Articles

SOLs for Roads

Lawmakers may clash over how much to raise taxes for state roads, but they do agree that Virginia would benefit from SOL-like performance measures for transportation.

by Peter Galuszka

As General Assembly conferees endeavor to hash out a transportation bill acceptable to both the Senate and House of Delegates, public attention is focused on the conflict over how to pay for road and rail improvements. Largely unnoticed are areas of agreement, such as the need to develop performance standards to prioritize transportation projects.

The Virginia Department of Transportation already rates road projects by safety and engineering considerations. But now there is broad support for rating improvements by the extent to which they would mitigate traffic congestion or contribute to economic development.

Other states such as Texas and Oregon use computer models to do just that. In the United Kingdom, a recent national study has argued that different projects have a widely varying return on investment when measured by their impact on congestion and the economy.

“Virginia is woefully behind on this,” says Robert Utt, a senior research fellow at Washington’s Heritage Foundation. “A decade ago, the state was a leader in such things as public-private road partnerships and now it’s behind as congestion grows worse,” he says.

As it has become increasingly clear that Virginia cannot "build its way out of congestion," as Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has put it, there is a recognition that, however much money is available, priorities must be set. The Old Dominion appears ready to establish performance goals for transportation much like the Standards of Learning program set goals 13 years for schools.

The concept of performance standards has backing from key players in the legislature: a call for standards is embedded within HB 3202, the GOP compromise transportation package. At the same time, Gov. Kaine has established by executive order a Transportation Accountability Commission "to help us create a framework for the continuous evaluation of our transportation programs."

House Bill 3202 broaches the issues in very general terms. It does not, for instance, enumerate the areas that standards shall measure. “We don’t get as specific as other states." says a legislative staff member close to the matter. "There is a reluctance to tell VDOT what to do.” 

Voting on House Bill 3202 could come as early as this weekend, when the 2007 session is due to come to an end. The bill is now the subject of a conference review between the House of Delegates and the state Senate, and a final version may be ready by Friday.

Lumping in the performance-standards with other VDOT reforms, House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, has said the bill would overhaul the way VDOT does business. Noting that the bill will try to improve VDOT’s focus, Howell declared that “the main components ... include establishing congestion- reducing performance measures, greater use of proven private-sector partnerships, as well as increased accountability and transparency in spending by VDOT.”

On Feb. 6, Kaine weighed in on a positive note, stating that the General Assembly “must include reforms that promote accountability and strengthen the link between transportation and land use.”

HB 3202 broaches the issue of performance standards in the following ways:

• A Joint Commission on Transportation Accountability would be created to review the goals and costs of road projects. The body would consist of six delegates appointed by the Speaker of the House, three of whom would be on the House Committee on Transportation, and four senators appointed by the Senate Committee on Rules, with two from the Senate Transportation Committee. The Auditor of Public Accounts would have a non-voting role. The bill does not specify what matrixes the Commission would use in its reviews.

• The 17-member Commonwealth Transportation Board would be required to assess the impacts of transportation projects as it prepares its five-year state transportation plans.

• The existing Northern Virginia Transportation Authority would study impacts and assess roads.

• The Hampton Roads Transportation Authority, which would be created by House Bill 3202, would do the same as it makes transportation recommendations.

While these four bodies are not specifically tasked with using any particular parameters in assessing road projects, one legislative staffer suggested that they might consider such issues as the job-to-housing ratio of the areas served by the roads, and the number of man-hours and miles saved by reducing congestion, along with the usual ones affecting design, engineering and safety.

In a separate development, Kaine has won budget support for VDOT to create a Transportation Accountability Commission that will work with regional planning districts to come up with performance goals. These would be “quantifiable and achievable” standards that would include job hours lost in traffic, rates of pedestrian travel near highways, and others. Kaine announced the initiative this past Dec. 28 and the commission has met once so far, says Jimmy Carr, assistant secretary of transportation.

Recommendations for specific performance goals are due by this May 30.

Some elements of the current legislation were contained in earlier bills, but so far, just about every transportation reform envisioned by the General Assembly has come apart because of in-fighting among Republicans in the Senate and opposition of Democrats generally.

Key GOP legislators did meet at a special summer retreat outside of Richmond last year. There, outside speakers, such as Utt of the Heritage Foundation, pushed the idea of developing highway performance standards that considered economic and congestion impact as a way to better link road planning to land use issues.

“We provided them with two hours of a presentation giving an option for a performance-based highway program,” says Utt who lives in Stafford and helps guide the Heritage Foundation’s efforts to study the issue nationally. Maryland, Texas and Oregon all have performance-based standards for highways. Texas has the most aggressive program to reduce congestion, he notes.

For years, states, including Virginia, have adopted “process” standards for highways such as requirements for lighting, curves, smoothness and so on. But until recently many states ignored performance goals such as encouraging economic development and reducing congestion when they came up with such standards. “Actually, most of these things can be easily handled, but the states didn’t do it because it’s not their goal,” he says. “A lot of the allocation (of money) is political.”

Without clear performance goals politicians, including those on the Commonwealth Transportation Board who decide how road money is spent, were free to do as they wished. For instance, says Utt, the state wasted $50 million in Stafford building an interchange to a new regional airport “that’s used by maybe a dozen local pilots.” Meanwhile, major congestion issues, such as clogged Interstate 95, have gone unaddressed. “The Commonwealth Transportation Board chooses to spend money on things that have nothing to do with congestion mitigation,” he says.

Utt says that it is unfortunate that the current legislation doesn’t list specific goal-oriented performance standards, relying upon VDOT to devise them. Other states that have progressed farther with standards did so "over their DOTs’ strenuous objections.”

There are federal programs available, such as a computer modeling program than can address issues such as congestion and future traffic needs. On such program, the Highway Economic Requirement System (HERS) has been developed by the Federal Highway Administration to help state DOTs anticipate future programs.

Rich Arnold, senior transportation analyst at the Oregon Department of Transportation in Salem, says he’s been using HERS since 2002. He plugs numbers involving Oregon’s highways into the model and HERS can tell what deficiencies, such as problems with congestion or financing, will be evident in 20 years-time. “It’s a great system,” he says. Carr, Virginia's assistant transportation secretary, says he is aware of HERS but wasn’t certain if VDOT used it.

Economic-based performance standards are on the radar screens of officials in other countries. The United Kingdom, one of Europe’s fastest-growing countries, is broaching the issue. Released in December, a government-sponsored report named after its coordinator, Sir Rod Eddington, an Australian and former CEO of British Airways, came up with a number of recommendations to link British transport projects to promoting economic stability and growth.  

Warning that unchecked traffic congestion in Great Britain would waste time and money, the report suggests that well-thought-out, “targeted” projects could improve the effectiveness of transportation spending. A good road pricing scheme could reduce congestion by half, the report says.

Highly visible, big-ticket projects like those normally favored by politicians generate among the lowest economic returns. A chart from the Eddington study (below) shows how schemes costing more than £1 billion (in red) generated returns less than five percent. Smaller projects showed a much wider range of variability; some earn returns of 20 percent or more, while others were marginal.

The report also condemns “build it and they will come approaches” to highway construction in isolated regions, noting that they often do local businesses more harm than good by exposing them to outside competition they're not prepared to meet. 

There is a danger that the performance standards might sink along with House Bill 3202 as a result of butter budgetary infighting in the General Assembly. Elements contained in the bill had surfaced in earlier legislation that was shot down. On the other hand, Gov. Kaine's transportation accountability commission should keep the idea alive.

Despite the political uncertainties, the effort to bring an SOL-style focus to Virginia’s road-building could go far to help alleviate the state’s major highways problems.

-- February 21, 2007