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Silicon
for Asphalt
It's
no surprise that the state highway commissioner thinks
Virginia needs more money to build more roads. But
Philip Shucet also entertains heretical thoughts on how
the state can use technology to improve mobility.
Philip
Shucet does not project the aura of a technophile.
He’s the state highway commissioner, after all. His
world is spreadsheets and budgets, rights of way and
dump trucks. Yet he’s using technology to work in ways
that the rest of us may be emulating in 20 to 30 years.
He
spends weekends in Virginia Beach
with
his family, then drives late Sunday to an apartment in Richmond.
Sometimes he checks into the big, formal commissioner's
office in the Virginia Department of Highways
headquarters on Broad Street.
But, as often as not, he hits the road to inspect
what’s happening out in the field. He shares an office
with a VDOT employee in Charlottesville,
where he can access his e-mail, and another in Norfolk,
close to home, where he checks in most Fridays.
Shucet
may be top dog at a state agency with thousands of
employees, but it’s not his style to stay in Richmond
and
summon subordinates. Liberated by the microchip, he goes
where the job takes him. He stays in touch by cell
phone, and he hauls along his electronic files in his
laptop. His “office” is wherever he says it is. In
the evening, he sits on his apartment porch, pulls out
his Blackberry and, between puffs on a cigar and sips of
wine, catches up with his e-mail correspondence. On
weekends back in Virginia
Beach, he
stays plugged in through a high-speed network connection
at home.
Shucet
is no geek – he’s not in love with technology for
technology's sake. He just appreciates what it can do
for him. Technology is changing the nature of work by
obliterating traditional distinctions between the home
place and work place, and sundering the links that
chained “the office” to a particular geographic
location. The implications for travel patterns –
especially for the traditional rush hour commute – and
for state transportation policy generally are momentous.
What
if government and corporate employers enabled employees
to work more like he does, muses Shucet. Instead of
working in cubicle pens, people would choose the most
convenient and productive times and locations to work
– whether at home, the main office or some other place
– depending on what they had to do and with whom they
had to meet that day. Instead of fighting the other
lemmings on Interstate 95 between 7:30 a.m.
and
9
a.m.,
they would have the flexibility to drive to work,
wherever that might be that day, when the traffic settled down.
Shucet
is far from an iconoclast: He insists that without more
money to fund road and mass transit projects, Virginia
risks creating L.A.-style traffic conditions in
Northern Virginia, and Northern
Virginia-style conditions in Hampton Roads. As highway
commissioner, he is responsible, after all, for building
and maintaining highways -- not engineering social
change.
But he’s
also a realist: Another round of tax increases will be a
very hard sell. Whatever extra dollars may come VDOT’s
way, they won’t be enough to meet the $70 billion in
unmet needs over the next 20 years identified by the VTrans2025
transportation plan. His assumption is that VDOT
will be constrained financially for the foreseeable
future.
Rather
than griping about short-sighted politicians and voters
who don’t know what’s good for them, Shucet takes
the situation he’s given and tries to make the best of
it. Financial necessity, he suggests optimistically, may
inspire “new and better ways of doing things.”
In
the last edition of Bacon’s Rebellion, I described
what the Commissioner has done to put VDOT’s financial
house in order, the starting point for developing any
rational transportation policy. (See “The
Shucet Shake Up,” Sept.
7, 2004
.) In this edition, I explore alternative transportation
strategies that Shucet is pursuing, and yet others that represent, at this stage,
little more than the commissioner thinking out loud.
You
wouldn't deduce it from looking at VDOT budget numbers,
which are skewed overwhelmingly to road building and
maintenance, but Shucet is steering VDOT in some
interesting new directions.
"What
if we had no new funds to expand our system," he
asks, "and all we could do was think smarter about
operating the system we had?"
One approach would be to increase the capacity of
existing roads and highways through more efficient
operations. Towards that goal, Shucet has created a new
post, a chief of system operations, that reports
directly to him. This official is responsible for
developing a strategy for getting more mileage, so to
speak, from Virginia's road and
highway network. At this initiative
matures, he says, he expects considerable sums to start
moving from asphalt to operations.
Shucet
sees two operational strategies that can generate a
quick payoff: better incident response and better signal
integration. As he looks back on his tenure as
commissioner, he thinks one of his biggest mistakes was
cutting -- under budgetary duress -- half the funding
for VDOT's safety service patrol program. "These
guys are key to early incident response," he
explains. More than half of all highway travel delay is
caused by traffic accidents. In retrospect, it's clear
that cutting the patrols contributed significantly to
congestion. Restoring funds to the program is one of his
highest priorities for next year.
Shucet
also would like to invest more in technology that allows
VDOT to gather real-time information on traffic
conditions and use the data to coordinate traffic
signals in response to shifting traffic conditions. In
VDOT's smart traffic center in Northern Virginia, he
says, there's already a guy who sits behind a computer
and can change the timing on 1,200 traffic signals. If
there's an accident on the Beltway, for instance, he can
change the signal timing along routes where traffic is
being diverted.
What
the guy in the booth can't do yet is monitor traffic
conditions at those 1,200 traffic signals. And even if
he could, the complexity of maximizing through-put on a
dynamic basis would be overwhelming. Equipping traffic
signals with monitors and devising algorithms to
optimize traffic flow would require a major investment,
but "integrating traffic information with traffic
signal systems," says Shucet, "needs to be a
big part of our future."
While
it may well be possible to push more cars through the
same roads and highways, the emphasis on
"operational" efficiency is only one stepped
removed from building more roads and laying more rail --
it's a supply-side solution to the problem. The default
response of an engineer-dominated organizational culture
like VDOT is to increase the supply, or capacity, of the
transportation network.
The
supply-side emphasis was evident in an op-ed piece that Whittington Clement
published Sunday in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
There, the Secretary of Transportation sang the praises of public-private
partnerships that invited fresh thinking, and
investment capital, from the private sector. These
partnerships would bankroll massive construction
projects through revenues generated by tolls or special
tax districts. Insofar as the people who benefit from
these transportation improvements are the ones who pay
for them, public-private partnerships are vastly
superior to tax hikes as a financing
mechanism.
However,
these partnerships don't have a terribly successful
track record financially. Tax revenues from the Rt. 28
widening project near Dulles Airport have fallen
calamitously short of projections, and bonds for the
Pocahontas Parkway south of Richmond have been
downgraded to junk status. It is critical that the
private developers pushing these projects assume their
fair share of the risk and not saddle the state with
massive liabilities
should revenue projections fail to materialize.
What
remains missing from VDOT policies, except on the most
theoretical level, is any effort to influence the demand
for transportation facilities. VDOT gives lip
service to the need to tie state transportation plans to
local land use plans, on the grounds that the pattern of
residential and commercial development is a prime driver
of the demand for transportation facilities. But as a
practical matter, very little has changed. Local pilot
projects in Caroline and Botetourt Counties have yet to
lead to any broader initiatives.
I
feel a bit ungracious for bringing up this unfortunate
fact, for Clement is the first transportation secretary
in Virginia history, to my knowledge, to pay any
heed whatsoever to the transportation-land use nexus. Even lip
service represents progress compared to previous
administrations.
Likewise, Shucet is the first highway
commissioner in Virginia to emphasize publicly the crucial role of land use
in transportation planning. "I raise that issue every
opportunity I get," he says. "Without a closer
integration of land use and transportation plans, no
amount of money will get us anywhere. Just getting more
money to do what we've been doing is not an
answer."
Shucet
knows how to talk the talk. Now, the Warner
administration needs to walk the walk. It won't be easy.
Turning rhetoric
into reality will take a huge commitment of political
capital, for the challenges of coordinating
transportation and land use planning are formidable.
As Lieutenant Governor Tim
Kaine recently pointed out to the Virginia Environmental
Assembly, there seem to be only two options: Either give
the state power over land use decisions, which would
infuriate localities, or devolve transportation planning
to local governments, which would balkanize the planning
process. Kaine admitted that he didn't know which was
the best way to go. Such constitutional issues are beyond the scope
of Clement and Shucet to deal with. But until someone
tackles the disjunction between transportation and land
use planning, localities will continue approving
irresponsible development projects that maximize property tax
revenues while letting the state worry about the traffic
generated by those projects.
VDOT
does have a tool, however, that may help local
governments make better informed land use decisions. The
department maintains sophisticated traffic modeling
capabilities that allow its planners to forecast the
traffic impact of a proposed office complex or housing
subdivision on the road network. VDOT makes this tool
available to local government, Shucet says, but hasn't
been as aggressive in its outreach as it could have
been. The ability to simulate different development
scenarios, he suggests, might help local politicians
make better-informed land use decisions.
Telework
is another potential strategy for re-shaping
transportation demand. Shucet confesses that he hasn't
given this option much attention, but he finds the idea appealing. In his previous
incarnation as a senior executive of a transportation
engineering company, he encouraged people to
telecommute. Fewer people in the office translated into
less office space. Smaller offices translated into lower
facility costs.
Perhaps
he could be more proactive about implementing telework
strategies at VDOT, Shucet says. He does employ
video teleconferencing extensively, using the technology
to run meetings with VDOT officials around the state
instead of making them drive to Richmond. And, of
course, he's never placed great stock in working in an
office and watching the clock. "The fact that someone sits in a chair in
an office in downtown Richmond, comes in on time and
leaves on time, that doesn't impress me. ... The
important thing is, did you get your job done, not where
did you get it done?"
Perhaps
state government as a whole could take the lead in
demonstrating the viability of telework strategies. A
task force under Secretary of Administration Sandra
Bowen is conducting a top-to-bottom review of the
state's real estate assets. The group is asking
probing questions, Shucet says: "Does everybody
need to be in the office from nine to five? No. Does
everyone need to have their own individual office? Maybe
not."
As
employees equip themselves with cell phones, laptops and
wireless e-mail, they can work effectively anywhere.
Indeed, some may work more productively if they don't
come into the office every day. Bowen's task force could
make a business case for telework simply
on the basis of higher employee productivity and lower
real estate overhead. (See the business case for
telework
in "The Network of
Space," July 12, 2004.) The case gets even stronger
if the state considers the benefit of taking of thousands
of state workers off rush-hour thoroughfares. And it
gets stronger yet if the state pioneers teleworking strategies
that other large employers emulate, pulling tens
of thousands of employees off the roads.
The
Warner administration has garnered national plaudits for
its work in re-engineering the Commonwealth's
information technology systems. The state's investment
in state-of-the-art IT and telecommunications
infrastructure opens up possibilities for Bowen's
working group to reinvent not only the management of
state facilities, but the workplace culture of the state
bureaucracy. In turn, forging effective telework reforms
would open up new vistas for addressing the demand side
of Virginia's transportation woes.
The
administration and its allies in the General Assembly
still need nudging. Many lawmakers remain stuck in
the mindset that transportation policy equates with
finding new sources of money to build more highway and
transit projects. The call last week by a group of
Northern Virginia Republican to borrow billions
to build more roads illustrates the stuck-in-a-rut
thinking that need to be overcome.
Perhaps
Shucet, who has earned tremendous credibility for his
work overhauling VDOT, can help move the debate forward.
Legislators might listen if he says that moving
cars and trucks is the wrong emphasis for transportation policy.
The focus, he asserts, should be on providing mobility
and access to people and businesses.
"I
can get in my car and drive to the movie theater across
town. Or I can drive to a video store in my neighborhood
shopping center. Or I can pipe a movie into my
home," he says. Which makes the better "transportation"
policy -- widening roads to make it easier to get to the
movie theater, or putting high-bandwidth Internet access
into every home?
Once
you break free of the supply-side mindset, all kinds of
crazy possibilities present themselves. Let's hope
Shucet has the chance to put some of his ruminations
into action.
--
September
20, 2004
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