Bacon's Rebellion

James A. Bacon


 

Baconometer

Percolating

Straws in the Wind

 

Does Virginia face untold billions of dollars in "unmet transportation needs"? Only if you ignore innovative experiments in traffic demand management bubbling out of Northern Virginia.


 

If you are one of those who deem Virginia to be gripped by a transportation funding crisis – crying out for higher taxes to fund indispensable transportation projects without which the wheels of commerce and commuters alike will grind to a halt – consider the following developments from the past two months:

 

  • The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and the Greater Washington Board of Trade launched a program to encourage 50,000 commuters to swap their cars for their cable lines -- to telecommute -- by 2005.

  • Reston-based TrafficLand, Inc., raised $600,000 in venture capital to provide data that helps commuters and businesses avoid congested road conditions.

  • Arlington County launched a pilot project to promote “flexcars”, a car-sharing concept that allows subscribers to rent a car for an hour or two when they really need one, as a way to encourage people to sell their cars and use mass transit for routine trips.

Rather than increasing the supply of transportation capacity, in the form of wider Interstates and new parkways, these initiatives seek to shift or dampen the demand for transportation capacity.

 

That’s a remarkable notion for Virginia, where people are accustomed to being told that the Commonwealth needs to build some $20 gazillion worth of road and mass-transit projects over the next couple of decades just to keep traffic congestion from getting worse. We hear the same sad song from transportation planners, who compile elaborate studies showing where the roads need to be built, how much they cost, and how little of the money is available. We hear it from business lobbyists who argue, quite sincerely, that economic prosperity requires continued "investment” in transportation infrastructure. And we hear it from our political leaders who can’t conceive of an alternative to raising taxes and building more roads.

 

Virginia’s transportation policy is in the hands of people who treat it like an engineering problem. Are roads congested? Then widen them, or build new ones. Trouble is, this old-fashioned approach ignores laws of human behavior. By building/widening a road, traffic engineers may temporarily ease congestion. But easing congestion reduces the cost of driving. Consequently, people feel free to live, work, shop and seek recreation in more scattered, more distant locations than otherwise would be the case. Motorists wind up up driving more, not less – and creating congestion bottlenecks in new locations.

 

“Demand management” seeks to break that vicious cycle by getting people to drive shorter distances, switch to less congested thoroughfares, or, best of all, get out of their cars and use alternate modes of transportation such as buses, the Metro, bicycles or their own two feet.

 

Demand management is a philosophy that everyone should embrace, regardless of partisan leanings. But, it seems to me, it's a concept that should particularly recommend itself to those seek to block tax hikes. As we've seen from the failure of the House of Delegates to hold the line on tax and spending increases this year, most Virginians aren't satisfied with "Just Say No to Taxes." They also want solutions to problems -- with traffic congestion, along with schools, at the top of the list. The concept of demand management could give fiscal conservatives a credible alternative to tax-and-build.

 

A well-rounded demand management strategy for promoting mobility would work at three different levels:

 

  • Manage transportation demand. Systematically explore ways to persuade or incentivize people to drive less frequently, share rides, use less congested routes or schedule their trips outside rush hour.

  • Enact micro-level urban design reforms. Revamp auto-centric zoning codes in favor of design principles that create pedestrian friendly communities. A pedestrian friendly orientation will shift numerous trips -- short errands that can be run during lunchtime, for instance -- from the street to the sidewalk. Pedestrian friendly environments also are a crucial adjunct to making mass transit viable.

  • Enact macro-level land use reform. Plan communities with a balanced mix of jobs, houses, shops and amenities where people can get to work, run errands and seek recreation without the necessity of hopping on congested Interstates and other traffic arteries.

In the view of those who think building more roads is the only way to ameliorate congestion, traffic conditions are bound to deteriorate as Virginia falls farther behind in funding its tax-and-build transportation policy. But traffic congestion does not vary in lockstep with the growth in population and the number of lane-miles in the transportation network. Transportation systems are highly fluid. As the cost of congestion increases, people seek transportation alternatives. Options that appeared unattractive in a low-congestion environment become feasible when the congestion costs rise. 

 

In its 2003 Urban Mobility Study, the Texas Transportation Institute estimated the cost of traffic congestion in major metropolitan areas throughout the United States, including Washington, D.C., Hampton Roads and Richmond.

 

Cost of Traffic Congestion

Major Virginia MSAs (2001)

 

Wash.,

D.C.

Hampton

Roads

Richmond

Person-hours of delay (millions) 125.3    20.1    7.1   
Increase in delay, 1991 to 2001 84%    99%    245%   
Avg. annual hours delay per person  34    13    10   
Avg. annual cost of delay per person  $667    $261    $204   

 

Given the higher costs in the Washington metropolitan statistical area -- about $667 per person -- it's not surprising to see greater ingenuity and effort being expended in Northern Virginia on demand management initiatives than either Hampton Roads or Richmond. 

As Northern Virginia voters proved in 2002 when they rejected a higher regional sales tax to fund a grab-bag of transportation building projects, they aren't willing to issue a carte blanche check. Voters, I believe, made a gut-level assessment that hiking the sales tax at an estimated cost of $72 per person per year would have generated a barely discernible impact.

 

As it turns out, the voters were smarter than a lot of the political and business leaders who urged them to tax, spend and build. As the cost of congestion escalates at the rate of about eight percent annually in the Washington region, civic and private-sector entrepreneurs generate a multiplicity of ideas you won't find in the Virginia Department of Transportation of Transportation's 20-year plan. Alternatives that might have proven unworkable in the 1990s when congestion costs amounted to only $500 per person -- telecommuting initiatives, for instance, were largely a bust -- may look more attractive at $750 per person.

 

Within just the past two months, it has become obvious that Northern Virginians enjoy a wider range of policy options than anyone imagined. Perhaps VDOT, instead of widening another lane-mile of I-95, should invest $100 million (or whatever the equivalent amount of money would be) to defray up-front costs of business and government telecommuting programs. Or expand the number of locations where video cameras feed real-time data on traffic conditions to commuters so they can adjust their routes and schedules. Or fund local connector roads to in-fill developments that locate jobs, houses and stores on under-utilized patches of the road network.

 

Rather than blindly funneling money into supply-side building projects, the Commonwealth needs to give equal consideration to demand-side projects. A program that gets 1,000 motorists off Interstate 66 during rush hour is just as valuable as a project that expands capacity at a single choke point by 1,000 cars -- indeed, the demand-side project would be more valuable because it would reduce congestion all along the transportation system, not just at a single bottleneck.

 

Once we start looking at transportation issues from a demand-side perspective and calling upon the ingenuity of the private sector, we will find that the $20 gazillion transportation funding shortfall looks a lot smaller. And by adjusting the way we spend our transportation dollars, we may even find we don't need to raise taxes.

 

-- April 12, 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fire back!

 

You can berate Bacon at jabacon@

baconsrebellion.com

 

Or read his profile here.

 

 
 

 

More about Demand Management Strategies

 

Even before TrafficLand got its $600,000 equity infusion, Bacon's Rebellion wrote how TrafficLand and Trichord Incorporated were developing the market for real-time traffic data to manage demand. See "Demand-Side Economics," October 20, 2003.

 

Doug Koelemay has written about HOT lanes, another demand-management option, in "Why HOT is Cool," February 2, 2004.

 

Meanwhile, Bacon's Rebellion has the best of intentions to write about Arlington County's flexcar pilot program and the Washington regional telecommuting initiative in future columns.