Bacon's Rebellion

I’ve culled these quotes from the articles filed today about the House land use-reform initiative.

From the Washington Post:

Speaking in blunt terms, House leaders said an eagerness by local officials to approve development was “an abdication of responsibility” to plan for the impact on traffic, and that supervisors in growing counties “have done a less-than-stellar job” in planning for the future.

“The easiest job in the world is to be a supervisor approving subdivisions,” said Del. C.L. “Clay” Athey Jr. (R-Warren), who leads the House GOP effort to design land-use legislation. “You can approve it, and as soon as it’s over and done with, you can say any impacts to the roads you don’t have to consider at all and you can just start blaming the state.” …

County supervisors, Democrats and Republicans alike, reacted angrily to the accusation that their planning decisions are why the state’s roads are such a mess.

“It just shows how desperate they are to find somebody to blame rather than themselves,” said Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald E. Connolly (D), who was singled out by name during the news conference. “This is all yet another attempt to sidetrack the public discussion from their unwillingness to put any new money on the table for transportation infrastructure.” …

Kaine spokesman Kevin Hall said Wednesday that the governor and House Republicans are “generally rowing in the same direction” in regard to the newly proposed legislation. But Hall cautioned that the governor had not seen any specifics.

From the Virginian-Pilot:

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said he welcomed the Republican ideas and would introduce his own growth-control bills during the session. “I think it’s an area where there’s a lot of common ground,” Kaine said. “I think that they’re looking at it in a smart way.”

From the Times-Dispatch:

“We are pleased to know that issues of transportation reform and land-use planning are being recognized as top priorities,” said Lisa Guthrie, executive director of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters. “Both polling and recent elections show growth management and transportation reform to be critical issues for Virginians.”

House Republicans have re-introduced land use-reform legislation they submitted during the ill-fated September special session of the General Assembly. The three-bill package is sure to generate controversy among home builders and local governments, but preliminary indications are that the proposals will have a lot more traction this time around.

Critical differences in the political environment: (1) Gov. Timothy M. Kaine indicated that he approved of the general thrust of the package even though he was planning his own legislative priorities; (2) Representatives of the environmental/conservation community applauded the House leadership for “proposing reforms that advance efforts to adopt successful, long-term solutions to our sprawl and traffic problems”; and (3) the capitol press corps acknowledged the existence of the legislation with full-length feature articles instead of relegating the bills to throw-away paragraphs buried deep in their stories.

The aim of the legislation is to tame “suburban sprawl” — the scattered, disconnected, low-density development patterns implicated in aggravating traffic congestion. As Del. Clifford Athey, R-Front Royal, one of the key architects of the package, put it: “Our existing laws in this area were adopted during the Great Depression. They aren’t just woefully outdated, they’re truly obsolete. For localities dealing with rapid residential growth and sprawl, this comprehensive and forward-looking plan is the most significant advance since zoning became commonplace over 40 years ago.”

The House hand-out summarizing the legislation frames this issue this way:

Transportation cannot be addressed and its challenges cannot be solved if we continue to adhere to the outdated approach of just three elements: Tax. Spend. Build. … Any legislative plan to improve transportation that ignores one of the root causes of clogged roads and highways – Virginia’s 70-plus-year-old government land use policies – is inherently inadequate, shortsighted and flawed.

The legislation has three main parts:

• Require counties to create urban development areas large enough to accommodate 20 years of population growth. These areas would incorporate principles of New Urbanism design to include “open space, mass transit, walking trails, denser development and a commercially zoned component – reducing the need to use the transportation system.”
• Invite counties to participate in pilot projects to take over responsibility for secondary roads within urban transportation service districts. As financial inducement, the state would give counties a share of state revenue and allow them to impose impact fees on development.
• Require the Virginia Department of Transportation to define “neighborhood” roads and then prohibit the state from accepting any more such roads into the state system for maintenance purposes. Either counties or homeowners associations would have to take over responsibility for maintaining the roads.

Bacon’s Rebellion has described the logic behind the original versions of these bills in previous columns. They include:

Seventy-Five Years. Virginia’s system for building and maintaining roads has changed little in three quarters of a century. Some people think it needs more money. Others think it needs an overhaul.

The Devolution Solution. Any meaningful transportation reform would make fast-growth counties responsible for their secondary roads. The trick is coaxing them into going along.

Focused Growth. To tame scattered development and the ills it creates, Frederick County concentrates growth in an Urban Development Area. The idea works so well that House Republicans want to take it statewide.

(Please note: The authors of the three bills may have changed aspects of the legislation since September. My columns do not provide an up-to-date explanation of what the current bills would do. The articles do provide history and background to help you understand what they are designed to accomplish.)

As a follow-up to my previous post, “Virginia, the De-Synchronization of Change and Fundamental Change,” I thought it useful to recapitulate what Alvin and Heidi Toffler have to say about the American transportation system. A vast infrastructure of four million miles of public highways, roads and streets, 23 million commercial trucks and hundreds of millions of automobiles, they write, “was a response to the mass society that grew up with mass production, urbanization and work patterns that required masses of workers to commute back and forth over the same pathways on uniform schedules.”

In 2000, the Tofflers note, some 119 million Americans wasted 24 billion hours getting to and from their jobs. But as mass production gives way to “increasingly customized, de-massified and decentralized knowledge production, large numbers of people no longer work in city cores. Work patterns shift from fixed schedules to anytime, anyplace, including home … altering the way time and space are used.”

The Tofflers look to “intelligent transportation” as a Knowledge-wave solution. The U.S. Department of Transportation concludes that intelligent “freeway management systems” could reduce accidents by 17 percent while permitting highways to handle 22 percent more traffic at greater speeds. Likewise, computerizing traffic signals could decrease travel times by 14 percent and delays by 37 percent.

Here’s where their analysis gets juicy:

But pressure from pour-more-concrete lobbies greatly outmatch the political influence of the nascent information-technology sector. When President Clinton in 1998 signed an act allocating $203 billion for repairing and “building roads, bridges, transit systems and railways,” the amount set aside for intelligent systems was approximately one tenth of 1 percent — this from an administration that touted its support for the “information superhighway.”

The U.S. transportation system, on which most business enterprises directly or indirectly depend, is still gridlocked by a political powerful triad of oil companies, car manufacturers and often corrupted highway-construction firms. … The key elements of America’s infrastructure – and their component subsystems — are de-synchronized and fought over by vested industrial-era interests and breakthrough innovators advancing the knowledge-based wealth system. Wave conflict again.

Virginia, one would think, possesses a IT industry with sufficient mass and political clout to nudge the Commonwealth’s transportation system in the knowledge-intensive direction espoused by the Tofflers. Sadly, Virginia’s tech lobby has functioned as a cheer-leader for the solutions advocated by the “pour-more-concrete lobby,” committing a miniscule amount of its political clout to pushing IT-oriented solutions. “Breakthrough innovators” do exist in Virginia, but they are small, politically powerless and largely unrepresented by the tech lobbies.

Of course, as the Tofflers fail to recognize, even liberal application of cool IT technology cannot, by itself, solve Virginia’s transportation problems. There simply is no way around the need for fundamental change to human settlement patterns, governance structures and transportation funding mechanisms.

Still, the Tofflers do intuit that the changing relationship between work and the workplace re-shapes the demand for transportation capacity — a subject that I am writing about for other publications and will address here on the Bacon’s Rebellion blog when I can. They also describe accurately how vested interests — not only auto companies, oil companies and highway construction firms but real estate developers and land speculators — have mobilized to thwart reform. While “Revolutionary Wealth” hardly offers the definitive treatise on U.S. transportation solutions, the Tofflers provide a useful context for understanding the problem.

In Arlington County, a team of 38 employees is dedicated to encouraging employers and property managers to promote transit, biking and walking. Fairfax County, with about seven times as many residents, has recently appointed a single person to coordinate the county’s Traffic Demand Management policies. So reports Alec MacGillis in the Washington Post today.

Perhaps that helps explain why Arlington, despite its greater densities, experiences less traffic congestion than Fairfax County. In Traffic Demand Management (TDM), property owners use a variety of tools — pricing and availability of parking spaces, flex cars, van pools, coordination with mass transit, streetscape design, a complementary mix of land uses — to reduce automobile traffic. As Arlington has demonstrated, effective TDM programs can ameliorate a lot of congestion.

One reason that TDM works in Arlington and doesn’t in Fairfax, suggests MacGillis is that Arlington invests resources in its TDM program and Fairfax doesn’t. Another reason is that Fairfax has failed to enforce the agreements it has forged with developers in exchange for increased development densities.

As we’ve argued on this blog for a long time, TDM is potentially a very effective strategy for combatting traffic congestion. TDM is basic. Fairfax County needs to get serious about implementing it.

The State of Virginia and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority are close to signing an agreement that cedes state control over the Rail-to-Dulles project and toll revenues from the Dulles Toll Road to the authority — and Stewart Schwartz wants details.

Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, argues that the turn-over is so important that “the public should have a right to review and comment on the agreement before it is signed.” The MWAA, governed by appointed directors from Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., would become a key player in decisions affecting Virginia transportation and land use decisions.

Said Schwartz: “We have already expressed concern that MWAA might be less likely to support the tunnel for Tysons Corner because their overriding interest is building the connection to the airport as fast as possible. Yet, it is not the airport that will generate the greatest number of riders, but Tysons Corner. The tunnel is the key to both the redesign of this edge city and to achieving the ridership necessary to justify the project.”

Key questions: (1) Will the agreement give MWAA power to direct surplus toll revenues to transportation projects of its choosing? and (2) will the MWAA have control over the granting of air rights development above metro stations?

On the issue of air rights, Schwartz asks: Who will receive revenues from the sale of those air rights? Will local governments and citizens be able to participate in planning for those sites? Will a mechanism exist to consider density transfers to the air rights sectors in return for expanded public spaces?

Schwartz also renewed his call for a competitive bidding of Rail-to-Dulles construction as opposed to a contract negotiated with Dulles Transit Partners, which is associated with engineering-construction giant Bechtel.

(Click here to visit the Coalition’s website. The press release is not yet posted online, but should be shortly.)

Garren Shipley, who covers the General Assembly for the Northern Virginia Daily, demonstrates once again that his dispatches are critical reading, for he covers topics you won’t read in any of the major metro dailies. Today he previews the legislation that the House of Delegates will submit next month to overhaul the relationship between state and local government in the maintenance of and planning for roads. So far, Shipley is the only political reporter to break from the herd and cover transportation as something other than a debate over taxes.

Readers of Bacon’s Rebellion, of course, will find the House proposals familiar. As we wrote earlier this year, the House would (1) mandate urban development areas, (2) create urban transportation service districts, and (3) curtail the admittance of subdivision roads into the state road network.

While my pieces were long and verbose, Shipley provides a quick, readable snapshot of the issues. As Shipley quotes Del. Clay Athey, R-Front Royal, new money for the state’s road system is out of the question unless it comes along with fundamental reform. Said Athey: “Funneling a bunch of additional money into a transportation system that’s broken because of poor local land use policy …. [means] that we’ve wasted our money.”

In their latest work, “Revolutionary Wealth,” Heidi and Alvin Toffler argue that different institutions evolve at different rates of speed as the economy, society, culture and political system shift from an industrial-wave to a knowledge-wave “wealth-creating system.” Businesses are adapting most rapidly — indeed, they are largely driving the shift — followed closely by nongovernmental grass roots organizations. Lagging behind is the American family, and even farther behind are labor unions, government bureaucracies and regulatory agencies. Bringing up the rear: schools, the governance structure and legal institutions. (Doug Koelemay touches upon mismatch between the “demands of the fast-growing new economy and the inertial institutional structure of the old society” in his column, “Future Still Shocking,” which inspired me to read the book.)

In their discussion of the United States, the Tofflers are relatively optimistic. Not only has our economy and society advanced farther down the path to a knowledge-wave wealth-creation system, Americans are more open to change than either the Europeans or Japanese, and they’re less vulnerable to cataclysmic political turmoil than the Chinese. However, there are several dischordances in our institutional mix that stand out — dischordances, as it happens, that are objects of regular scrutiny on this blog: the transportation infastructure, the energy system and the educational system.

The Tofflers make a number of useful observations about each, as I hope to explicate in future posts. As high-altitude observers, integrating global trends, the Tofflers miss some important details. They have little to say about the importance of human settlement patterns, for instance, in understanding the dysfunction of our transportation and energy systems. But their larger points hold up very well.

The old, industrial-wave wealth-creating system is supported by an array of vested interests. These interests resist meaningful change, seeking to apply familiar, but increasingly ineffective, industrial-wave solutions. In essence, they argue for redoubling our efforts in doing the same old thing. We can see this clearly in Virginia in our approach to roads and education: There’s nothing that spending more money can’t fix.

But industrial-wave solutions will not work. Incremental reforms won’t work. We need to reconceptualize crucial institutions. We need to reinvent them from scratch. In other words, to borrow the idiom of Bacon’s Rebellion, we need Fundamental Change.

The Bacon family is heading to the once-great state of West Virginia (“once great” in the sense that it once was part of Virginia) for a little R&R at the Showshoe resort. Last year, there was no Wi-Fi access, so I do not anticipate doing any blogging. Which is just as well. While others in our party go skiing, I will be doing the kind of prolonged and thoughtful reading that I have little time for now.

Right now, I’m finishing up Mark Steyn’s book, “America Alone,” a depressing but impossible-to-ignore treatise on the demographic decline of the secular Western World in the face of a resurgent and fertile/virile Islam. Next on my list is the Toffler’s book, “Revolutionary Wealth,” which, from what I can glean, is a tad more optimistic about the future of the world.

To all my friends and readers, I wish you Merry Christmas — unless you’re offended by my cultural chauvenism, in which case I offer my abject apologies and wish you a happy winter solstice.

New Delhi has had zoning laws banning businesses from residential areas since the 1950s, but they’ve been honored only in the breech. The result, according to Shikha Dalmia, writing in the Wall Street Journal, is that “until now, ordinary citizens arranged their homes, businesses and neighborhoods according to their own private plans. Over the last 50 years, the city has quite spontaneously sorted itself according to an inner logic that no planner could have anticipated, unleashing vast reserves of entrepreneurial energy.”

But New Delhi will host the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and there is concern that the congested, gridlocked tangle of India’s capital city will prove to be an embarrassment. So, India’s Supreme Court has ordered a campaign to close all businesses — potentially affecting 500,000 of them — located in the city’s residential zones. That order has prompted such an outpouring of protest that it has been temporarily suspended.

Here’s how Dalmia describes the mixed use atmosphere of New Delhi (in a description reminiscent of what visitors have told me about Hong Kong, another entrepreneurial marvel):

People with homes on major arteries, for instance, have either opened their own businesses or rented out rooms to accountants, doctors, clothing show-rooms, jewelry stores, beauticians, banquet halls or Internet cafes — you name it. Many of these businesses have totally displaced the original homes, creating thriving, bustling places of commece such as the super-posh makrets in South Extension and MG Road and their less-plush equivalents in Moti Nagar and Kamla Nagar.

But major commercial activity has not been limited along major roads. Every Delhi neighborhood is a self-sufficient entity with its own grocery stores, tailors, dry cleaners and salons — all within safe walking distance for kids to run errands. Some of the more upscale areas such as Defense Colony have about 100 art galleries sandwiched between houses. The freedom to operate from home has been a particular boon for Indian women who are able to run roaring businesses — most of them catering to other women — while keeping an eye on their children. Indeed, residences and businesses have become so intertwined that most people don’t know that a Master Plan forbidding mixed uses exists.

Such “chaos” is anathema to planners, of course. Here in Virginia, we have neatly segregated all of our land uses, separating housing, workplaces, shops and civic buildings, and then relying upon automobiles to make them accessible. Our system works economically as long as there’s enough money to pay for an endless supply of new roads and/or transit projects (which there isn’t), and as long as the price of oil and gasoline remain inexpensive (which it won’t).

It is also interesting to ponder what segregated land uses have done to America’s entrepreneurial vitality: in particular to the ability of women to form micro-enterprises that allow them to work in their houses where they can juggle home-making, money-making and child rearing. One could probe even deeper and inquire into the impact of our human settlement patterns upon our national psyche. Children too young to drive have lost their independence. They cannot reach any meaningful destination in the suburbs without a parent to drive them somewhere. That prolonged dependence is satisfying neither for the children, nor the parents (predominantly the mothers) who never imagined that they would spend so much time as glorified chauffeurs.

Someone please tell the Indians, we Americans have been there. Don’t do it!

(Note to knee-jerks: I am not railing against the automobile. I love automobiles and the freedom of movement they provide. I’m railing against the segregation of land uses which, by forcing spatial separation between different types of activities, makes us overly dependent upon the automobile.)

(Photo credit: Simjen Hendriks photography)

Tom Morris, the secretary of education, has hit the road to build support for Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s universal pre-k child care proposal. In a public forum in Charlottesville city hall, Morris noted that the state has provided a preschool program exclusively for at-risk 4-year-olds since 1995. It has been difficult, however, for the Virginia Preschool Initiative to reach all at-risk children, he said.

As the Daily Progress reports in its coverage of the forum, Kathy Glazer, the director of Kaine’s working group on early childhood initiatives, elaborated: “Those dollars were not fully utilized because there were some barriers that were in place.”

It’s not totally clear from the context of the article what those “barriers” were. However, the Daily Progress quoted Morris as saying that more community groups and business leaders would support an all-inclusive 4-year-old plan. “Public programs for just at-risk students don’t have the broader constituency of support as one that includes all children.”

That may be what Morris said, but that’s not what the debate is about. The Kaine administration message just isn’t getting through. I can’t tell if that’s because the Kaniacs are not articulating it well or if reporters are just failing to follow their logic. But here’s what I picked up from a two-minute chat with Morris at a recent Virginia FREE function:

Yes, Virginia does provide support pre-k programs for “at risk” children, but the problem is bigger than that. Thousands of children of working-class and middle-class households are showing up at kindergarden unprepared as well. With private pre-school tuitions averaging $7,000 a year (a point that was noted in the story), many middle-class parents can’t afford pre-k. It’s in society’s interest to make sure that their children, too, are well prepared for school. It costs far more to provide remedial education and to deal with the consequences of high school drop-outs than it would to make pre-k universal.

Now, I am skeptical that expanding the reach and scope of government is going to do much to address the problems that Morris cited — especially when it entails spending another $300 million a year, which must be extacted from the very same overextended working/middle class taxpayers. But I don’t mind having the debate. The Kaine administration is raising a legitimate issue, and I would like to see the Kaniacs make the very best argument they can. At this point, however, either the argument isn’t being made properly or it’s not making it through the media filter. The cogent points that Morris articulated in a short private conversation with me have yet to enter the public domain.

During their 2005 fiscal years, Virginia hospitals provided almost $1 billion in charity care to patients — more than triple their 2000 contributions, according to a report filed by Virginia Health Information. Where does that money come from? From hospitals — and their privately insured patients.

Which paying customers? Not Medicare or Medicaid. The federal government is so big and has so much purchasing power that it can set its reimbursement rates at below market rates. One in five hospitals in Virginia lost money in 2005. As a rule, those were hospitals stuck with a higher percentage of indigent patients (who pay nothing) and Medicaid patients (who get the lowest reimbursements) and the fewest private pays (which pay the most). The healthiest hospitals tend to be the suburban facilities that can pass the losses from their unprofitable business onto privately insured patients.

It’s just one more way to shaft the middle class. The progressive federal tax code is bad enough, especially now that the Alternative Minimum Tax is kicking in for tens of millions of taxpayers. But it’s only the beginning. The Virginia income tax is more progressive now than it was in 2004, thanks to “tax reform.” There is also the higher ed wealth transfer in the form of higher tuitions that help pay for scholarships for the needy. And, then, there’s the health care system paid for predominantly by working-class and salaried stiffs whose insurance premiums go up 10 percent a year.

It never ends.

The Virginia Department of Transportation has opened the first design-build roadway project in Virginia, doubling the out-bound shipping capacity of APM Terminals in Portsmouth. The private design-build team, which included contractor Tidewater Skanska and engineering firm Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, completed the $22 million project ahead of schedule.

Said Greg Lassiter, director of Design-Build Delivery for VHB: “The resulting time savings from this design-build contract meant lower costs for the Commonwealth of Virginia and earlier utilization of APMT’s marine container terminal. This project is a model of what the design-build method should be all about.”

Construction of the new interchange involved raising Route 164, a four-lane limited-access highway, 25 feet to accommodate an overpass over the new APM Terminals Boulevard. Careful construction phasing enabled all four lanes of highway traffic to be maintained throughout the project. Other improvements included extensive utility and drainage work, as well as reconfiguration of an existing highway exit and upgrades to commercial and government access roads. The roadway layout was chosen to minimize wetland impacts. (Read the VDOT press release.)

“Walkable” communities are the hot concept in real estate development these days. Certain elements are necessary for building them. The communities must contain a finely grained mix of land uses — houses, shops, offices, civic buildings — within walkable distances of each other. These land uses must be integrated with one another, not separated by physical and psychological barriers. And the streetscapes must invite pedestrian activity.

There is an art to designing inviting streetscapes. There’s a lot more to it than installing brick sidewalks and paving fancy crosswalks. Buildings should abut the sidewalk, and they should present a varied and visually interesting face to the street. There should be on-street parking, with parked cars acting as a barrier between vehicles on the street and pedestrians on the sidewalk. And local streets, as opposed to arterial or collector roads, should be designed for slow driving speeds.

How do you slow traffic speeds? You can post speed limit signs for 20 miles per hour, but if the street is designed to accommodate 40 miles per hour, you’re going to find a lot of people ignoring the speed limit. The key, according to the New Urbanists, is narrow streets. When streets are narrow and corners are tight, people have no choice but to slow down.

People living in residential neighborhoods prefer slow traffic: They don’t like the idea of their children playing in the streets and getting flattened by zooming cars. That’s why we have so many cul de sacs — dead-end configurations that prevent motorists from hauling butt through the neighborhoods on streets so wide that they could host the Daytona 500. But cul de sacs are not walkable. The only people you see walking in cul-de-sac subdivisions are getting their daily exercise. They aren’t using the streets as a means to actually get anywhere. Neighborhoods built around cul de sac streets rule out walking as a transportation mode, rely upon bottleneck-prone collector roads for access, and hard-wire the region for traffic congestion.

As Virginia seeks solutions to traffic congestion, why don’t we encourage developers to build neighborhoods with narrow streets instead of subdivisions served by dead-end mini-freeways? Short answer: Because of fire department regulations. Narrow streets supposedly make it more difficult for monster fire trucks to gain access to houses on those streets.

New Urbanists insist that there are ways to design around the problem. But they raise a more fundamental issue: When it comes to public safety today, what’s the bigger problem — people dying in fires, or people getting killed in automobile accidents? Traffic fatalities are the larger problem, and the desire of fire-fighting professionals to rush around in bigger, flashier fire trucks should not trump the design of safer streets.

The design-by-fire-truck issue surfaced recently in Virginia during a charrette for Tree Hill, a proposed New Urbanist development south of Richmond. In my latest column, “Design by Fire Truck,” I describe New Urbanist guru Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk negotiating with Henrico County deputy Fire Marshal David Seay for some flexibility in the application of the rules. Once again, we demonstrate the point that our problem in Virginia is not a failure to give local government sufficient regulatory power — it’s the misapplication of the power they already have.

(Photo credit: VA Fire News.com)

The December 18, 2006, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine has been published. You can view today’s edition in its entirety here. Make sure you don’t miss a single issue — subscribe for free here.

Here are today’s columns:

Design by Fire Truck
Why can’t developers today create walkable communities like the small towns of the 1920s? Go ask your fire marshal.
by James A. Bacon

Spirit of History
The family stories we all share add up to the real history of our communities. It took 83-year-old Jac Walker of Franconia to show us how.
by Doug Koelemay

Neighborhood Values
If you want to promote family values, dispense with cultural wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage and focus on creating supportive dooryards and neighborhoods.
by EM Risse

Road Map
There is no need for legislative gridlock in Virginia. Two new publications outline priorities and detail solutions that a consensus can build around.
by Michael Thompson

Writing Rightly
I am driven to write — partly as a form of self expression, but mostly in defense of values threatened by secular humanists and totalitarian jihadists.
by James Atticus Bowden

Can’t We All Just Get Along?
GOP leaders want to paper over philosophical divides in pursuit of power. But they miss the fact that electoral victories are achieved only through visionary policies and strong leadership.
by Phil Rodokanakis

Nice & Curious Questions
Virginia’s Alma Maters: Halls of Public Ivy in the Old Dominion
by Edwin S. Clay III and Patricia Bangs

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when most of the region we call “Northern Virginia” was like the rest of Virginia. Once upon a time, Fairfax County was known for its dairy farms. Once upon a time, people referred to the Rest of Virginia as “south of the Occoquan.” Today, the Washington metro area has leap-frogged past the Occoquan — and even past the Rappahannock.

Now we can contemplate the time when the Washington metro area subsumes the Richmond region. In an op-ed piece published today in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Robert Land and Chris Nelson, co-directors of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech in Alexandria, suggest that the 2010 Census could find, based on commuting patterns, that the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan statistical area qualifies as the Washington-Baltimore-Richmond MSA. They write:

With growth in the booming Washington region surging south to Richmond, it appears that D.C. may soon have a new metropolitan partner. Consider recent growth trends in Carolina [County], about halfway between D.C. and Richmond. In 2000, a quarter of its workers commuted north to the Washington region while a slightly larger percentage headed south to the Richmond metropolitan area. According to the Census, if metropolitan areas share a significant proportion of workers, they may form a combined metro area.

Land and Nelson say that this emerging “megalopolis,” which they refer to as the “Chesapeake metropolitan area,” now contains 10 million people and could surpass 15 million by 2040.

Egads. I grew up in northwestern Washington, D.C. After graduating from the University of Virginia, though, I never had the slightest temptation to go back. Settling in Richmond, where I’ve lived for 20 years now, I always considered Washington as a psychologically distant universe. But those days are over, it appears. It looks like Washington has caught up with me.