Bacon's Rebellion

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.”

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.