Category: Transportation
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Another Blue State Bails on Tax-and-Cap TCI, VA Democrats Dig In to Protect Their Green Revolution
by Steve Haner First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. The Governor of Connecticut has abandoned his efforts to enroll that state in the Transportation and Climate Initiative, an interstate compact which would impose a cap, tax and ration scheme on gasoline and diesel fuel. Virginia remains a part of…
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Buckle Your Seatbelts, HUFs and MBUFs Are Coming
by James A. Bacon For once, Virginia’s Virginia’s $8 billion-a-year surface transportation system (roads, highways, bridges, mass transit) is not in crisis. The system is in pretty good shape, and it is well financed, concludes a new Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) report. Recent tax increases bringing in more than $800 million a…
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Bacon Bits: Government Failure, Private Initiative
Will Metro ever get its act together? The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has pulled the 7000 series of rail cars from service after a derailment on the Blue Line and discovery of more than two dozen wheel-assembly defects similar to those that had contributed to the accident, reports the Washington Post. “The potential for…
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Bedlam at Southwest Airlines
by Kerry Dougherty At the risk of sounding like a paid Southwest Airlines P.R. person, I can truthfully say it’s my favorite airline. No change fees. Two bags fly free. Decent fares if you book early enough. Best of all, Southwest flies out of our sad little airport. Those perks are nice, but what impressed…
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Bacon Bits: Bafflement, Confusion… and Hope
What is wrong with this picture? Headline from FFXnow: “Inova temporarily closes urgent care centers in Reston and Tysons due to high patient volume.” On top of an influx of COVID-19 cases fueled by the Delta variant, Virginia hospitals are getting more patients — many of whom had delayed seeking medical care due to the pandemic…
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The Tide Celebrates Ten Years of Waste
by Randal O’Toole The Tide, Norfolk’s light-rail line, has been open to the public for ten years. As noted in this article in The Virginian-Pilot, it opened 18 months late after a 60% cost overrun. The article claims the light-rail line carried its first million rides “five months ahead of original projections,” but that’s a transit…
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Your Tax Dollars at Work: The Virginia Breeze
by James A. Bacon The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation (DRPT) subsidizes three bus routes connecting communities in Southside and Southwest Virginia to population centers to the north. One of those, the Valley Flyer, links Blacksburg and Virginia Tech, ferrying college students to Northern Virginia and back. It carried more than 2,800 passengers…
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Another Sick Idea: Vaccine Passports for Domestic Travel
by Kerry Dougherty Oh look. Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia car dealer who served eight years as Virginia’s lieutenant governor and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1997 against Jim Gilmore, is in the news. The congressman who represents the second-most Democratic district in the commonwealth — the 8th — has joined the Biden administration in…
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Conference Explores VA Rush to Copy CA Energy
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by Steve Haner Californians were again this week under an electricity “flex alert,” a conservation order required because of its reliance on unreliable solar and wind energy. They often cannot keep up with demand on the hotter days. Is this Virginia’s future? The government is telling Californians: Set your thermostat at 78° or higher Avoid…
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Bacon Bits: Reality Sucks Edition
Bye, Bye, Brackney. The City of Charlottesville will not renew the employment contract of Police Chief RaShall Brackney, who took on the job in June 2018, the City announced on its website yesterday. No explanation was given. However, the announcement follows less than two weeks after publication of a survey of Charlottesville police officers showing…
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DMV Still Hiding Full Gas Tax Amounts
by Steve Haner The Virginia Division of Motor Vehicles is now hiding only 22% of the state’s existing motor fuels tax with misleading website data, not the 26% it was hiding when I wrote about this last year. In the chart you first find searching DMV on motor fuel tax rates, set out below, there…
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How Hillsboro Reinvented Itself… with Government Grants
by James A. Bacon Hillsboro in western Loudoun County is a rural success story, reports The Washington Post. Over the past couple of years, the town of 120 has transformed its main street, a 0.7-mile stretch of Route 9. The addition of sidewalks made the community’s main drag inviting to pedestrians after having been rendered…
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Chaos In the Streets, er, In the Sidewalks
by James A. Bacon Sidewalks are going to get very crowded, and now is the time to start thinking about what to do about it. We all know that self-driving cars soon will become a common sight, but a white paper, “The Last Block,” by Canadian Bern Grush, an occasional contributor to Bacon’s Rebellion several …
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Car Crashes Down, Fatalities Up in 2020
by James A. Bacon Virginia transportation officials are puzzling over a divergence in road safety statistics during the COVID epidemic last year. The number of crashes on Virginia roads fell 15% to 20% below the level of a normal year while the number of fatalities climbed by 2.4% and serious injuries by 5.3%, reports The…
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Silver Line Phase II — Now Four Years Late
Back when work began on the Washington Metro’s Silver Line under the Kaine administration, planners expected Phase II to be complete by 2018. Here it is, mid-2021, and the officials in charge now are hoping to open in early 2022. Phase I went relatively smoothly, but Phase II, which extends the commuter rail system to…