Bacon's Rebellion

“Generally, in politics, when you change your positions or your image, the only people who believe you have changed are the ones who used to like you and don’t anymore. The people who used to dislike you, who you are trying to appease by your metamorphosis, don’t think you’ve changed at all and generally still can’t stand you.” –Dick Morris (writing on the Presidential Primaries and John McCain in particular).

Too bad the Virginia GOP didn’t hire Dick Morris to advise them on the disastrous, so called Transportation Compromise bill (AKA Bill Howell’s Tax Increase Bill).

Arthur C. Nelson, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has re-written one of the most commonly used “rules of thumb” used by the planning profession: the idea that pedestrians are willing to walk no more than 10 minutes, or a quarter mile, to reach a transit destination.

Local elected officials in Northern Virginia say they are likely to approve a regional transportation financing package that could raise more than $400 million a year for local improvements, according to Timothy Dwyer with the Washington Post.

Two-thirds of the nine NoVa localities must approve granting the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority power to impose a barf bag of regional taxes and fees ranging from hotel, rental car and auto repair taxes to vehicle registration and inspection fees.

Loudoun Supervisor Scott K. York summed up the prevailing attitude: “I will probably be inclined to support it because, simply, we need the revenue if we want to fix our roads. You can’t fix it with the tooth fairy. It’s a multibillion-dollar problem.”

Mayors and council chairmen representing seven of 12 Hampton Roads localities say they support, or lean toward supporting, creation of a regional transportation authority to raise taxes and fees for transportation projects, reports Tom Holden with the Virginian-Pilot.

At least seven of 12 municipal governments representing at least 51 percent of the area’s 1.5 million inhabitants must pass resolutions approving the authority’s new power. Once the authority is empowered, at least seven of 12 representatives to the authority would have to approve the full package of taxes and fees in an all-or-nothing vote.

According to Holden’s nose count, the mayors of Norfolk, Newport News, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach and Williamsburg and the chairmen in James City and Isle of Wight counties support the authority. Those opposed include the mayors of Chesapeake, Hampton and Poquoson and the chairman of York County.

Controversy is brewing over a $75.6 million project that would expand westbound Interstate 66 in Arlington from two lanes to three over a 10-mile stretch. The main foe of the project: Arlington County.

As Eric M. Weiss reports for the Washington Post, project supporters say the roadway has become a regional chokepoint. Widening the road would improve traffic for commuters heading west in the evening, as well as reverse commuters heading for the Dulles corridor in the morning. But Arlington County leaders, who have opposed widening the Interstate inside the Beltway since it opened in 1982, argue that the project would simply replace existing chokepoints with others — at great expense.

Says Chris Zimmerman, a member of the Arlington County board of supervisors: “We’ve called for years for a multi-modal study to see what alternatives would be most effective in improving mobility in the I-66 corridor. All of that is being bypassed.”

I don’t know the particulars of Interstate 66, so I can’t comment on it. But the project reminds me of the clamor to build the Third Crossing in Hampton Roads. That crossing would tie into the existing Monitor-Merrimac bridge-tunnel just before it touches ashore in Newport News. The traffic from the two bridges then would funnel onto Interstate 64, which is already so congested that traffic routinely backs up for miles. From what I can tell, all the multi-billion dollar Third Crossing would do is move the chokepoint from the two existing bridge-tunnels to a point a few miles west on I-64.

Traffic projects must be evaluated in the context of the larger transportation system. When spot improvements can eliminate a bottleneck and restore free-flowing traffic, they may warrant funding. But when projects simply shift the location of bottlenecks from one location to another, they would seem to be an utter waste of money.

Except for the mutual backslapping, the lawmaking is over. HB 3202, the Comprehensive Transportation Funding and Reform Act of 2007, is now law.

House Speaker William J. Howell is touting the bill, not without reason, as the most significant legislative initiative on transportation introduced since 1986. The Republican caucus came into the session desperately needing a political victory. Howell got a big one. Between the transportation act and other legislation — expansion of the death penalty, protection of property rights, reregulation of the electric power industry — Howell can plausibly claim that “the 2007 Session of the General Assembly will be remembered for being one of the most productive in Virginia history.”

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine expressed satisfaction as well: “The bipartisan compromise legislation will allow us to make significant and responsible investments in our transportation system. This compromise offers new tools to officials in traffic-clogged Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to address their regional transportation challenges. The compromise makes significant investments in bus and rail operations statewide, will generate long-needed new revenue for our overworked infrastructure, and protects transportation dollars in a ‘lockbox’ so Virginians can be assured these new revenues will not be diverted to other purposes.”

So, everybody’s happy. But the story’s not over. Better to say that the curtain has dropped on Act One and that it will soon rise for Act Two. The scene now shifts to the Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads regions, to local governments and to the Virginia Department of Transportation. There are three major sets of issues.

First, NoVa and Hampton Roads must empower regional transportation authorities to spend about half the new money to be raised. However, a majority of local governments must go along first, which guarantees debate in each locality over what it has to gain and lose from participating. Before that’s even possible, the legislation may have to survive challenges to its constitutionality. Leesburg Today reports that Supervisor Mick Staton, chairman of Loudoun’s Transportation/Land Use Committee, questions whether the regional transportation authority’s taxing powers are legal. “It’s something that needs to be taken seriously,” he said, adding that the board of supervisors “needs to be prepared to defend its citizens, in court if need be.”

Second, about half the localities in the state will be required to establish Urban Development Areas, where growth, road improvements and infrastructure will be concentrated. That may require extensive changes to local comprehensive plans. Additionally, boards and councils of qualifying jurisdictions will have to consider the desirability of imposing transportation impact fees. That guarantees yet more debate.

Third, VDOT has a new set of marching orders. More outsourcing, new metrics for rating road projects, reclassification of roads and possibly in some instances, devolution of responsibility for secondary roads to local governments.

The transportation issue is far from over. Indeed, it’s about to ratchet up to a higher level intensity. Snap on your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, it’s going to be a wild ride.

Gerald E. Connolly, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, wants to make Fairfax County more green. In the “Cool Counties” initiative he launched two weeks ago, Connolly aims to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that result from automobile emissions and coal-fired power plants that generate electricity. He has taken on a formidable task.

Fairfax County has an embedded infrastructure of buildings, roads and utilities — an investment worth hundreds of billions of dollars — built to serve automobility. Much of the development in th ecounty is scattered, disconnected, low density and energy inefficient. In describing Connolly’s challenge, Amy Gardner with the Washington Post hones in on the Fairfax County government complex as a monument to dysfunctional land use.

The 670,000-square-foot government center, built in the early 1990s when energy prices were low and environmental consciousness even lower, could have anchored a pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented community of homes, shops and jobs. “But,” Gardner writes, “the five-story mass of granite and glass, which rises squatly from an isolated, 86-acre sea of asphalt and lawn near Fair Oaks Mall, is suited to nothing of the sort. For years, critics have said the government center is an emblem of sprawl: far from Metrorail, sequestered by divided highways, intimidating to walkers and bicycle riders.”

Of about 11,000 county employees, only 135 are known to use bus, rail or vanpools to get to work. The ratio is even smaller at the 2,900-parking-spot government center, where about 1,700 county workers are based. Gardner paints a word picture of an empty transit bus “creeping from shelter to shelter in a vain search for a rider. Not a single pedestrian was in view on the sidewalks and trails leading away from the building.”

The “Cool Counties” initiative is designed to decrease government emissions of greenhouse gases by increasing the use of wind power, clean-burning vehicles and environmentally friendly building techniques. But Connolly concedes that it will take more than carbon fluorescent lightbulbs and hybrid cars to transform a government whose physical form, as Gardner puts it, “mirrors the expansive suburb it serves.”

Connolly envisions a future in which the government center is surrounded by a more urban feel: affordable housing for county workers, more commerce and jobs — and even an extension of Metrorail along Interstate 66.

Reading between the lines: The Greening of Fairfax County will require a built environment more hospitable to pedestrians and mass transit. And that will require the demolition and rebuilding of half the roads, buildings and utility infrastructure in the county. Even in the absence of political resistance and bureaucratic lethargy, that will take decades to complete. Connolly will not live long enough to see his vision fulfilled. But it’s accomplishment enough if he can get the process started.

It’s not often that I give the French credit for anything other than their wine, but this is too good to ignore: A new train with a 250,000- horsepower engine and special wheels has broken the world speed record for conventional trains. Reaching 357.2 miles per hour on a 125-mile run between Paris and Strasbourg, the bullet train is exceeded in speed only by Japan’s magnetic levitating train. (Read the AP story.)