Tim
Kaine won the 2005 gubernatorial contest by campaigning
as Mark Warner Redux: If you liked the last four years,
a vote for Kaine was a vote for four more. Yet the
Governor-elect is taking Virginia's transportation
policy, the top issue on the legislative agenda in 2006,
in a very different direction.
The
ballots had barely been counted last week when Kaine
promised to hold summits around the state with the goal of building a statewide coalition for
his transportation program. Where Warner has treated transportation as a
fiscal problem -- his reform of the
Virginia Department of Transportation stressed
completing new construction projects on budget and on
time -- Kaine sees it as largely a planning problem.
Kaine
wants to address what he deems the underlying cause of
traffic congestion: the disconnect between
transportation and land use planning. A
top priority will be enacting an idea, articulated
late in his campaign, to give local governments more
power to block rezoning requests for development that would
generate more traffic than the transportation system
could handle.
Kaine did not run as a radical, but his transportation
plan arguably represents the most dramatic change in
thinking about transportation in Virginia since the
implementation of the Interstate highway system a half
century ago. Previous
governors -- and that includes Warner -- had barely
uttered the words "land use" in public, much
less expended political capital on an issue as abstract
as the transportation-land use interface.
Kaine has
charged way ahead of public opinion and the conventional
wisdom. News and editorial coverage of the
transportation crisis in Virginia has overwhelmingly
viewed traffic congestion as a matter of insufficient
supply. If roads are crowded, build more roads -- and
raise taxes if need be to pay for them. But
Kaine doesn't buy into the tax-and-build paradigm. As
the Kaine for Governor website states plainly: "Trying
to tax and pave our way out of traffic won't work."
The
land-use gambit is risky both politically and
practically. Politically, because the idea of giving
local governments more power to block development is
sure to arouse the wrath of the special interests
arrayed around the practice of Business as Usual. Practically, because Kaine's proposed solution
could create problems of its own. If local governments
use the proposed new powers to restrict the supply of
new housing, they could well aggravate a housing
shortage that has reached crisis proportions
already,
especially in Northern Virginia where the anti-growth
backlash is strongest and the housing shortage the most
severe.
But
the potential payoff is enormous, too. As readers of the
Bacon's Rebellion blog may recall, I initially
responded very negatively to Kaine's proposal -- so
negatively that I declared that Kaine had just lost my
vote! I still worry about the potential impact of his
proposal on the affordability and accessibility of
housing. But as I've thought the issue through, I've
come to believe that Kaine's idea -- if properly
formulated -- could become a powerful force for
positive change.
Kaine
learned an important lesson in 2002 when voters in
Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads rejected proposals,
which he'd backed, to raise regional taxes to augment local road and
rail construction programs. According to the Kaine
campaign website, voters did not trust the politicians
in Richmond to spend new money as promised -- on
transportation only -- did not trust VDOT to use the
money efficiently, and did not believe state and local
leaders could solve transportation problems by planning
and building roads the same way they always had. Stated
the website: "The message was crystal clear—don’t throw
money at a broken system. Fix the system."
In
Kaine's estimation, state and local governments need to
do a better job of matching transportation planning with
land use planning. "For too long in Virginia, we
have made transportation and development decisions
separate from each other," states the Kaine
transportation document. "We can all point to
examples of new homes or shopping centers that were
built on roads not ready to handle the traffic, leaving
drivers stuck waiting for the state to play catch-up in
building or widening roads. ... We can’t continue to
do things the same way and expect them to turn out
differently."
The Kaine campaign
offered a number of proposals for combating
traffic congestion, including
the following:
- Utilize Existing
Infrastructure. Kaine would encourage developers
to do more in-fill development and redevelopment,
citing a property tax abatement program the city of
Richmond has used successfully to spur renovations
of existing buildings. "By encouraging more
activity near our job center," the Kaine plan
says, "we help slow down the need for expansive
road development in the far suburbs of our
city."
- Make existing
corridors more efficient. Instead of adding
lanes to roads, protect the integrity of
transportation corridors by limiting the number of
intersections and curb cuts that interfere with
traffic flow. Also, upgrade traffic lights to
respond dynamically to changes in traffic
conditions.
- Manage demand.
Instead of adding transportation capacity, reduce travel
demand. Encourage telecommuting, employ HOT lane tolls with
congestion pricing, and stagger work schedules so
people can commute at different times of
day.
- Conduct traffic
impact statements. When a developer asks a
locality to rezone land for a project, require him
to submit a traffic impact statement. Likewise,
require VDOT to conduct traffic-impact studies of
its own road construction projects.
- Allow local
governments to deny rezoning when roads are
insufficient. "Localities should not be
compelled to accept large new developments that
overwhelm the local road infrastructure unless there
is a funded infrastructure plan in place."
The first three bullets
encompass ideas that I have called
for in Bacon's Rebellion. I could not be much
happier with the Kaine transportation plan if I'd
written it myself. My concern with the last item is
this: Localities have contributed in large measure to
the scarcity of affordable and accessible housing in
Virginia by
using their existing powers to restrict the supply of
new housing. Give them more power, I fear, and they will
restrict the supply even more.
Here's the problem:
Local governments face electoral pressure to keep tax
rates low. The near-universal response is to encourage
commercial real estate development, which pays more in
taxes than its tenants demand in services, and to
curtail residential real estate, which attracts renters
and home buyers who cost more than they pay in taxes.
Giving localities more power to restrict residential
growth on the grounds of traffic
congestion will make it even easier to block
much-needed residential development. But
newcomers have to live somewhere.
Fortunately, the
housing-transportation trade-off may be solvable. Here's
the key: Any move to grant local governments more power
to block development projects must take into
account the fact that the impact of a project
upon local traffic conditions can vary widely, depending upon how
it is designed.
Ideally, communities
should have a balance of houses to live in, offices to
work in, and places to shop. Kaine's transportation plan
acknowledges this basic truth: "By building
communities where people can live, work and shop,"
it says, "we will reduce the amount of time we
spend traveling from place to place during the
day."
If a project contributes to the rounding
out of what Bacon's Rebellion columnist EM Risse
calls a "balanced community," its impact will
be far more benign than a development that accentuates
the imbalance. For a real-world example, a project that
would add condominiums to Tysons Corner would restore a
modicum of balance to that highly out-of-balance jobs
center. Residents who lived in Tysons County would have
to drive only a short distance to work, relieving the
burden on Interstate 495, I-66 and other traffic
arteries to get them there. Any rational legislation
would favor such a development rather than penalize it.
Similarly, communities
should be designed to accommodate alternate modes of
transportation, such as walking, biking and mass
transit. Projects that create pedestrian-friendly
streetscapes and make mass transit more accessible will
tend to generate fewer automobile trips than those that
ignore these essentials.
There exists a body of
thought that communities can be designed from the ground
up to mitigate the local traffic impact. A fascinating
experiment is occurring right now in Fairfax County,
where Pulte Homes wants to put 6,000 people on 56 acres
next to the Vienna Metro station. As a condition of
getting the land rezoned at higher densities, Pulte must
demonstrate that it can reduce the number of residential
rush-hour trips by 47 percent and office-generated trips
by 25 percent compared to comparable development at traditional,
lower densities.
As Bob Burke reports
for Road
to Ruin, Pulte Homes has identified a wide range of
alternatives for reducing traffic:
-
Make
sure the right retail mix emerges – including a
small grocery store, child care, banks and ATMs, dry
cleaning, cafes and restaurants, that are readily
accessible on foot.
And
that list does not begin to exhaust all the
possibilities.
If
the MetroWest experiment proves successful, it could
provide a model for other developers around Virginia. If
Tim Kaine's legislation is crafted properly, it will not
simply block development projects that threaten to
overwhelm local roads and streets -- it will prod
localities and developers into the kind of dialogue that
is taking place between Fairfax County and Pulte Homes.
Rather
than providing localities a stick for beating away
unwanted new projects, Tim Kaine's legislation could
provide carrots for developers to submit projects with a
low traffic footprint. Good legislation would reward
projects that restore a balance of housing, jobs and
amenities to a community. Good legislation would give
special consideration to projects that display creative
thinking on how to reduce residents' dependence upon
automobile trips. Not every developer will have access
to Metro Rail like Pulte Homes, but any developer can
incorporate buses, vans, carpooling, telecommuting and a host of other
strategies into their designs.
Democrat Tim Kaine, whom his opponent
attempted to brand as a "liberal," has already
presented a small- government vision for transportation
at odds with those who would solve traffic congestion by
throwing more money at it. He has an opportunity to
confound his critics yet again by tweaking his
transportation plan to transform developers from a part
of the problem into part of the solution. Let us hope that the General Assembly Republicans
can see the virtue in a transportation policy built upon
public parsimony and private creativity.
--
November 14, 2005
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