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Incentives
out of Joint
In
theory, the Washington region can grow by 200,000
more households yet reduce traffic congestion
if it shifts to transit-oriented development.
Trouble is, localities have little reason to
cooperate.
By
Robert L. Burke
The
reason that traffic congestion is so bad, many
Washington-area commuters would agree, is not just
the lack of roads -- it's the flood of people
moving into the region.
That
sentiment is reinforced with every new population
report. Loudoun County, for example, which seems
overrun with bulldozers and new housing projects,
has seen its population climb an astonishing 49
percent since 2000 to more than 250,000 people,
with no let-up in sight. Of course the
local roads will be overwhelmed.
But
the common-sense assumptions about population and
its impact on traffic may be wrong.
Transportation
analysts with the Metropolitan Washington Council
of Governments, a regional group, last fall looked
at what would happen to traffic demand by 2030 if
another 200,000 housing units were added to the
study region, which in Virginia includes the
counties of Prince William, Loudoun, Stafford,
Fairfax, Arlington and the city of Alexandria. To
some that might sound like a recipe for disaster.
But
the results of the study said otherwise: Under
that scenario, the number of total vehicle miles traveled would
actually drop by nine percent and transit
trips would rise 12 percent. What’s more,
traffic during the peak morning congestion period
would actually improve slightly. The key issue
isn't how many housing units there are but where
they are located.
The
COG exercise assumed that new housing units
would be concentrated in “activity clusters”
near major transportation corridors and commercial
centers, not just scattered across the
countryside. “That was a fairly dramatic
result,” says Ron Kirby, director of the
group’s department of transportation planning.
The
point of the study was to support increasing the
supply of housing and the amount of
transit-oriented development. “It resonated
pretty well with all of our elected officials.
They basically buy it, and so do the [county]
planning directors," says Kirby. "The
issue is how to shoehorn this housing in.”
That
question gets to the heart of how housing supply
can affect transportation. Despite evidence that
higher density and more housing units could ease
the stress on the region’s road network by
letting people live closer to where they work,
there’s little reason to think the housing
supply can keep up with the fast-rising demand.
The
problem is that local governments don't have the
main responsibility for making transportation
improvements but they do bear the burden of
providing other services, like education, to
newcomers. An
average household in Prince William costs the
county about $16,000 per year for services but
pays only $3,300 in local taxes, notes Sean T.
Connaughton, board chairman of Prince William County,
which saw a population increase of 74,500 between
2000 and 2005.
While
residential growth drives up the cost
of building and operating new schools, the
state's education funding formula reimburses
Northern Virginia's affluent localities as little
as 20 percent of their school budgets. Bottom
line: Virginia's tax structure and educational
funding formulas create a disincentive for local
governments to accept new housing no matter how
much it might benefit the regional transportation
system.
The
financial incentives put local officials like
Connaughton at odds with those who adopt a
regional or statewide perspective. County
planners have not made enough room for housing,
Kirby observes. “We ask where’s the housing,
and they say somebody else is going to have to
provide the housing. And it’s always the next
county out. That’s been going on for decades.”
The
result is longer and longer commutes on roads in
the outer suburbs that are almost never able to
handle the demand. “What people have to realize
is that saying no to new housing in an environment
where you’re recruiting new business expansion
is not the answer,” says Mike Toalson, executive
vice president of the Home Builders Association of
Virginia.
Some
localities intentionally drive down the supply of
low-cost housing by eliminating the smaller lot
sizes, Toalson says, because larger housing lots
produce more real estate tax revenues. “When one
[locality] does it, the others do, and the demand
leapfrogs out.”
People are willing to drive longer
and longer distances to and
from work to get the house they want.
“The problem is our roads are choked with people
making these very long commutes,” Kirby says.
One
way to deal with this congestion-inducing dynamic
is to put the onus on local governments,
especially those near the urban core, to allow
more houses to be built closer to where the jobs
are. Another option is to put the burden on the
state make the long-distance commutes work.
“They’ve
got to widen the interstates and get these cars
off all the secondary roads,” says Connaughton.
He
approves of plans to extend HOT lanes down the I-95
corridor to Spotsylvania County, an upgrade that
will allow commuters to pay a toll to avoid
congestion. Some fear that the improvement will
engender more sprawl by making it easier for
commuters to make even longer commutes.
Connaughton's response: “You know what, if
you’re on the HOT lanes and not on my Route 1,
go for it. Move as far out as possible.”
Connaughton
says homebuilders shouldn’t aim their criticisms
at local government. “Our mutual enemy is the
state government. If the state
would build the damn roads it’s supposed to
build, if the state would give us the full money
we’re due to build schools… I wouldn’t be
putting the screws to them.”
The
underlying problem, suggests Connaughton, is Virginia's out-of-whack tax
structure. "That's where this whole system
breaks down," he says. Unlike localities, the
state benefits when people move into Virginia because newcomers pay income taxes
into the General Fund without incurring
commensurate obligations. "They (the
state) are out there doing
everything they can to encourage [more] people
because it gets more revenue for them, and we’re
trying to figure out what to do with
them.”
Kirby says there are signs that some of the inner
Northern Virginia localities are
reappraising how they look at the problem. They
would like to balance things out and bring people into
their commercial areas by creating more mixed-use
developments. “Communities don’t want to be
canyons of office buildings where they roll up the
sidewalks at night,” he says.
Redevelopment of older existing commercial
projects is one answer, Kirby says. Old shopping
centers or other commercial developments that are
no longer viable can be redone into mixed-use
projects that would include townhouses or
condominiums, he says. “It’s a slow,
painstaking process but if you have the overall
goal in mind as opportunities arise, you take
advantage of them.”
While
localities may pursue Kirby's enlightened path,
they'll have to act against their fiscal best
interest to do so. It's hard to see local
governments in the Washington region accommodating
those 200,000 predicted new households as long as
the financial incentives remain as out of balance
as they are.
Bacon's
Rebellion News Service
May
4, 2006
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