Bacon's Rebellion

Suffolk City Council is nearing approval of a $553 million mixed use project, Harbour View Station Towne Center, that could create a second “downtown” for the sprawling, mostly undedeveloped city.

For Interstate 81, rails are out and tolls are in, reports Garren Shipley with the Northern Virginia Daily. Those are the two main points to emerge from the Final Environmental Impact Study for I-81, which will guide how the Virginia Department of Transportation approaches the highway in the years ahead.

On trains:

A “Steel Interstate” proposal put forward by Rail Solution, a Shenandoah Valley group lobbying for a greater emphasis on freight rail rather than road expansion, just won’t work, according to the report.

Supporters are correct when they argue that a substantial portion of long truck trips would take to the rails if the $3.5 billion-plan were implemented, according to the a section of the report dealing with freight diversion.

Of the 7.3 million 500-mile or greater truck trips forecast for I-81 in 2035, 16.6 percent, or about 1.2 million, would take the train instead. But the vast majority of trucks, 21 million, are on trips of less than 500 miles, according to the study, and would be much less likely to take the time to offload their cargo onto trains.

On tolls:

Tolls also will be a part of I-81’s future, according to the document. Federal officials say they want to go forward with plans to levy fees of anywhere from 7 cents to 14 cents per mile.

Significant numbers of trucks and passenger cars would try to duck the tolls by using U.S. 11, the report says, but there would be wildly different impacts up and down western Virginia, depending on the location and toll charged.

In Washington County, near Bristol, a low toll would put 420 more trucks on I-81 every day while having no impact on U.S. 11. But in Shenandoah and Frederick counties, a high toll on trucks only would take 3,400 off of I-81 and put 3,190 more onto U.S. 11.

Tolls on interstates are generally forbidden, under the theory that taxpayers already paid to build the highways through federal and state taxes on gasoline. But Congress has carved out two exceptions in recent years, one for a “congestion pricing” pilot program, the other for a “reconstruction” pilot program.

Examiner.com makes an interesting point:

Officials at the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority late last month unveiled an agreement to build the first 11.6-mile phase of the rail at a total cost of $2.4 billion to $2.7 billion — considerably more than the early estimates of $1.8 billion. Fairfax County and the federal government have pledged a total of $1.3 billion. Tolls will cover the rest of the growing cost.

That’s just Phase One, extending the rail to Tysons Corner. What happens with Phase Two, which runs the rail all the way out to Dulles, Examiner.com asks. How big will the Phase Two overruns be? What sources of money, other than the toll road, will exist to pay for that leg of the project? Will Dulles Toll Road commuters be asked to take up the slack with tolls even higher than what’s currently projected?

Instead of sticking it to commuters with ever-escalating flat tolls, I think we should convert the Dulles Toll Road to a congestion-toll arrangement. Take the surplus funds and reinvest in making improvements to the corridor, whether expanding lanes, improving interchanges, setting up Rapid Bus Transit, synchronizing stoplights along parallel roads… or underwriting the Rail-to-Dulles project to a limited degree.

I want to see Rail-to-Dulles built. But not at any cost. And certainly not overwhelmingly on the backs of people who benefit only indirectly from the project. There has to be a better way. Again, I return to the landowners, who will reap multi-million windfalls from the presence of Metro stations and increases in zoning density. Why are the politicians so unwilling to consider tapping some of that value to help finance the project?

Long commutes can be dangerous to your health, reports Eric Weiss with the Washington Post. He leads his story with this anecdote:

For seven years, Gail Ennis has been spending up to three hours a day behind the wheel of her Subaru, commuting between her law office in Washington and her home on Gibson Island in Anne Arundel County. What she’s gotten out of the 100-mile
daily round trip is sciatica — a shooting pain down one leg — and a lack of time for exercise. “It’s just too much and getting worse every year,” Ennis said.

Researchers have found that road warriors with long commutes get sick more often and stay home more often. They work out less, are prone to high blood pressure, and suffer more headaches and chest pains. Robert G. Squillante, an orthopedic surgeon in Fredericksburg, said constant road vibrations and sitting in the same position for a long time is bad for the neck and spine and puts special pressure on the bottom disc in the lower back, the one most likely to deteriorate over the years.

When the Texas Transportation Institute calculates the cost of traffic congestion, I do not believe that it considers these hidden medical costs. Virginia’s transportation system is even more dysfunctional than commonly acknowledged.

Mike Toalson, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Virginia, vows to fight the impact fees permitted by The Comprehensive Transportation Funding and Reform Act of 2007. The metropolitan dailies have overlooked this obvious follow-up to the legislative duel of the decade. Fortunately, we have the Culpeper Star Exponent to report the story.

The reason that the Home Builders weren’t a factor in the final days of the debate over the landmark legislation, it appears, is that the association was taken by surprise. Reports Liz Mitchell:

“When the governor released his amendments he included an entirely new component that had never been a part of the bill and no public opportunity for comment,” Toalson said. “What he embedded was new road impact fee authority for 67 localities in Virginia, including Culpeper, Fauquier, Green, Louisa and Orange counties.” …

“He embedded it in the bill HB3202 in a form we could not get out,” Toalson said. “Normally, we get an opportunity to vote but it didn’t happen that way. It was crafted in a way that we couldn’t touch it.”

The Transportation Act allows localities to imopse permit fees but does not require them to do so. That shifts the debate over how to finance growth from the General Assembly to 67 separate jurisdictions. In a meeting with the Piedmont Virginia Building Industry Association, Toalson got the troops fired up for the coming battles.

“Are you going to take the cost of doing new business and just eat it,” Toalson asked the room full of builders, real-estate agents and bankers. “No. You’re going to pass it on to the consumer. And then what happens? All the neighbors’ houses become more expensive. And then what happens? Real estate taxes get higher. But it’s, ‘You’re the bad guy. You’re paying your fair share.’ And it’s coming sooner rather than later.”

As road-building action in Northern Virginia shifts to the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, Eric Weiss with the Washington Post profiles that long-obscure body now finding itself in the limelight. The organization’s main accomplishment to date has been to publish “TransAction 2030,” a $16.6 billion wish list of road, transit and trail projects for the region.

Under The Comprehensive Transportation Funding and Reform Act of 2007, the Authority will have roughly $400 million a year at its disposal, assuming NoVa localities approve. That’s only half of the sum needed to fund the TransAction 2030 list, however, so someone will have tough choices to make. As Weiss points out:

Although there is a plan, there is no mechanism to decide which projects go first. Also, the money raised by the new taxes will not come close to building all the projects, so members will have to decide which to postpone. Several members said they will seek input on priorities from their local elected boards and lobby for those.

Another concern (mine, not Weiss’) is that there appears to be no mechanism for coordinating the improvements with, or making them conditional upon, changes in land use.

Oh, and there’s also the problem that representatives to the Authority are largely unaccountable, mechanisms for public participation have yet to be worked out, and the decision-making process will be influenced disproportionately by the transportation contractors and land owners who can afford to pay full-time lobbyists to work the system.

Sounds to me like a recipe for back-room deals.

I found early reports and analyses of The Comprehensive Transportation Funding and Reform Act of 2007 to be so confusing that I assigned journalist Peter Galuszka to summarize the land use components of the bill. The thrust of his story filed today: Very few people, not even developers or local government officials, fully appreciate how disruptive to the status quo the reforms will be.

“I don’t think they completely understand the dramatic change that is going to occur in the next 10 years in Virginia,” Del. Clay Athey, R-Front Royal, a key co-author of the law, told Peter.

The “laissez-faire” era of real estate development is over, Athey declares. Instead of executing well-planned projects, he says, developers have tended to go for the cheapest land — property that was up for auction after a foreclosure or estate sale — or locate projects in counties where the supervisors had a reputation as zoning pushovers. New tools — Urban Development Areas, Urban Transportation Service Districts, impact fees, devolution of responsibility for secondary roads — will force local government to do a better job of planning.

I agree with Athey’s overall assessment, although I would quibble with his choice of the word “laissez-faire,” which implies that real estate has been a free market subject to little or no government control. In fact, real estate markets have been shaped by a host of zoning laws, subdivision ordinances, environmental regulations, comprehensive plans and government-funded funding of transportation and infrastructure improvements. It would be more proper to say that the old “quasi-free market” era in real estate is over, to be replaced by a different quasi-free market era.

Whether applying new layers of power and regulations to land use will yield results superior to those of the past, I dare not venture to predict. Concentrating growth into development districts where infrastructure can be more efficiently provided does make sense to me. But there is no escaping human perversity and the law of unintended consequences. I have a gnawing fear that the reforms will not turn out quite like Athey hopes they will.

Regardless, change is upon us.

“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.”