
system.
Officially,
the law doesn't go into effect until next year, but
the Kainiacs jump-started the process by running a
pilot study in Loudoun County. It was a timely
intervention. Straddling the
Northern Virginia growth frontier, Loudoun will make
crucial decisions this fall affecting proposals to
add 23,000 housing units to the 5,000 already
allowed in the Dulles South planning area. VDOT's "preliminary
review"
showed
that the expanded housing would inundate local roads,
creating atrocious driving conditions
for miles around and spilling deep into Fairfax and
Prince William counties.
The
analysis didn't have the effect that some had hoped
for, however.
Developers and pro-growth supervisors immediately
knocked holes in the report, describing it as a
"distortion" and a political stunt. The
VDOT review did not, to put it mildly, quell the
traffic controversy.
But
the analysis did do one thing: It
focused the attention of everyone -- developers,
citizens, the media, county officials -- on the
traffic issue. The scenario of
gridlock radiating out from Loudoun County in 20 years, even if only a possibility, was too scary to ignore.
Indeed,
judging by the furor in Loudoun County, I would suggest that the politics of
growth and rezoning in Virginia may be entering a new
phase. VDOT traffic analyses do carry
weight, and they will become an
important factor in future rezoning debates. Warring
interest groups may contest VDOT findings, but that's OK.
The traffic
impact of big real estate projects will be discussed in greater detail.
Local officials, I expect, will sift through traffic issues
more carefully and will consider a wider range of
transportation financing and planning alternatives than
they have before. For the citizenry of Virginia,
it's a no-lose situation.
At
issue in Loudoun is the fate of Dulles South, a
sparsely populated area west of Washington Dulles
International Airport, which has undergone multiple
revisions in county plans. In 1997, the Board of
Supervisors designated the area as a
"transition" zone between the suburban development near Dulles Airport and the bucolic
horse country to the west. By 2001, county plans
called for an
average of two houses per acre and more than half
the land set aside as open space.
Since
then, a new, more growth-friendly board has been
elected. In addition, a handful of
major property owners -- Greenvest, the Toll
Brothers, Winchester Homes, the Van Metre Companies
and others -- have consolidated ownership of about
85 percent of the land in the Upper Foley and Broad
Run subareas of Dulles South. At the urging of these
property owners, the county is contemplating a major
increase in density: from about 5,000 housing units
to as many as 28,000 housing units.
The
blue dot shows the approximate location of the Upper
Foley and Broad Run sub-areas where Loudoun County
is considering an increase in the number of housing
units from 5,000 to 23,000.
The
Piedmont Environmental Council and allied citizen groups
sounded the klaxons. Last October, the PEC distributed a
traffic-impact analysis that concluded:
The
Greenvest proposal will bring development to an
area far in excess of what has been planned and
forecast through the [Metropolitan Washington
Council of Governments] travel demand model. While
road improvements are also proposed, they are
vastly insufficient to address the impacts. In
fact, the regional plan, without the Greenvest
amendments, already shows growth in excess of road
capacity for many roadways.
Pro-growth
forces can dismiss the PEC report as biased because
the PEC has a history of fighting development in
Loudoun County. But it's harder to brush off an
analysis by VDOT, which has no vested stake in the
outcome of the planning battle.
Using
information supplied by the Loudoun County staff,
VDOT conducted an analysis of
the changes to Loudoun's plan for South Dulles. By
VDOT's calculations, the increase in the number of
housing units to 28,000 would generate an additional
250,000 to 300,000 automobile trips per day. While
Loudoun County's previous analysis looked only at
the impact on Loudoun roads, VDOT contended that
negative traffic impacts would spill into
neighboring Fairfax and Prince William counties.
In
a letter to
Loudoun's planning director Julie Pastor, Dennis C.
Morrison, VDOT's district administrator, stated that
by 2025:
(Click
here to see a map
of VDOT's projected traffic counts.)
The
Washington Post quoted VDOT spokesperson Joan
Morris as saying that mitigation of the congestion
could "easily" reach hundreds of millions
of dollars. Not
surprisingly, the VDOT letter generated headlines in
newspapers all over Northern Virginia. The story
suddenly got much bigger than a local, Loudoun County
planning controversy.
But
the developers quickly struck back. Greenvest, the
company leading the charge, criticized the VDOT
analysis on numerous grounds.
First,
VDOT failed to take into account the hundreds of
millions of dollars in traffic improvements that
developers have promised to build, says Packie
Crown, vice president of planning/zoning. In
planning its project, Greenvest did something that
neither Loudoun County nor VDOT had ever done
before: It took an inventory of all the
road projects in and around Dulles South that developers had
proposed, bonded, proffered
or included in Community Development Authorities,
and found that a staggering $700 million to $750 million of
improvements had been committed to.
Second,
VDOT listed only corridors where traffic
congestion would get worse. In Greenvest's analysis,
traffic corridors to the west would improve as the
Dulles South improvements diverted traffic from Rt.
15.
Third,
Greenvest argued, VDOT presented its conclusions
without any context. Sure, six hours of stop-and-go
traffic sounded horrendous. But what was the
alternative? Says
Crown: "The county has been issuing 5,500 to
6,000 building permits a year over the past five
years. The county staff and
[Council of Governments] project that 80,000 new homes are needed by
2010." Those people have to live somewhere.
Wherever
they located, those 28,000 households projected for
Dulles South still would generate 250,000 to 300,000 trips.
What traffic impact would they have if they lived in existing
Loudoun communities such as Leesburg, Ashburn, Sterling or
South Riding -- or, worse, if they leapfrogged west
to Clarke County or even West Virginia, driving
greater distances and clogging even longer stretches
of road? How many miles would the gridlock extend under
those scenarios? VDOT didn't say.
Furthermore,
under questioning by a hostile board of supervisors
last week, Morris, the VDOT manager , conceded that
he hadn't even analyzed what would happen if 5,000 houses
were built in South Dulles, as allowed under
existing zoning -- with no contribution
by developers to transportation improvements.
Of
course, the dueling assumptions and methodologies
doesn't end there. Ed Gorski, a former
county planner and now the Loudoun
County land use officer for the PEC, defends the VDOT study. If
anything, he says, VDOT made conservative
assumptions. "I think they underestimated
what's going to happen. They assumed an average
commute length of 13 miles. ... Thirteen miles
barely gets you down the road to Dulles airport to
the west, or I-66 to the south. A 20- to 25-mile
commute would impact a lot more roads."
Gorski
has a point. The average commute for Leesburg, for
instance, is 26.5 minutes -- twice the length
postulated by VDOT for South Dulles. Very few Dulles South
residents would work locally -- most would commute
to employment centers to the north, to
Leesburg/Ashburn/ Sterling, or to the east in Fairfax
County.
Moreover,
in defense of VDOT's methodology, Gorski asserts that
the agency assumed
that most of the improvements listed in the
Loudoun County transportation plan would be built --
and that includes the road network that the Dulles
South developers would spend $750 million upgrading.
However, Greenvest's Crown denies that's the case.
Round
and round the arguments go, one response leading to
another... and yet another. Who's
right? Greenvest? The PEC? I don't know. But at some
point, after enough coverage in the newspapers (and
e-zines), enough prattling by pundits and enough
posturing by the politicians, the facts will get
sorted out. And that's the point. At the end of the
day, county boards of supervisors will make zoning
decisions on the basis of better information than
they've been getting. And that's progress.
--
July 24, 2006
|
