Bacon's Rebellion

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s proposal to steer $500 million in General Fund surplus revenues into transportation projects is too little and too late, charged the Republican leadership of the House of Delegates. (Read the House press release here.)

Too little: The Governor proposed dedicating only $161 million of the anticipated $475-$550 million surplus — about one third — as opposed to the House recommendation for at least one half, or $250 million. Added House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford: “It is especially disappointing that the Governor attempted to characterize the $339 million already designated by the General Assembly for transportation as new funding.”

Too late: Said Del. Leo Wardrup, R-Virginia Beach, chairman of the House transportation committee: “We could already have started most of these projects if the Governor and his allies hadn’t obstructed our efforts to fund them earlier this year. Now, these projects are likely to cost more and won’t be finished as soon.”

Wardrup reiterated the House call for using the state’s ample bonding capacity to borrow funds to accelerate road construction. He offered a new justification for borrowing money, which Democrats had derided as putting state bills on a credit card. The bonding initiative, which would allow the state to build projects now, would provide a “hedge” against inflationary cost increases.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine still wants to increase taxes for transportation, but until he can do so, he’s willing to spend funds from Virginia’s bounteous General Fund budget surplus on road and transit projects. Yesterday, he outlined plans for spending $500 million in General Fund surpluss on a mix of road, transit and technology projects. (Read the press release here.)

Among the justifications he cited was a $112 million “revenue reductions” for the current biennium. “Some major mandates and other cost increases faced by transportation providers include: the continued growth in the cost of highway maintenance; the federal REAL ID program for driver licenses; increased construction costs due to spiking commodity prices; and salary increases for state employees.” (Sounds like a mix of mandates and inflation-driven costs, not “revenue reduction,” but the larger point is well taken: It’s less money for construction and capital spending.)

The Governor’s priorities for one-time expenditures include:

• $305 million to support PPTA and design-build projects on the Capital Beltway (HOT lanes), the Hillsville Bypass on Route 58, the I-64/I-264 interchange, and Route 50 in Fairfax and Loudoun counties;
• $125 million to increase passenger rail along I-95 and take more truck traffic off of I-81, and bring new railcars to the Metro, VRE and Norfolk light rail systems, and buses to other public transit systems statewide;
• $50 million to complete the route 164 rail relocation in South Hampton Roads and to begin the planning and engineering for the Craney Island expansion, and;
• $20 million ($10 million for Hampton Roads and $10 million for Northern Virginia) to create a technology innovation grant, providing incentives for ideas that reduce congestion or increase transportation options in the most congested regions of the Commonwealth.

Bobbie Kilberg, president of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, elaborated upon the technology grants:

Leveraging private sector technology-based transportation solutions, as Governor Kaine has proposed, is a critical step to relieve traffic congestion and to provide Northern Virginia commuters with more information, choice, predictability and safety. … Technology-based solutions will better inform commuters of real time traffic conditions and allow commuters to consider alternatives, such as telework and mass transit.

The Virginian-Pilot is conducting an interesting experiment: converting its letters to the editor into blog posts that allow other readers to comment. So far, the reader interaction has been meager. That may change, and I hope it will.

If the idea fails to take off despite the massive readership that the Pilot can drive to the blog, here’s my take on why: Letters to the Editor are, by their nature, extremely diverse in their viewpoints, their tone and their subject matter. A Letters blog does not have a thematic focus, and it cannot develop an editorial voice that people can respond to, either positively or negatively.

Virginian-Pilot columnists are much more likely, I would suspect, to generate a following and interaction with readers than the Letters section. Succeed or fail, the Pilot deserves credit for trying something new.

Two pieces of interest today on the topic of education.

First piece: The Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit group focused on school reform, has questioned the rigor of Virginia’s Standards of Quality exams, according to the Virginian-Pilot.

Among eighth-graders who took the state Standards of Learning math test in 2005, 81 percent were either “proficient” or “advanced.” By comparison, 33 percent of Virginia eighth-graders who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress that year scored “proficient” or “advanced.”

Similar findings applied to fifth graders. Bottom line, we think our schools are doing an adequate job — but maybe they’re not.

Second piece: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg published a column (subscribers only) in the Wall Street Journal comparing America’s education system to the automobile industry of the 1970s: “stuck in a flabby, inefficient, outdated production model driven by the needs of employees rather than consumers.”

The problem, he says, is not that America doesn’t spend enough money. “We spend enormous amounts, far more than any other nation. But we’re not getting a sufficient return on our investment.”

Bloomberg blames bureacracies that lack clear lines of accountability, tolerating mediocrity and failure and failing to reward excellence. He blames lifetime tenure for school teachers, rewarding them for longevity, not performance. He blames the failure to help struggling students in early years, when costs are lower, and then paying for ineffective remediation programs in later years, when costs are higher. He blames funding inequalities between school districts that short-change minorities.

What schools need, Bloomberg says, is “a top-to-bottom rethinking…. one that insists on a perfomance-based culture of accountability that is oriented around children, not bureaucracies.” He calls for higher teacher salaries to attract the best and brightest, upholding high standards and ending social promotion, and investing in early childhood development.

Bloomberg’s emphasis on early childhood education is reminiscent of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s proposal to push universal pre-K in Virginia. While I question the benefits of such a plan, I remain open to persuasion and, indeed, hope to address the Kaine administration’s arguments for universal pre-K in some depth in the not-too-distant future. But I am unalterably opposed to blindly dumping mo’ money into a system that is already awash in funds and exacting no institutional change whatsoever. Virginia has many dedicated teachers and administrators but the system is highly bureaucratic and inefficient.

Any injection of more money into the system must be accompanied by greater accountability and institutional reform. Otherwise, we’re squandering billions of dollars. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure that out.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine will introduce legislation $250 million in bonds to upgrade 89 municipal sewage treatment plants with the goal of slashing nutrients released into the Chesapeake Bay. Said Kaine in a prepared statement today: “Through this partnership with our local governments, we will be able to accomplish with this $250 million bond package what few have thought possible: we will have the resources to meet the sewage treatment plant discharge requirements of the Chesapeake Bay Agreement.”

House Republicans aren’t real happy about it. In a counter press release, House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, reiterated the Republicans’ support for a half billion dollars in Clean-the-Bay initiatives. What frosts him is the fact that Gov. Kaine is willing to tap the state’s ample debt capacity to upgrade sewage treatment plants — but not roads.

Said Howell: “We are left scratching our heads and wondering why he has selectively chosen to use 21st Century financing tools for this priority but has actively opposed our efforts to take advantage of this proven solution to address transportation.”

Added House Majority Whip M. Kirkland Cox, R-Colonial Heights: “Not less than three months ago, the Governor’s office cynically compared House Republicans’ use of bonding to address a long-term problem to using one credit card to pay off another. Now, he’s applying that same financing tool as part of the solution on Bay cleanup.”

Howell and Cox make a legitimate point. Gov. Kaine and his fellow Democrats don’t have an aversion to using debt, as the Governor has just demonstrated. Their problem is with using debt for transportation as an alternative to raising taxes. Their show of waving their credit cards on the General Assembly floor was nothing more than a cynical photo op for the benefit of a compliant news media.

Personally, I have no philosophical objection to the state issuing long-term debt as long as it can be done while maintaining a AAA bond rating. The reason I oppose issuing debt for roads at this time is that I am not convinced the money will be well spent. The House Republicans have some good ideas for restructuring the state transportation system — but I’d like to see them enacted before the state starts cranking up the spending machine, whether through debt or taxes.

The word “density” means different things to different people. To some, it conjures images of a dystopic, skyscraper-ridden Manhattan. To others it evokes a crowded, jostling K Street in Washington, D.C. To developer Ted Smart, it means a few blocks of three- and four-story buildings clustered around a Virginia Railway Express station in Stafford County.

For many Stafford residents, it appears, Smart’s vision for a walkable, mixed-use community in the middle of the ‘burbs is frightening. As Bob Burke documents in his story, “The Curse of the ‘D’ Word,” Smart is running into a lot of local resistance to the proposal on the grounds that the density would create too much congestion.

It is imperative that people learn to distinguish between impact of density on local traffic patterns and its impact on regional congestion. Yes, Smart’s Leeland Station would create more localized congestion than would exist on the 626-space parking lot that sits there now. But it would create less congestion regionally than the alternative: sprawling, by-right development. People living in Leeland Station would take fewer, shorter car trips, putting less strain on Stafford County’s road network, than would a comparable number of households living in cul-de-sac subdivisions and five-acre farmettes.

How do we know this? First of all, the community would be designed to provide maximum access to the VRE train station — taking commuters off Stafford’s traffic-clogged roads during rush hour, the time that matters most. Secondly, Leeland Station residents would find that many of their daily needs — drug stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, child care, video stores, whatever — would be located within a very short distance. Even if they were too lazy to walk, the drive would be extremely short. Such trips would not stress the county’s secondary road network. Thirdly, Smart’s plan would efficiently accommodate bus service, which cul de sac and farmettes cannot.

A second point: Smart is willing to provide the county $37 million in proffers and make $17 million in local road improvements on his own. How much proffer money will the county get from by-right development, which, by definition, requires no zoning approvals and no negotiation?

A third point: If Smart provides 1,673 dwelling units, that’s 1,673 fewer households living in scattered, disconnected, low-density locations where it’s impossible to walk anywhere, bicycle anywhere or serve by bus or light rail. Here’s the irony, Leeland residents will be OK with the “congestion” created in Leeland Station itself (a) because the community is designed to handle it, and (b) they want the urban-style amenities the project offers.

If other Stafford residents don’t like the “congested” atmosphere of Leeland station, with all those cars and people, guess what: They don’t have to go there! It’s not as if Leeland would transform the character of the entire county! No one will be taking away their precious cul de sacs and strip shopping centers. I just don’t see how anyone loses by approving Leeland Station. But I see everyone losing if it gets turned down.

A move by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to fully fund a three-percent pay raise for public school teachers and administrators generated the headlines in today’s newspapers, but it isn’t likely to prove terribly controversial. The General Assembly had already recommended the three-percent raise but just hadn’t funded it. With an anticipated $500 million surplus anticipated next year, lawmakers shouldn’t have much trouble finding the $64 million needed.

Of greater interest are Gov. Kaine’s early childhood initiatives, as reported by Michael Hardy with the Times-Dispatch:

• Allocate $4.1 million to provide assistance for eligible first- and second-graders who are having trouble reading.
• Add $3.9 million to extend the algebra readiness program to sixth-graders.
• Earmark $4.6 million for new pilot programs to gauge implementation practices for expanding current pre-kindergarten through public-private partnerships.

I don’t have any problem with the initiatives per se. I just don’t see why they can’t be funded out of the existing K-12 budget. It’s not as if schools have been getting short-shrifted. The FY 2005 budget contained $4.7 billion in state aid to public education. The FY 2008 budget will contain $5.9 billion — an increase of 25.5 percent in four years.

The problem, I suspect, lies in the inflexibility of the state-aid-to-public-education formula and the Standards of Quality that drive it. The SOQs, as I have argued on this blog before, are a mindless automoton that drives education spending ever higher, redistributing massive wealth from affluent school districts to poor ones, and making it difficult to reallocate resources within school budgets to new priorities. End result: To do anything new, as the Governor wants, requires supplemental funds.

Virginia must be running a budget surplus — lawmakers are pushing for new entitlements. The latest bid to expand the size and scope of government comes from two Republican lawmakers. Never let it be said that Democrats are the only ones who support bigger government.

Senate Majority Leader Walter A. Stosch, R-Henrico and House Appropriations Chairman Del. Vincent Callahan Jr., R-Fairfax have teamed up to push a bill that would create a giveaway program called Virginia Community College Transfer Grants. These grants, explains Matthew Bowers with the Virginian-Pilot, “would pay the difference in tuition costs between students’ two-year community colleges and any Virginia four-year public colleges or universities to which they are admitted.”

Scott Leake, an assistant to Stosch, said the first-year cost to taxpayers was projected at $8 million, with the annual cost increasing to $10 million to $12 million within a few years.

As far as giveaway programs go, this one is modest. For me, it’s the principle of the thing: Legislators approach education much the same way they approach transportation. Roads too congested? Build more roads. College too expensive? Subsidize tuitions. The “solution” is always the same: shovel more money into propping up a dysfunctional system.

In the case of roads, it never occurs to most legislators that instead of endlessly increasing supply to match every increase in demand for roads, they might examine alternatives that would dampen the demand. Likewise, when it comes to education, lawmakers seek to redress the higher cost of higher ed with more tuition subsidies. No one talks about restructuring higher ed to meet its mission at less cost and lower tuitions.

Back in the days of the Allen administration, people did talk about curtailing the growth in the university spending that undergirded the ever-escalating tuition increases. Costs were spiraling out of control back then, too. Gov. George Allen required each university to submit a “restructuring” plan. The idea was that universities, like private-sector organizations, had to make choices. If an institution wanted to invest more resources in one area — life sciences, say, or nanotech — it had to retrench somewhere else.

Private companies continually re-evaluate their product portfolios and lines of business. To finance expansion in growth sectors, they consolidate operations in slow-growth sectors. They shutter outmoded factories. They spin off businesses they’re no longer competitive in. Universities don’t do that. They just grow, grow, grow. When’s the last time you read about a state university shutting down,consolidating or shrinking a department? When’s the last time you read about a state university spinning off an under-performing unit? It hardly ever happens.

Why? Because university administrators can get away with it. Higher education is such a sacred cow that Americans are willing to pay whatever the universities will charge. If tuitions get unaffordable, then colleges jack up tuitions even higher to squeeze students of more affluent families to subsidize students of needier families. Meanwhile, the federal government dishes out more student loans, many of which are never repaid, and state government hands out more subsidies to universities and students alike.

I’m all in favor of making college more affordable to everyone. But what does it have to come at the expense of taxpayers and relatively well-off households? Why can’t higher ed function more efficiently?

Let’s look at some numbers:

1995-2005 Cost of Living Index: 25 %
1995-2005 Enrollment increase in public Virginia colleges and universities: 19 %
Total inflation plus enrollment increase: 44%

FY1999-2008 Increase in General Fund allocation to public colleges and universities: 50%
FY1999-2008 Increase in Non-General Fund budgets for public colleges and universities: 67%

Bottom line: Virginia has increased its financial support for public institutions of higher ed 6% more than the rate of inflation plus enrollment increases combined over the past 10 years for which CPI figures are available. Drawing upon other sources of revenues, primarily tuitions, endowments, dormitory rents, etc., Virginia colleges increased other revenues, adjusted for inflation and enrollment increases, by 23%. In just 10 years!

Affordability of higher ed in Virginia is not a matter of insufficient state support. It is a matter of out-of-control spending — higher faculty salaries, a greater emphasis on expensive technology-intensive disciplines, and god knows what else. If we want our universities to all become polytechnic institutions, that’s fine — but let’s shrink those programs deemed less critical to the future.

Update: Neither the newspaper articles filed by the Virginian-Pilot and the Times-Dispatch — nor my post, which was based upon them — does justice to this issue. Stosch and Callahan lay out their thinking in considerable detail in a press release that I’ve posted online here. I also would recommend consulting a comment to this post written by Scott Leake, an aide to Stosch. New bottom line: This legislation must be viewed in the context of an anticipated expansion of higher ed enrollment in Virginia by 20-25 percent by FY 2012. Question to Leake: Is this bill actually designed to save the Commonwealth money?

House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, has pledged to commit at least 50 percent of the anticipated $475-550 million, biennial budget surplus to transportation projects. He also said that he would submit a package of proposals, crafted by a special subcommittee set up after the September transportation special session, to align transportation and land use.

Additionally, the Speaker said the House will introduce legislation “designed to reduce congestion and chokepoints on our roadways, and give hard-pressed localities the tools they need now to manage growth.”

Read the Speaker’s press release here.

I will withhold comment on the House legislative package until I see the details. Agree or disagree with the House reforms, however, no one can deny that they aren’t meaty and ambitious. I will do my best to cover the substance of the debate as it unfolds.

As an aside, I will track the Mainstream Media commentary, which I anticipate will continue to follow the meta-narrative defining the transportation crisis as a purely fiscal phenomenon, as if no other institutional reforms were needed. Maybe one day the capital press corps will be shamed into covering the debate in all its many facets.

Any comprehensive approach to transportation in Virginia must include aggressive use of public-private partnerships. Not only can the private sector tap private sources of capital, making it possible to build road and rail projects the state can’t afford, but the discipline of the marketplace improves the odds that projects are built only if they are supported by real-world demand — not because developers and land speculators have lobbied for them. If the state builds a road with tax dollars and bets wrong, no one is held accountable. If investors bet wrong, they lose their shirts.

Virginia knows a lot more about public-private partnerships today than it did in 2002 when it opened the Pocahontas Parkway, an 8.8-mile road that connects Interstate 64 and Interstate 295 southeast of Richmond. The justification for the project was economic development: The road would make the Richmond International Airport more easily accessible, and it would open up eastern Henrico County to development. But demand for the road didn’t materialize. Revenues fell far short of projections. The way the deal was structured, the state incurred increasing liabilities for operations and maintenance. Even payments to bond holders were in doubt, reducing the bonds to junk status.

This May, the Kaine administration completed negotiations with Transurban, the Australian infrastructure company, to take over operation of the Parkway in a 99-year lease. The state recouped $27 million in public funds and got off the hook for $225 million in maintenance and operations expenses over the life of the project. Most important of all, finances are back on a sound footing. We don’t have to worry now about a Pocahontas Parkway default spewing radioactive fallout over the debt of all present and future public-private partnerships.

Peter Galuszka has the story here: “Close Shave.”

I derived two lessons from the story:

1. Distrust transportation mega-projects justified on the basis of “economic development.” Such projects win the support of broad constituencies, who don’t have to pay for them, on the basis of vaguely defined benefits, which may not materialize. Projects not subject to market discipline are more likely to fail.
2. Properly appraising risk is critical to making these projects work from a taxpayer perspective. The state is far better protected financially in the restructured Pocahontas Parkway deal than it was in the original version. Let’s apply what we’ve learned to the negotiation of future deals — even if it means walking away from projects where the risk-reward ratio leaves the state too exposed.

There’s one other point that bears noting, even if Peter didn’t have the time and space to explore it. Mega-projects like the Pocahontas Parkway cannot be viewed in isolation. They need to be seen as part of a larger transportation system.

One way Transurban intends to make money is to promote traffic along the Parkway. One way to do that is to lobby for new interchanges and encourage new development at those interchanges. One such project is already in the works — a giant mixed use project on the James River proposed by the Wilton development group. Wilton would pay for the interchange. Sounds like a great deal, doesn’t it? Isn’t that exactly what we want — for the private sector to pay for transportation improvements?

Look a little closer. The Wilton project would overwhelm local county roads in eastern Henrico County. County planners anticipate the need to upgrade the secondary road network. In particular, county planners want to build a so-called “concept road” that would link the Wilton property with the city of Richmond. Who’s going to pay for that?

Developers building along the planned route of the Concept Road may pay for some or all of the cost through proffers, in which case taxpayers might come out ahead — I’m not prejudging. But building mega-projects in the wrong places doesn’t do anyone any favors if they just create new transportation bottlenecks that need fixing at public expense. This gets us back to Ed Risse’s point about planning balanced communities and transportation infrastructure to serve them. You plan them together. You’re courting trouble if you start by building a road through the middle of nowhere and stimulating development in an area unprepared to receive it.

Bob Gibson, political reporter for Charlottesville’s Daily Progress, opines on the prospects for transportation taxes in the 2007 session of the General Assembly. Traditional wisdom, he writes, says that it’s hard to get new taxes passed in the 46 days allotted to short sessions of the legislature, especially when all seats in the House and the Senate are up for re-election later in the year.

This year, Gibson contends, the pressure to do something about transportation is so intense that the Assembly may well pass a tax without calling it a tax. One possibility is to let congestion-prone regions like Northern Virginia or Hampton Roads impose a regional levy upon themselves — it may be a tax, but it’s not a “general” tax. Another is to pass a mini-tax on the grounds that, “If it’s hidden, or it’s small, a tax is a tax but may not be much of a tax at all.”

A third trick, suggests Gibson, “is to call a tax a toll.”

I take from the tone of Gibson’s column that his intent is to be light and clever, which entails adopting a voice of tongue-in-cheek cynicism. Fair enough. Trouble is, if enough people adopt that voice, they may kill off one of Virginia’s best hopes to deal rationally with traffic congestion.

A toll is NOT a tax. It is a user fee — and that’s not just semantics. A tax collects revenues from people generally and then redistributes it to someone else. Even narrow-bore taxes like the Kaine administration’s proposed auto titling tax would tax citizens generally (all those who purchase cars, regardless of how much, or where, or when they drive) and redistribute it for the benefit of those who drive the most (pushing up maintenance costs) or who drive on congested routes (increasing the demand for new roads).

With tolls, the people who pay for a road are the ones who use it, when they use it — unless, of course, they are Dulles Toll Road commuters, who are being levied to pay for the Rail to Dulles heavy rail project… in which case the toll really is a tax.

A toll is a “toll,” and not a “tax,” when it is either (a) used to pay off the cost of building an entirely new transportation asset, or (b) is used to ration scarce roadway capacity in order to reduce traffic congestion to levels consistent with optimal throughput. In either case, the toll payer is receiving a direct benefit — access to a roadway — in exchange for his money.

As public opinions consistently show, citizens understand the difference. They express greater willingness to accept tolls than transportation taxes because they know that there is a direct exchange of value when they pay tolls, while there is no guarantee of value when they pay taxes. Citizens understand that gasoline taxes often fund projects that benefit no one but developers, land speculators and the politicians in their pockets.

Last night Tim Kaine and his wife sat in the row behind my wife and me at the Westhampton Theater in Richmond, attending a showing of “The Queen.”

The Governor dressed like an ordinary bloke: He wore a tieless, button-down shirt and a leather jacket. That’s one of his more appealing traits. He may be the Governor, but a year on the job doesn’t seem to have changed him. He hasn’t grown impressed with himself — he does the same things he did as Lt. Governor, mayor and private citizen. Over recent years, I’ve seen him pop into a wine store in the Fan, walking alone down the sidewalk in downtown Richmond, and chowing down on hamburgers with the wife and kids at the River City Diner in Shockoe Bottom.

The two central characters in “The Queen” are Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Tony Blair, a moderate liberal politician in much the same philosophical mold as Gov. Kaine. When the movie was over and the lights came on, I was tempted to ask the Governor his impression of how Blair was portrayed. But I decided not to: The movie had opened with Princess Diana fleeing the torments of the paparazzi and driving to her death. Even public figures deserve their privacy. Indeed, respecting the rights of people, especially prominent people, to their privacy is a sign of civilized behavior — a trait that the Queen found to her dismay that the British people no longer possessed.

But Virginians are still civilized and respectful of the rights of others. So, I left the Governor in peace. I guess I’ll have to wait until the next blogger conference to ask him what he thought of Tony Blair.

Former VDOT Commissioner has left Dragas Management Corp., a Virginia Beach home-building company, on friendly terms after a year and a half there. An e-mail to friends and associates signed jointly by Shucet and company owner Helen Dragas stated: “Philip finds that his passion for large engineering and construction projects continues to burn. His fire in the belly comes from over 35 years of dedication to an industry that has been a large part of his life. His fire is still burning brightly.”

In an interview with the Virginian-Pilot, he said:

…he has had “some very superficial discussions” with other companies but declined to identify them. “I’m pretty set on staying in the private sector,” he said. “I do plan, however, to take another shot at making some noise about transportation in Virginia.”

The conventional wisdom holds that traffic congestion is getting worse and worse, that commuting times are getting longer, and that citizens are enduring increasingly unbearable frustration while stuck in traffic. But what if that’s not true? What if, while nobody was looking, commuting times actually got shorter? What if the reality on the ground was at total odds with the political rhetoric?

New census data, which the Axis of Taxes (which includes most of the media) conveniently chose to ignore, suggests that there may be a chasm between perception and reality. According to a September statement by the AAA, the Census Bureau has released data indicating that commuting times actually got shorter between 2000 and 2005.

The average daily commute to work has shrunk from 25.5 minutes in 2000 to 25.1 minutes last year, according to data released this week by the Census Bureau.

“We all should hold a celebration,” said Alan Pisarski, author of Commuting in America. “We’re saving 0.4 minutes!”

I don’t know if Pisarski, a prominent Northern Virginia transportation consultant was speaking sarcastically or not. But I, for one, find the news quite encouraging.

Of course, national averages can obscure local trends. Commuting times in the Washington metro area, third longest in the country, actually got “slightly longer” between 2000 and 2005, AAA reports without providing details. A U.S. Census press release singles out Prince William County, Va., as a suburban county with one of the longest average commutes, 36.4 minutes — fifth longest in the nation. (Which may explain the blind frustration motivating the freeze on new home building there.)

Average commuting times for Virginia in 2005 were 25.8 minutes, ninth longest in the nation. How does that compare to 2000? AAA didn’t say. But the Bureau of Census, god bless ’em, puts its data online. Go here and see for yourself: That’s down from 27.0 minutes in 2000!

A decline of 1.2 minutes in averaging commuting time would be so dramatic and so counterintuitive, that one must consider the possibility that some of the change can be accounted for by the margin of statistical error in Census data or some other change in the way data was collected and compiled. But until such a case can be made, I can only presume that the conventional wisdom just may be wrong.

The commuting data also might explain why, despite the media- and politician-generated hysteria over traffic congestion, most Virginians stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea of higher taxes for transportation.

After reader Larry Gross referred to the AAA “Pockets of Pain” survey in comments on a couple of previous posts, I decided I ought to take a look. I found a summary of the survey in a press release but could not find the details of the survey itself. But even the pro-tax AAA’s spin on the data should deliver a sober warning to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, who has been stumping the state in favor of a tax increase and wants to elevate taxes and transportation to a defining issue in the 2007 General Assembly races.

For all the angst and maelstrom about traffic congestion, the AAA reports, transportation is far from the public’s top priority. “When respondents were asked to rank a list of national priorities, transportation did not fare well.” In order of importance the respondents produced the following ranking:

(1) Healthcare (26% rated most important)
(2) National Security (25%)
(3) Education (24%)
(4) Social Security (12%)
(5) Energy Independence (9%)
(6) Transportation (3%).

Further, stated the report, the public is far more receptive to the idea of paying tolls, particularly for new projects, than to raising taxes.

When respondents were asked to choose from a number of funding options, the public did not favor using general purpose revenues. In fact, the most frequent choice – 52% – was some form of toll option to help raise money to fund our transportation system. The most popular options are those that add tolls to only new roads and highway lanes (39%).

In focus groups, people made it quite plain why they don’t like the idea of higher taxes.

“In previous surveys and focus groups, we’ve seen more reluctance to increasing funding for transportation,” said Robert L. Darbelnet, AAA president and CEO in a speech given at the National Conference of State Legislatures Transportation Leaders meeting in San Antonio, Texas. “Common responses used to be ‘I already pay enough,’ or ‘existing funds aren’t invested efficiently,’ or ‘I don’t trust my state DOT to do the right thing.’…

Those national responses track very closely to polls conducted earlier this year showing that Virginians have very little appetite for raising taxes. (For details, see our October post on the Survey USA poll and our August post on a Richmond Times-Dispatch poll.)

While the business and political elites tend to favor taxes, the public clearly does not. If Gov. Kaine wants to make taxes and transportation the signature issue of the 2007 campaign season, I say, “Bring it on!”