Bacon's Rebellion

One of the most torturous aspects of building a new road or rail line, especially in urbanized areas, is acquiring the right of way. Urban land is expensive, and the acquisition process can be lengthy when landowners resist selling. It is difficult to imagine a replay of the 1950s-era acquisition of rights of way for interstate highways, which were routed through neighborhoods of the poor and politically powerless.

That’s why it’s so urgent, when we have rights of way for potential transportation corridors, that we protect them. But it seems that rights of way for old, abandoned railroad lines around Virginia are being allowed to lapse. Indeed, it doesn’t appear that anyone in Virginia even maintains a master list of abandoned railroad lines.

That’s what I found out in an interview with Kevin Page, Virginia’s director of rail transportation, during the course of researching my recent column, “Midlothian Leviathan.” I didn’t use any material from the interview in that column, but Page made a number of observations that are worth recounting in the blog.

One of the questions I asked: Has anyone conducted a survey of deactivated or under-utilized rail lines in Virginia? Such lines, it seemed to me, could serve as potential routes for local passenger rail service. No one conducts a statewide survey, said Page, although local Metropolitan Planning Organization officials may undertake local studies of their own.

The subject is more complicated than it might seem. “Sometimes abandoned rail lines can be difficult to resurrect,” Page says. It depends on the terms of the abandonment. Sometimes the land can revert to the owner of the land before the railroad acquired it.

During a period of downsizing and restructuring a quarter century ago, freight railroad companies abandoned a lot of unprofitable routes. A handful have been converted to jogging/bicycle lanes. Many lie fallow. It would seem to be a horrendous waste to allow them to revert to former owners — or, more likely, the descendents of former owners — who can’t do anything economically useful with their fragments. Even if passenger rail doesn’t look profitable today, you never know when circumstances might change. We could well be kicking ourselves ten or twenty years from now for having let the rights of way lapse.

Peter Galuszka has tackled the issue of abuser fees for the Road to Ruin project in his article, “Abuser Fees or Abusive Fees?” While he covers some of the same ground as the Mainstream Media — primarily the fact that the fees don’t apply to out-of-state drivers — he also hones in on an aspect of the unfolding debate that continues to go under-reported: The unintended consequences.

We know the intended consequences. Abuser fees for dangerous driving is supposed to raise about $50 million for transportation funding. It is also supposed to make drivers think twice before engaging in reckless behavior, with the hoped-for benefit of reducing the number of traffic accidents. Because traffic accidents are a major contributor to traffic congestion, the abuser fees should reduce congestion.

Fortunately, it should be easy to find out if the intended consequences transpire or not. Will the incidence of speeding, DUI and other forms of reckless driving decline? Will the number of traffic accidents fall? The numbers are readily available.

But it’s the unintended consequences that concern me. Will more motorists decide to contest their tickets in traffic court? Will traffic courts get more crowded? Will more drivers fail to pay their out-sized fines? Will more Virginians be driving on suspended licenses? Will more of those drivers get arrested and thrown in jail? I suspect that those numbers may be difficult to come by.

Let’s assume that the abuser fees raise the full $50 million they are postulated to raise. How much will it cost in additional court costs and state trooper time to process an increased number of disputed tickets? How much will it cost to house people in jail when they’ve been arrested for driving on a suspended license? And, assuming that many of those people are not like Paris Hilton with rich daddies to fall back upon, who will support their families? How much money will the state spend on welfare?

Add up all those ancillary costs, and how much will abuser fees cost the state in ways that nobody’s counting? Will the sum amount to more than the $50 million raised for transportation? Will the Commonwealth, in effect, be robbing Peter to pay Paul — mugging Virginia motorists along the way? We’ll never know because no one is tracking the data.

Chesterfield County is the last place on the planet you’d expect to see commuter rail. Characterized by scattered, disconnected, low-density development and communities designed around the movement of automobiles, Richmond’s southern suburb epitomizes the autocentric society that destroyed mass transit in the 20th century.

Virginia has the 18th best road system in the country in 2004, according to a national survey published by the Reason Foundation. That’s a far-from-stellar performance, but we can console ourselves that we outperform our neighbors in Maryland (38th) and North Carolina (31st). However, the sour pusses among you can take heart that Virginia’s performance fell significantly from the previous year, when it had ranked 11th.

The rankings combine two sets of measures: roadway quality and performance measures, and cost measures. States ranking the highest tend to offer a combination of superior performance at lower cost.

As a generality, Virginia fared well in cost measures — we spend considerably less on our roads than other states — but enjoy middling performance levels.

We ranked 8th lowest in the country in receipts per state-controlled mile: $55,063. That compares to a low of $36,890 in South Carolina and a high of $2,370,630 (not a misprint!!) in New Jersey (Can anyone say “Mafia-dominated construction unions?”)

Virginia was the 2nd lowest state in the country for Capital & Bridge disbursements per
state-controlled mile, 27th lowest for maintenance disbursements, and 7th lowest in administrative disbursements.

In the critical performance measure “urban interstate congestion,” Virginia ranked 21st best with 42.54 percent of our interstate miles congested. A handful of western and Great Plains states enjoy zero percent interstate congestion, but the numbers are high throughout the East Coast. The comparable numbers in Maryland: 68.58 percent. In North Carolina: 72.47 percent.

With 83.33 percent congested interstate miles, California has the worst interstates in the country.

I’m a big fan of bike lanes, as Bacon’s Rebellion readers know — but there are limits to how much money we should spend on them. Apparently, the Chesapeake City Council agrees. Yesterday the council voted to reverse a previous decision to build a two-mile, $16 million bike path paralleling a road that currently has only five bikers per day. (See today’s article in the Virginian-Pilot.)

As Virginian-Pilot columnist Kerry Dougherty railed last week:

Despite the price, all but one council member at the meeting merrily voted “yes.” And why not? The cash wasn’t coming out of Chesapeake’s coffers. This would be mostly federal and state transportation dollars.

Defending his affirmative vote, Vice Mayor Dwight Parker explained that Chesapeake couldn’t use the $16 million for anything but the bike path. “If we don’t use it,” he told me. “We lose it.” Sheesh.

That’s the quality of decision making you get when the federal government doles out money with all sorts of strings attached. The feds ought to get out of the local transportation funding business and stick to projects of national significance. It’s not clear what the state’s role was in this narrowly averted fiasco, but whatever it was, it suggests that someone is not doing a very good job of prioritizing the investment of scarce state tax dollars. Let’s hope that the NoVa and Hampton Roads regional transportation authorities are more careful. (See the previous blog entry.)

As the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority prepares to approve a slew of taxes and fees expected to yield $300 million a year, the first new projects in the pipeline are coming into view. According to the Fairfax County Times, a $102 million list of projects for Fairfax County include:

• $10 million for pedestrian upgrades to the Route 1 corridor
• $6.1 million for upgraded signs at Virginia’s 20 Metrorail stations
• $2.5 million for gutter, sidewalk and bike lane improvements at Chain Bridge Road and Eaton Place
• $29 million for the Fair Lakes interchange with the Fairfax County Parkway.

Pedestrian upgrades? Metrorail signage? Bike lanes? Wow. It’s nice to know that something other than mega road projects are getting funding. What I’d like to see in addition to the list of projects, though, is some kind of return on investment analysis. Inquiring minds want to know.