Bacon's Rebellion

I must say, for all the skepticism I have expressed about Abuser Fees, I am astounded by the depth and breadth of hostility towards the bad-driving penalties that has surfaced this summer. State and local governments have been jacking up spending, taxes and fees for years, yet the electorate has laid there, supine and tranquilized. Stirring at last from their somnolent state, people have fixated on… what? Property taxes? Sales or income taxes? The swarming host of lesser levies? No, people are agitated about a set of fees that will punish a tiny fraction of the population — about 2.5 percent — consisting of the most reckless and incorrigibly dangerous drivers in the state.

Now momentum is building to throw out Abuser Fees. Former Gov. Jim Gilmore and 11th District Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, R-Fairfax County are the latest to denounce the penalties, according to Bob Gibson at the Daily Progress. Lost in the criticism is the idea that maybe we should incentivize the worst drivers — who cause the most accidents and, as a byproduct, the worst traffic congestion — to drive more carefully.

Constitutional issues aside, there are two core problems with the Abuser Fees legislation as it now stands. First, the fees are structured to raise transportation revenues, not to curb bad driving. That’s why, for a convoluted chain of reasons, out-of-state drivers are exempt from the fee. Virginians are rightly irate. If we need to raise taxes for transportation, then we should do so in a way — raising gasoline taxes — that is transparent and captures revenue from out-of-state motorists. The gasoline tax has many problems, as I have written extensively. But at least it functions as a rough user fee, which makes it vastly preferable to the $1 billion grab-bag of taxes, levies, fees and penalties that lawmakers foisted into place this year.

The other problem is that we have no idea if the higher fees will succeed in curtailing bad driving as they are purported to. No one has studied the issue carefully. Legislators did not solicit the input of traffic court prosecutors or judges. If the goal is to reduce the incidence of reckless driving, the ideal solution may not be blunt-edged, oppressive fines, which force many people into driving on suspended licenses, but a combination of penalties that include fines, remedial driving education, driving restrictions and other remedies.

If we want to combat traffic congestion, it does make sense to target the reckless drivers who cause accidents and snarl traffic. But we should put into place a set of remedies that are designed specifically to accomplish that goal — not to raise revenue.

A group of conservative activists, represented by Richmond attorney Patrick McSweeney has filed a sweeping legal challenge to the Comprehensive Transportation Funding and Reform act of 2007. As the Virginian-Pilot’s Christina Nuckols sums up the initiative: “The lawsuit seeks to disable the legislation by riddling it with 13 separate state and federal constitutional objections.”

-Regional transportation authorities in northern Virginia and Hampton Roads with the power to levy taxes breach the state Constitution because their members are not directly elected by voters;

-“Impact fees” on people who develop their land in those regions constitute an unconstitutional governmental taking of property.

-$3 billion in long-term borrowing for roads without statewide voter approval violates the state Constitution.

-The civil remedial fees, already under court challenge, violate federal and state protections against double jeopardy, equal protection under the law and state constitutional safeguards against excessive fines.

-The multifaceted law, directing numerous ways revenues are raised and spent statewide and regionally, violates the state Constitution’s “one-object” mandate that bills be confined to a single purpose.

I’m no legal scholar, but I think there’s merit to four out of the five challenges listed above. The only one I would question is the objection to the impact fees — impact fees have passed constitutional muster elsewhere, what’s so different about these? Meanwhile, abuser fees have already encountered a major setback in Henrico County courts. It will be interesting to see how far these legal challenges go.

Update: Attorney General Bob McDonnell, Gov. Tim Kaine, and House Speaker Bill Howell have filed a legal brief defending the constitionality of the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and three Northern Virginia Congressmen met late last week with federal transportation officials “as part of a late-stage effort” to salvage the multibillion-dollar Rail-to-Dulles heavy rail project, reports Examiner.com. The meeting follows a report by the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General that expressed grave reservations about the project.

The only substantive comments about the meeting came from Rep. Jim Moran, D-8th, and they didn’t reveal much:

The first phase of the planned 23-mile rail line now is “probably on a more solid track,” [Moran] said after the hours-long discussion that dealt with the cost and timeline problems that have plagued the project, among other issues. “And we think that some of the concerns that the Federal Transit Administration has may have been addressed,” he said.

Nine dead and 60 injured, 20 missing in Minneapolis– and that’s just the latest count. Reports the Star-Tribune: “The 1,907-foot bridge fell into the Mississippi River and onto roadways below. The span was packed with rush hour traffic, and dozens of vehicles fell with the bridge leaving scores of dazed commuters scrambling for their lives.”

Virginia has its share of old bridges in need of maintenance and repair. The state highway allocation formula allocates more money for fixing them than it used to, with the goal of working down the backlog of projects over 20 years or so. However, my impression is that Virginia places a higher priority on maintenance than most states, many of which prefer to steer funds into new construction.

It’s tempting to short-change maintenance in favor of new construction — until a disaster like this reminds us what’s at stake.

How’s this for a Catch-22?

Starting tomorrow, the cost of the proposed Metrorail extension to Dulles International Airport, now estimated at $2.7 billion, will increase by some $3 million to $6 million a month. The cost escalation is built into the contract between the state of Virginia, the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority and the Bechtel-lead construction team.

But work can’t begin until the U.S. Department of Transportation finishes reviewing the project to determine if it qualified for $900 million in federal support. As part of that review, the feds are conducting a cost-benefit analysis. The Office of Inspector General has already warned that escalating costs threaten to undermine the economic viability of the project, which could result in the feds dropping out of the project.

How much longer will the federal review take, adding $3-6 million for each month that goes by? Writes Bill Turque with the Washington Post:

The timetable for approval of final design is unclear. The Federal Transit Administration said it needs at least an additional two weeks to complete its “risk assessment,” meaning its estimate of the project’s overall cost and completion time. If those numbers exceed Dulles Transit Partner’s, then the consortium, the state and the airports authority will have to revisit the project plans to prune costs. How long that would take is not clear. The project would then go back to the Federal Transit Administration for additional review.

This is just one more argument in favor of getting the federal government out of the business of funding state and local transportation projects. Let all projects — highways, heavy rail, mass transit buses, what have you — live or die on their own merits as determined by the people who benefit from them and pay for them directly.

This week’s column was inspired by a recent trip to Arlington County. Squiring me around their remarkable community, Arlington officials explained how they approach local development and re-development. I was especially attuned to anything that might shed light on a notion frequently expressed by commenters in this blog: the idea that increased density necessarily translates into greater traffic congestion.

Arlington irrefutably proves otherwise. Poorly planned density may aggravate traffic conditions, but well-planned density can have quite the opposite effect. All one has to do is visit the high-density development around Arlington’s Metro stops to see the proof of that. For all the retail, the high-rise offices and the apartment/condo complexes, the streets around Clarendon station are are freer of traffic than any suburban commercial corridor. The traffic statistics convey the same message.

That may be so, skeptics may say, but Arlington has a huge advantage that most other Virginia localities do not: a heavy rail system largely paid for by someone else. Maybe Arlington escaped the density/congestion trap, but no one else (with the possible exception of Fairfax County) can afford to build a Metro line. Arlington is the exception that proves the rule.

Board Chairman Paul Ferguson has heard that argument, too, and in refutation, he points to the re-development that’s taking place in the Shirlington Town Center — an emerging “urban village” that has no Metro station. Shirlington, he says, is a model that can be replicated in any metropolitan area in Virginia.

Some of the tools used by Arlington planners are known to anyone who reads this blog: Greater density, finely grained mixed uses, and special care in the design of pedestrian-friendly streetscapes. Arlington planners are big believers in narrow streets, wide sidewalks, plazas and other small public spaces, and ground-level retail in large office and apartment buildings — whatever it takes to avoid presenting a blank wall to the sidewalk.

But pedestrian-friendly streetscapes are not the entire solution. Vibrant communities should not just avoid dead spaces, they should avoid dead times. Arlington planners envision a town center that’s jumping 24/7. Well, maybe not 24/7, but definitely 18/7. The trick, which seems to be working, is loading up the town center with major traffic generators including a quality urban grocery store (though with a smaller, urban footprint), a theater and a public library. The formula seems to be working. Shirlington is a happening place.

My visit to Shirlington and its library, which is housed in the same building as the popular Signature Theater, prompted a closer look at the role of libraries in defining human settlement patterns. Sadly, I found that an otherwise marvellous new facility in my Henrico County neighborhood reinforces the community’s old auto-centric habits. An opportunity to create enormous added economic value was lost. In today’s column, “Libraries as Liberators,” I explore what different communities are doing — or not doing — to capture libraries’ phenomenal economic value for the public good.