Category: Transportation
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Bacon Bits: Mostly Good News for a Change
Energy efficiency done right. After investing $2 million over three years to update the energy and water infrastructure of Clark Hall, the University of Virginia calculates that it is saving $75o,ooo a year in electricity bills and $22,000 in water bills — a payback in less than three years. The university replaced 5,000 interior and…
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Bacon Bits: Black Diamonds, Tarnished Silver, Wilting Green
Free falling. As coal production declines, the economy of far Southwest Virginia is in free fall, with potentially dire fiscal consequences for local governments. “A sharp decline in coal production jeopardizes the fiscal health of local governments, degrading their capabilities to provide adequate public services and issue and serve debt,” finds a report by Columbia…
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Just How Smart Is the Smart-Scale Scoring System?
Over the past month Del. Dave LaRock, R-Hamilton, has criticized the state’s Smart Scale scoring system for allocating transportation dollars. By law, he says, the system is supposed to prioritize congestion mitigation. But the latest round of allocations was biased heavily in favor of land use and economic development. As a result, a Metro station…
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Spending Increases, Road Quality Decreases
A new study by Transportation for America and Taxpayers for Common Sense documents the magnitude of the “Growth Ponzi scheme” in the U.S. road transportation system. Between 2009 and 2017, the 50 states collectively added more than 223,000 lane miles to their road networks. At an average cost of $24,000 per lane mile to keep…
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LaRock: Northam “Hijacked” Road Funds for Amazon
Money from Northern Virginia taxpayers meant to address traffic congestion has been “hijacked” by Gov. Ralph Northam to keep the governor’s promises to Amazon in the HQ2 project, charges Del. Dave LaRock, R-Loudoun, in a Washington Post op-ed. The state’s Smart Scale scoring system, which by law is supposed to emphasize congestion-mitigation strategies, has been…
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Movable Walkways for Potomac Yard Metro?
We have all encountered moving walkways in airports. I’m wondering why we haven’t seen them in other places. Perhaps the darn things are just so expensive to build and maintain. But that may change. A moving walkway is one of the options being considered in the planned $370 million Potomac Yard Metro station to be…
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Uh, Oh, Virginians Are Driving More. A Lot More.
Now that we’ve learned that Millennials have the same driving habits as previous generations — as soon as they can afford to, they buy their own cars and drive them just as much (see previous post) — we can dispense with the delusion that their enlightened consumer preferences will induce them to abandon the practice…
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So Much for Millennials Saving the Planet
Are Millennials really different from older generations when it comes to transportation preferences? Is the younger generation, supposedly enlightened about the need to combat global warming, truly embracing bicycles and buses and the sharing economy over owning and driving their own automobiles? Here in Virginia, billions of dollars of mass transit and other infrastructure spending…
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Fantasy Thinking about Passenger Rail
I like riding passenger trains. My wife and I rode the rails from Richmond to Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago to avoid the knuckle-clenching grind of Interstate 95 and the expense of parking in the District. The seats in our Amtrak car were comfortable, and Wi-Fi allowed us to check email and surf the…
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Floods, Roads and Risk Management
In a blog post yesterday (“Risk and the Fisc”), I cited an Old Dominion University study that guesstimated that Katrina-scale hurricane could cause $40 billion in damages and lost economic activity in Hampton Roads. The cost to the Commonwealth of coping with such a disaster, said Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne, “keeps me up at…
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NoVa Transit Projects Got Highest Congestion Scores This Round
Yes, it’s true that most of Northern Virginia’s regional transportation funds were dedicated to mass transit projects in the last round of funding, says Deputy Secretary of Transportation Nick Donohue. But six of the seven projects that did receive funding scored highest in congestion mitigation under the state’s Smart Scale scoring system. The only project…
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Is Smart Scale Working Like It’s Supposed to?
Republican legislators in Northern Virginia (the few that are left) are wondering what happened to Virginia’s Smart Scale mechanism for allocating transportation dollars. Smart Scale was established during the McAuliffe administration to score proposed transportation projects on key metrics such as congestion relief, economic development, safety, land use, and the environment. But somehow 84% of…
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Mass Transit and Unfunded Pension Liabilities
It has long been known that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which operates the Washington region’s commuter rail and bus systems, has unfunded retirement-benefit costs approaching $3 billion (on top of its multibillion-dollar unfunded maintenance backlog). While the Commonwealth of Virginia is not legally obligated to made good Virginia’s share WMATA’s shortfalls, as a…
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Distracted Driving the New Drunk Driving
It is intuitively obvious to anyone who drives that other people using cell phones (not us, of course) are a menace to the public. We’ve seen them yakking away with the phone to their ear or, worse, actually texting with eyes on the phone. Indeed, a new study by Zendrive, a driving behavior analytics company,…
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Bacon Bits: I-81 Taxes, VCCS Shrinkage, Solar
The Numbers on Interstate 81: Tax First, Explain Later When you approve a major tax increase with amendments proposed just a few days before the General Assembly’s reconvened session, as happened last week, discussion is limited and there is almost no hard data on the financial impact available to the public. You tax first and…