A
Curious Lapse of Memory
Lawmakers
never mention it when talking about traffic congestion,
but real VDOT spending has more than doubled the rate of
population growth over
the past 10 years.
In
the 2001 cult movie Memento, the protagonist
Leonard Shelby suffers a brain disorder that renders him incapable of forming new, long-term
memories. Obsessed with finding the men who
murdered his wife and bludgeoned his head,
causing his condition, he tattoos his findings on his body so he
doesn't have to retrace his steps with each new day.
I
have no evidence that Senate
Finance Chair John H. Chichester, R-Fredericksburg, has
suffered a debilitating blow to the cranium, but he does
seem handicapped by maladies oddly similar to those of
Leonard Shelby. As the most powerful
lawmaker in the Virginia state senate, Chichester zealously
pursues new revenues for transportation as if
previous spending hikes have been obliterated from his
memory.
When
Chichester wakes up in the morning and squints at himself
in the mirror, it would do him good to see these two clues
stitched into his chest:
Ten-year
VDOT spending increase -- 33 percent *
Ten-year
population increase -- 12.8 percent
How
would these numbers help Chichester in his quest? They
would demonstrate that state spending on highway
maintenance and construction has outstripped
the increase in Virginia's population by more than a
two-to-one
margin over a sustained
period of time--a period during which traffic
congestion has only gotten worse.
If
forced to ponder the meaning of these numbers on a daily
basis, it eventually might occur to Mr. Chichester -- as I
wish it would occur also to his cohorts in the state
Senate and House of Delegates, whose
memories seem equally afflicted -- that raising more money... to fund more
transportation projects... using the same approach the
Commonwealth has employed over the past 20 years...
would accomplish little more than drain taxpayers' pockets.
Proponents
of higher taxes for transportation cite a variety of
metrics for justifying the need to raise more revenue and
undertake more projects. The increase in automobile
fuel efficiency, they whine, means that motorists are
driving more without paying more in gasoline taxes. The number of
lane-miles of road, they sniffle, has not kept pace with
the increase in population. What
they never bother to mention is that over the years, the Virginia Department of Transportation has
somehow managed together to cobble together
funding sources from somewhere to pay for
massively expanded spending.
Here
is what the General Assembly has budgeted over the past
10 years, according to the Department
of Planning and Budget website:
|
VDOT
Budget (in $ millions) |
|
FY
1997 |
1,856 |
FY 1998 |
2,003 |
FY 1999 |
2,436 |
FY 2000 |
2,354 |
FY 2001 |
2,515 |
FY 2002 |
2,609 |
FY 2003 |
2,565 |
FY 2004 |
2,991 |
FY 2005 |
2,848 |
FY 2006 |
2,969 |
Adjusted
for inflation, the real rate of VDOT spending
stands at approximately 30 percent. (See note
on inflation below.) Actual
spending may not always have matched authorized budgets,
especially in recessionary years when the Warner
administration had to make emergency spending cuts. But
over the long run, spending has climbed
relentlessly. Whatever problems there are with
Virginia's transportation system, they are demonstrably not
a lack of money.
For
all of VDOT's failures at estimating project costs and
bringing in projects on time, bureaucratic ineptitude is
not the cause of Virginia's transportation woes. Clearly, an inability to bring in projects
on budget and on time hasn't helped VDOT keep up with
its ambitious construction schedule. But VDOT Commissioner Philip Shucet is steadily improving
VDOT's project performance, and he's done it while
cutting payroll and saving millions of dollars in
overhead.
Shucet
deserves kudos all around for improving VDOT
performance, but saving a few hundred million
dollars--or even a couple of billion dollars--won't make
a dent in the $108 billion in projected "unmet
needs" that the
VTrans2025 transportation plan has identified in
Virginia over the next 20 years.
The
fundamental problem is a failed transportation model:
the belief that the way to reduce traffic congestion is
to lay more asphalt or extend a METRO line another few
miles without changing the forces--primarily land
use--that influence the frequency and distance of car
trips.
I
have made the point so many times that I surely must
weary my readers in repeating it: Virginia cannot
build its way out of traffic congestion caused by
dysfunctional development patterns.
But Virginia's lawmakers, like Leonard Shelby, appear to
have a brain disorder that makes them incapable of
remembering the most elementary facts. So, they need to be
reminded over and over again.
Let's
walk through the numbers. Feel free to tattoo this
information on the forehead of your friendly legislative
representative. (The numbers I'm about to recite come
from the Virginia
Department of Motor Vehicles website.)
In
the decade between 1994 and 2003, Virginia's population
rose from 6.55 million to an estimated 7.39 million, a 12.8 percent
jump. VDOT spending has increased at four times that
rate. Why, then, is traffic congestion getting worse,
not better?
One
frequently cited culprit is the increasing number of cars on the
roads. The
spread of middle-class affluence has made it affordable
for more people to purchase and maintain an
automobile. While Virginia's population increased 30
percent in the two decades between 1971 and 1990, the
number of licensed motorists surged 80 percent. In other
words, a significant amount of
the increased driving on Virginia's roads--and the
ensuing increase in traffic congestion during that
period-- arguably was a felicitous consequence of prosperity.
While
rising incomes may have contributed to increased
traffic in the 1970s and 1980s, it has long since ceased
to be a factor. By the 1990s, almost everyone who
wanted a car already had a car. The number of licensed
drivers, expressed as a percentage of the total
population, flattened out. Indeed, it has even
declined modestly over the past few years.
|
Licensed
Drivers
as
Percentage of Virginia Population
|
|
|
1992 |
74.6 |
|
1993 |
74.2 |
|
1994 |
73.9 |
|
1995 |
73.8 |
|
1996 |
74.4 |
|
1997 |
74.5 |
|
1998 |
71.4 |
|
1999 |
71.9 |
|
2000 |
71.1 |
|
2001 |
70.9 |
|
2002 |
71.1 |
|
2003 |
71.1 |
What,
then, has been the driving force of traffic congestion?
Simple: People have been driving more. In
1992, Virginians logged an average of 13,285 miles
per motorist. By 2001, they racked up an incredible
17,055 miles per motorist--an increase of 28 percent
per driver!
That
is an astounding increase for a single decade. It is
obtuse not to inquire why Virginians are driving
so much more, and reckless not to ask whether the trend
will continue. Indeed, I would characterize it as
downright irresponsible for self-styled "fiscal
conservatives" to blindly hurl billions of tax dollars
at Virginia's
transportation system without understanding the social
and economic forces causing the traffic congestion.
That's not statesmanship. That's not fiscal integrity.
It's pandering.
Readers
of of Bacon's Rebellion--either of my column or Ed
Risse's "The Shape of the Future" column--know
the answer. The past 10 years have witnessed an
acceleration of what is commonly referred to as
"sprawl," a scattered, land-intensive pattern
of development that makes it impossible to participate
fully in contemporary suburban society without driving
to virtually every destination. As Ed and I have argued ad
nauseum--see Ed's latest, "The
Commuting Problem," in the current edition of
Bacon's Rebellion--it is utter folly to pour more money
into building more roads, or even building new mass
transit projects, until state and local governments
address the flawed taxation policies, zoning codes,
allocation of state transportation dollars and other
root causes of traffic congestion.
Sadly, Virginia's lawmakers--Republicans and
Democrats alike--have no coherent body of thought to
guide them in setting transportation policy. They absorb the
self-serving pleadings of special interests, the uninformed
scribblings of newspaper pundits and the ignorant
mutterings of random citizens motivated enough to attend
the occasional public hearing. The track record of our
politicians has been abysmal. For years now, the politicians have
claimed that begging, borrowing or stealing more money
to build more projects would improve transportation
mobility--or, at least, slow Virginia's descent into
gridlock. So far, they have been proven consistently wrong.
Based
on their public statements to date, leading lawmakers show no
awareness of the basic data cited in this column. To all
appearances, they
lack even the institutional memory of their own actions.
When was the last time any member of the
General Assembly acknowledged how much VDOT
spending has surged over the past 10 years?
Either
our politicians
don't know what the facts are, or they don't care. In either case, their
mental processes are as fractured and confused as
Leonard Shelby's.
At
least Leonard had an excuse: Someone had hammered
him on the head. Maybe that's what Virginia's
legislators need: a good hammering in the polls this
fall. That's one thing they won't forget.
--
January 17, 2005
*
In little teeny letters following an
asterisk--perhaps on the ankle--the tattoo would add the
proviso: "in inflation-adjusted dollars."
In
absolute dollars VDOT spending will have increased 60
percent over the 10-year period ending in fiscal 2006.
In the most recent comparable 10-year period for which
statistics are available, 1994 to 2004, the consumer
price index increased a tad more than 27 percent,
implying an inflation-adjusted increase of 33 percent
for VDOT.
Of
course, that's just a guesstimate. On the one hand, the
Producer Price Index increased only 14.9 percent over a
comparable period (1993-2003). On the other, with China
driving up global prices of cement, asphalt, steel and
other raw materials, the rate of inflation for
construction undoubtedly has been higher. Bottom line:
We're dealing in rough numbers.
|