Many meaty stories from the Commonwealth Transportation Board meeting today. It will take me a long time to do them all justice, so, for the moment, I will settle for whetting your appetite with the highlights.
- The Charlottesville Bypass is dead. It may not be buried — a few ritual oblations remains — but it is lying in the coroner’s office. The McAuliffe administration has tasked a Rt. 29 Advisory Panel, headed by former highway commissioner Philip Shucet, to develop recommendations for improving mobility through the U.S. 29 corridor in the Charlottesville area that fits the state’s current budget parameters. The group will examine a wide variety of options. However, Shucet said, “The bypass is not something we would consider.”
- Can we get that $300 million back? Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne announced earlier this week that he has suspended spending on the U.S. 460 Connector on the grounds that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has warned that it may not grant a critical environmental permit. He noted that the state had spent roughly $300 million so far, about $60 million for Virginia Department of Transportation oversight, $100 million for environmental work by the contractor, US 460 Mobility, and another $140 million for the contractor’s “mobilization,” which includes opening and staffing offices in preparation for the work to begin. VDOT will consider alternative routes, including upgrades to the existing U.S. 460. Layne told Bacon’s Rebellion that he could not now say how much of that $300 million could be recovered. “If it’s a different alignment, we’ll have to negotiate with the contractor.”
- VTrans is reappraising its forecast methodology. The Secretariat of Transportation, which oversees the VTrans long-range planning process for Virginia’s transportation needs, is implementing the biggest overhaul in its forecasting methodology seen in years. Past forecasts of future transportation demand largely extrapolated from previous trends. But Deputy Transportation Secretary Nick Donohue told the CTB that past projections overshot actual demand by a wide margin. This time around, he said, planners would take into account indicators of changing demand such as Americans’ increasing preference for walkable communities, the declining interest of teenagers in acquiring a driver’s license, and the surge in multifamily housing construction.
- Expand the Washington Metro… or build an extra 110 lane-miles of highway? The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority wants Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., to kick in an extra $6.1 billion to fund its aggressive Metro 2025 capital improvement program, requiring annual average contribution in $190 million a year more from each state by 2021. Expanding the number of cars per train to eight, WMATA Richard Sarles told the CTB, would increase people-moving capacity in the region by the equivalent of adding two lanes to Interstate 66 or building 110 lane-miles of highway.
— JAB