Bacon's Rebellion

I’ve received an e-mailed copy of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s press release (compliments of Barnie Day) outlining the details of his amendments to the GOP transportation package. It’s not live on the Governor’s Web page yet, so I’ll post it on the Bacon’s Rebellion website and link to it for your reading pleasure.

I haven’t had a chance to dissect the Governor’s amendments yet, but I’ll return with comments when I can.

…OK, I’m back. Here’s my insta-analysis before I have to run off to an interview and Little League.

First of all, I’m confused. Kaine seemingly has back-tracked on two of the Democrats’ key rhetorical themes of the past few months. If I am missing something obvious, would someone please point it out to me?

Question One: Gov. Kaine has excoriated Republicans for wanting to finance transportation projects with General Fund revenues, including one half of the ongoing budget surplus. Transportation, he said, should not have to compete with other needs such as schools, health care and law enforcement, and he didn’t think the surplus, which can increase or contract dramatically, was a stable, ongoing source of revenue. So, now he proposes to increase reliance on the budget surplus, tapping two-thirds of the surplus? The inconsistency is so jarring that I must be missing something critical. If someone can enlighten me, please post a comment.

Question Two: Waving credit cards mockingly in the air earlier this year, Democratic legislators lambasted the Republican plan for “mortgaging our children’s future,” “putting state debts on the credit card,” and all manner of fiscal irresponsibility. Now comes Gov. Kaine, proposing to jack up transportation debt from the $2.5 billion the GOP legislators proposed to $3 billion. Again, a jaw-slapping inconsistency. Am I missing something?

So much for Return on Investment Analysis. Gov. Kaine never made a big point of this, so I can’t accuse him of inconsistency. I just don’t agree. He proposes increasing the percentage of bonds going to transit capital from 15.7 percent to 20 percent, and he wants to dedicate two cents of existing recordation taxes to transit funding. I’ve got nothing against transit — I just think it should compete on a level playing field with roads. All projects should be ranked on a Return on Investment basis. Anything that arbitrarily increases or restricts funding for a major transportation category is a sure-fire recipe for making sure that higher Return on Investment projects get overlooked.

Land use and traffic flow. There are shreds of good news. The Governor has signed side legislation (not part of the infamous HB 3202) that will accomplish a number of worthy goals:

• Subdivision roads. SB 1181 strengthens standards for accepting subdivision streets into the state system by increasing connectivity standards for roads and subdivisions, enhancing the overall capacity and efficiency of the transportation network.
• Corridor management. HB 2228/SB 1312 promotes traffic flow and interconnectivity on the state’s road system, ensuring that new and existing roadways are not degraded by the creation of too many and poorly spaced intersections, turn lanes, median breaks, and other impediments.
• Incident management. HB 2163/SB 1144 allows VDOT vehicles to participate in clearing cars and restoring traffic flow after an accident, improving clearance time.

The press release provides only a cursory summary of very detailed legislation, so the significance of many of the Governor’s amendments is not immediately evident. I await more details.

The Governor’s press release is now online. Here it is.

Marc Fisher, a metro columnist for the Washington Post, has launched a full-scale assault on the HOT lanes proposed for the Washington metro area, mainly on the grounds that they benefit only the rich and powerful. He uses three key arguments against the congestion tolls:

1) Lexus lanes seem unfair to low- and middle-income commuters who can’t afford to shell out the big bucks. In Virginia, where prices could vary according to traffic volume, planners say it could cost up to $42 per day roundtrip between Prince William County and the Pentagon on the HOT lanes scheduled to be built along Interstate 95.

2) Folks tend not to believe the new lanes would really save much time. After all, look how congested HOV lanes have become on I-95.

3) The structure of these deals, with private companies winning the right to profit off traditionally public infrastructure, sets off many people’s stench meters. Because public dollars built almost all roads in the first place, exorbitant tolls feel like double taxation.

None of Fisher’s arguments hold water. Point for point, here’s why

1) Hot lanes unfair. HOT lanes along I-95 might cost $42 for commuting both ways, but few low/middle-income people would use it for that purpose. They would use the lanes only when time was at a premium. The lanes would give them an option they did not possess before. Insofar as new HOT lanes took traffic off existing lanes, low/middle-income motorists actually would benefit.

If low/middle commuters do choose use the HOT lanes to cut the time of their drive to/from work, they can avail themselves of numerous options: car pooling, van pooling, buses and other forms of ride sharing in which riders share the cost of paying the toll. Ride sharing with one other passenger would cut the cost per person in half; sharing with two would cut the cost by two thirds.

2) Hot lanes don’t work. If the lanes don’t save much time, then people won’t use them and they won’t have to pay the charge. D’oh! Ideally, tolls would be set at rates consistent with a level of traffic that optimizes traffic flow through the HOT lanes. If the lanes are congested and the traffic flow is sub-optimal, then the rates need to be raised until conditions improve. It’s called dynamic pricing.

3) Stench meter. There is no intrinsic reason that HOT lanes must be privatized. VDOT could introduce congestion pricing just as easily as a private company could. The advantage of public-private partnerships is that the private sector would invest a billion or more dollars of private capital into upgrading the Interstates, doing what the state cannot afford to do.

Fisher might argue that the state could afford to upgrade the Interstates itself if it just had more money. Why not raise taxes? Well, we could. Just two problems. First, you’d have to raise taxes a lot more than a billion dollars in order to generate a billion dollars for I-95 or I-495; state road revenues go through a complex distribution formula that makes it all but impossible to steer the money where it’s needed most. Second, just adding more lane-miles of Interstate doesn’t incentivize the kind of car pooling and van/bus riding that is essential to maximize the carrying capacity of the roads.

Finally, as far as the “fairness” factor is concerned, I find the issue wearisome. The reason people spend years earning college degrees, working hard and saving their money is so they can have more money than if they don’t. The advantage of having more money is that you can afford things you could not otherwise afford. You can ride in a Lexus instead of a Hyundai. You call up a satellite-navigation map on your touch-tone screen instead of unfolding a paper road map. You can put a double latte from Starbucks in your cup holder instead of a cup of joe from Quick-Stop. And you can pay tolls to whizz along in HOT lanes instead trduging bumper-to-bumper in the congested lanes. That’s the whole point of making more money! Otherwise we’d all jump out of the rat race!

(Hat tip to Tobias Jodter for passing along the story.)

Albemarle County is one of the most beautiful counties in Virginia, and Charlottesville is one of its coolest small cities. But the strip development on U.S. 29 North is one of the most god-awful products of the contemporary “planning” process you can find anywhere in Virginia. It’s as if Charlottesville/Albemarle took anything that could be remotely ugly or dysfunctional and smooshed it into an eleven-mile strip of state highway north of town Unfortunately, if you live in the region or travel through it, there is no escaping this horror.

Citizens seem serious about doing something, although there doesn’t seem to be a consensus about what to do. The Daily Progress has published a lengthy article describing the Places29 initiative and the controversy it is generating.

Places29, the product of local planners, provides what sounds like an attractive vision for the corridor (although the devil is in the details):

Electric lines vanish. New roads appear, giving drivers a way to avoid 29. Some commuters simply avoid the hassle by riding the bus. Walking is encouraged, because residents work, shop and play in coordinated communities.

And all it will cost is some $400 million.

The usual NIMBYs object to anything that might impact their neighborhoods, oblivious that by-right development will impact their neighborhoods anyway. And there’s always some joker — in this case John J. “Butch” Davies III, the local representative to the Commonwealth Transportation Board — who wants “Richmond” to pay to clean up the mess.

There are no magic wands for a place like U.S. 29 North. Fixing that monstrosity is going to cost money, and it’s going to take doing things differently than in the past. The longer the region delays in implementing a new vision, the more dysfunctional development that will take place. It’s critical to minimize future costs by getting landowners and developers to buy into a new vision as soon as possible. Then, through the use of Community Development Authorities, municipal bonds and some 30 or 40 years of re-development, the corridor might have a fighting chance. If key players are unwilling to adopt a long-term time horizon, any spasmodic effort at cleaning the place up is bound to be cosmetic and a waste of time.

How refreshing. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and Republican leaders in the General Assembly are finally talking to one another about transportation — and doing so cordially, no less. Judging by the multiple news reports, the lawmakers’ closed-door meeting yesterday was fairly productive.

Kaine must submit his amendments to HB 3202 by Monday, and the legislature has until April 4 to accept or reject them. Apparently, much of the conversation centered on finding areas of common ground.

Michael Hardy and Jeff Schapiro report in the Times-Dispatch: “The lawmakers indicated that there appeared to be major progress toward reaching a transportation agreement on a batch of regional tax and fee increases to raise more than $400 million a year for Northern Virginia and $200 million for Hampton Roads.”

Christina Nuckols reports much the same in the Virginian-Pilot: “Several of the 10 lawmakers participating in the latest meeting said they do not expect to reach compromise on every change the governor wants to make. However, they said they have agreed on most details of the regional funding plans for Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.”

Seth McLaughlin at the Washington Times notes areas of continued disagreement: “Mr. Kaine opposes paying the state’s debt with money from the general fund, which primarily pays for schools, police and social services. He also has legal concerns about charging repeat driving offenders larger fines and wants to reduce or eliminate the option for Northern Virginia localities to increase the commercial real estate tax. “

If this legislation passes, my concern is that legislators will declare victory and move on to other topics. My sense is that everyone has had a belly full of the transportation issue over the past three or four years, and that there will be little appetite to follow up with a second round of reforms. While HB 3202 does do some useful things — particularly in prioritizing road projects and devolving more responsibility for secondary roads to localities — it doesn’t come close to “fixing” the problem. More roads will get built, but congestion will not improve. Taxes will rise, but they won’t prove sufficient.

The Virginia Club for Growth released today a TV ad that will be broadcasted across the state in different television markets. The ad urges Gov. Kaine to veto the HB 3202, the Transportation Compromise Bill (AKA Bill Howell’s tax increase).

In the interest of full disclosure, the poster of this entry, Phil Rodokanakis, wants to remind everyone that he is also the President of the Virginia Club for Growth.

It’s interesting to see the line of argument developing in rural Virginia regarding the GOP’s transportation funding plan: There’s not enough money in the plan for non-metro areas. And Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is pushing the angle hard.

How can rural Virginia justify demanding more, when it already benefits disproportionately from the allocation of state highway dollars? It’s all about safety. Read this article in the Martinsville Bulletin.

Rural Virginia would get about one-fourth of the money the legislative transportation plan would yield, even though 61 percent of the state’s traffic fatalities from 2000 through 2005 occurred on rural roads, according to federal highway safety data. …

During a stopover in Stuart last week on his “listening tour” to gather input on the proposed $2.5 billion transportation bill, Kaine criticized the bill for its omission of significant help to rural areas. “What’s in this (bill) for rural Virginia?” Kaine asked, adding that the one-fourth earmarked for rural Virginia could only be spent on primary roads and interstates, under the current wording of the bill.

Of the 5,593 people killed in Virginia car crashes from 2000 through 2005, more than three-fifths — 3,398 — died on roads U.S. Department of Transportation highway accident data classifies as rural, according to a computer analysis by The Associated Press.

Crashes in rural areas are more often lethal because drivers reach greater speeds on the open roads, said Ray Pethtel, associate director of the Center for Transportation Research at Virginia Tech. Driver distractions, which cause most crashes, occur in rural areas and urban ones, Pethtel said. … “You don’t have on the rural roads the same safe design characteristics that you do on major arterials like interstates,” he said.

One of the main threads of controversy in the transportation debate right now is the propriety of devolving responsibility for building and maintaining secondary roads to local governments. Many local officials have objected to the transfer of authority, fearing that the state won’t send along the money to match. Remarkably, no one has seen fit to ask local officials in Henrico or Arlington Counties what they think of the idea. They would seem to be logical people to ask — after all, they have been handling their own roads for the past 75 years.

So, that’s what we’ve done. Bacon’s Rebellion dispatched Bob Burke to look into the experience of Arlington County and Peter Galuszka to take a look at Henrico.

Peter has filed his article about Henrico: “Doing It Their Way.” One message came through loud and clear: Henrico County officials like having control over their secondary roads. They say they can make better decisions and faster decisions, and that they can be more responsive to local constituencies than VDOT can. Henrico officials also like to set their own standards, which often exceed VDOT’s.

However, there doesn’t seem to be any way to quantify whether or not Henrico is doing a better job than VDOT would. Has the ability to align transportation and land use planning resulted in less traffic congestion? Can’t say. We asked for “levels of service” data, but Henrico hasn’t compiled it. Has local control resulted in more efficient expenditure of road dollars? Can’t say. Henrico hasn’t done the studies.

Bottom line: We can’t get answers to fundamental questions. Little wonder. No one in local government seems to be asking the questions, so no one is collecting the information. Meanwhile, lawmakers in the General Assembly — both those in favor of devolution and those opposed — are flailing in the dark. They’re basing their positions on hunch, intuition and anecdote, not hard data. We don’t have a prayer of solving our transportation problems in Virginia without the basic information we need to make informed decisions.