Bacon's Rebellion

Cayman Brac, a Caribbean island with a population of 1,822 residents, is installing a pay-as-you-go metering system, Smart Meter, that allows homeowners to monitor their electric charges real time. The goal is to equip consumers with data that will enable them to conserve energy. Reports Cayman Net News:

This initiative is driven by efforts to conserve and reduce electricity consumption, and [Jonathan] Tibbetts, [General Manager of Cayman Brac Power and Light,] maintained that consumers gain valuable insight as to their energy usage, which in turn empowers them to take control of their consumption and ultimately save money.

“Energy conservation is an important global issue that needs to be brought to the forefront of all consumers worldwide,” said Tibbets, who has a Smart Meter installed in his own home. “This has saved me as much as thirty percent off my current bill,” he claimed.

If a tiny Caribbean island can equip homeowners with this conservation technology — manufactured by an American company, APMY Metering, incidentally — you’d think that a comparable initiative would be within the grasp of Virginia utility companies more than 1,000 times larger.

Dominion anticipates that economic/population growth in Northern Virginia will lead to scattered electric power shortages within five years. Dominion’s answer: build a 240-mile electric transmission line of 150-foot tall towers to wheel in surplus electricity from the Midwest — against the vehement objections of the communities whose lands would be traversed and landscapes despoiled.

Why isn’t Dominion actively exploring the conservation option? Smart Meters combined with pricing that charged higher rates during periods of peak demand would encourage homeowners (a) to invest in energy-saving appliances, and (b) shift electric demand to off-peak periods of time. Dominion could save multi-millions in transmission-line construction costs.

Perhaps one reason is that the electric utility industry in Virginia isn’t kept on a short leash like it is in the Cayman Islands. This comes from a December 2003 article in Cayman Net News:

The Cayman Islands Government and Cayman Brac Power & Light Co. Ltd (CBPL) signed a 15-year non-exclusive licence to generate, transmit, distribute and supply electricity to Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, on Wednesday. …

The terms of the agreement are in keeping with the policy announced by government earlier this year that no more exclusive licences would be issued in the electricity sector, and that new licences would not exceed 15 years in duration. (My italics.)

Maybe 15-year, non-exclusive licenses would encourage Virginia power companies to be a little more creative in their thinking.

(Hat tip to Larry Gross for pointing me to the Cayman Net News.)

The Center for Digital Government has released its 2006 Digital Cities Survey, which rates city governments for how they “utilize digital technologies to better serve their citizens and streamline operations.” Virginia cities — and not just those in Northern Virginia — stood out nationally for their embrace of technology.

125,000-249,999 population:

1st: Alexandria (tie with Madison, Wis.)
3rd: Richmond
5th: Hampton (tied with Hollywood, Fla., and Winston-Salem, N.C.)
8th: Chesapeake

75,000-124,999 population:

1st: Roanoke (tied with Ogden City, Utah)

30,000-74,999 population:

3rd: Charlottesville
5th: Lynchburg
6th: Blacksburg

With ties, 37 cities were included in the three categories listed here. Virginia cities nailed down eight of the top spots — more than 20 percent of the total. Kudos all around!

One of the ongoing debates on this blog is the extent to which American drivers are willing and able to modify their driving habits in response to higher gasoline prices. Well, here’s the latest data. Reuters reports:

HOUSTON (Reuters) — High gasoline prices not only slowed fuel demand growth and cut sales of gas-guzzling vehicles in 2005, they also prompted Americans to drive less for the first time in 25 years, a consulting group said in a report Thursday.

The drop in driving was small – the average American drove 13,657 miles (21,978.8 km) per year in 2005, down from 13,711 miles in 2004 – but it is more evidence that the market works and prices help control consumption, Boston-based Cambridge Energy Research Associates said.

“Price matters,” CERA Chairman Daniel Yergin said.

Notable was the fact that driving declined even though the general economy remained strong. The decline was not induced by recession and a contraction of economic activity.

Miles driven per motorist was down partly because there are more elderly people driving, and they tend to drive less, the report said. Between 1980 and 2004, drivers under age 21 dropped from 18.8 million to 15.8 million and those over 65 almost doubled, from 15.4 million to nearly 29 million, CERA said.

I find the impact of changing demographics to be particularly interesting. I’ve argued in the past that the the aging of the population (old people don’t commute to work) and the leveling off of women in the workforce will slow the rate of increase in Vehicle Miles Driven compared to historical rates over the past 20 to 30 years. That’s why I placed little faith in long-range forecasts that Virginia faces a $108 billion shortfall in transportation revenues over the next 20 years.

Demographics may explain a slowing in the rate of increase but it doesn’t explain the outright decline in Vehicle Miles Driven. The big story is that people do respond to price incentives. Higher gasoline prices do reduce driving. The lesson to learn: Time-of-day pricing for tolls will reduce congestion. Likewise, time-of-day pricing for parking, as I will argue next Monday, will reduce driving.

The moral: Any transportation policy that attempts to match every increase in Vehicle Miles Driven with an increase in road capacity is doomed to failure. As with every other sector of a functioning capitalist economy, we need to incorporate pricing into the transportation marketplace that sends appropriate signals to consumers (motorists) and vendors (those who supply transportation services).

(Hat tip to Ed Risse for pointing me to the article.)

I’ve long advocated “car sharing” as one of the many small-bore solutions that, collectively enacted, can relieve traffic congestion in Virginia. (See “Step up to Flex,” May 10, 2004.)

The concept of flex cars, in which subscribers make Internet reservations to rent cars by the hour for short trips, was easy to ridicule a couple of years ago. The number of cars and subscribers in the early pilot projects seemed ludicrously small. But the idea, it appears, is taking off. People are saving big bucks and eliminating major hassles by trading in their cars and relying instead upon mass transit and car sharing. Reports Eric M. Weiss with the Washington Post:

Yesterday, one of the two major car-sharing companies that operate in the Washington region, Zipcar, announced a $25 million investment that will allow it to possibly double the 350 vehicles it already puts on area streets. In June, Zipcar’s rival, District-based Flexcar, announced a major investment by a company started by AOL co-founder Steve Case.

That could set up the Washington area — one of only two major markets where the two companies compete — as a testing ground to see just how far car sharing can go in reducing congestion, pollution and parking woes.

“Some of the highest adoption neighborhoods in the country are in D.C.,” said Scott Griffith, chief executive of Zipcar, based in Cambridge, Mass. He said that in the Dupont Circle and Capitol Hill neighborhoods, where parking can be difficult to find, more than 10 percent of residents older than 21 use the service.

Let’s hear it for the free market, baby!

There is no hope of solving Virginia’s transportation woes through government action only. The government is slow, plodding, bureaucratic and prone to political meddling. We need to open up the transportation market to more innovators like Zipcar and Flexcar. The principle extends to buses, vans, jitneys, taxies and other forms of shared ridership… and to private-sector consortia building new road and transit infrastructure… and to inventors of Intelligent Transportation System services such as those that transmit video/radar traffic data to commuters.

Sadly, most lawmakers are stuck in the mindset that transportation is a problem that only government can solve — with higher taxes. Only a handful of legislators seem interested in unleashing the potential of entrepreneurs and free markets. Maybe Zipcar’s $25 million investment will change a few minds.

The House of Delegates hasn’t forgotten about the U.S. Supreme Court “Kelo” ruling that expanded the rights of local governments to condemn peoples’ land for economic development purposes. The House passed a bill last year curtailing the application of eminent domain in Virginia but deadlocked with the Senate, so the bill went nowhere.

But according to the Free Lance-Star, House Speaker William J. Howell, has a task force looking at Kelo and expects to submit new legislation in the 2007 session.

Now that the Federal Drug Administration has decided to make emergency contraception (the so-called “morning after pill”) available over the counter, the controversy will migrate to the states as local legislators consider local restrictions. As a happily and monogomously married guy who has been surgically “fixed” after having three children, I’ll concede that emergency contraception is not something I spend a lot of time thinking about. But I found out last night that it’s an issue that animates many politically active women — including many Republican women.

My neighbor Barbara Rose opened up her home to a constituents’ meeting with Del. John M. O’Bannon, R-Henrico, who happens to be the only physician serving in the General Assembly. In attendance were some two dozen people. Most were women — the handful of men either were curious neighbors or were tagging along in support of wives/girlfriends. As John Rose said during a round of introductions, “I come with the house.”

The issue was emergency contraception. Mira Signer, director of statewide organizing for Planned Parenthood, explained that she anticipated a legislative backlash to the FDA ruling, and she was hoping that O’Bannon, a perceived moderate, would help find a middle-of-the-road position acceptable to a broad cross-section of the Virginia population. She proposed a “Birth Control Protection Act,” which “provides that the federal Food and Drug Administration approved methods of birth control are not subject to or governed by the abortion law set forth in Title 18.2.”

Specifically, the reproductive rights crowd is worried that the General Assembly may move to limit Emergency Contraception by (a) restricting access to teens without parental consent, and (b) allowing pharmacists to refuse to dispense the drug.

In all likelihood, the Emergency Contraception issue will get embroiled in the ongoing abortion debate. If I understand the debate correctly, it boils down to an essentially theological question regarding at what point “pregnancy” begins. If you think the pregnancy begins when a sperm fertilizes an egg, then the Emergency Contraception drug (the same drug, in larger doses, as the “pill”) amounts to an abortion pill. If you believe that pregnancy begins when the fertilized egg attaches itself to the uterus, a process that the drug in question prevents, then you regard it as contraception.

Personally, I have huge reservations about late-term abortions. I’ve seen babies in neo-natal units surviving birth after a mere six-seven months gestation. Aborting a foetus/baby at that stage is uncomfortably akin to murder, acceptable only if the mother’s life is in danger. At the other end of the spectrum, a free-floating fertilized egg is not a baby or anything remotely resembling a baby. It does not have a heart or a brain. It is insensate. Fertilized eggs are created by the thousands in fertility clinics and disposed of, without fanfare, when no longer needed. If we restrict Emergency Contraception on the grounds that it equates to abortion, then we need to question the morality of the life-creating fertility industry.

O’Bannon did not give his female constituents the answer they hoped to hear. He was not prepared at this time to endorse the Birth Control Protection Act. And he also indicated that he had reservations about forcing pharmacists to dispense the drug against their individual conscience. But he didn’t wave the women off either — he promised to continue listening to them as the debate unfolded. Although he anticipated that the issue would quickly polarize along party lines, he vowed to keep an open mind.

He did vote against a previous bill, O’Bannon reminded the audience, that would have mandated parental notification when minors received services for contraception, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases at public health facilities. He had heard too many stories — some from women in the audience — of how parental notification discouraged children from getting treatment they needed.

If this meeting is any indication, Emergency Contraception is shaping up as the cultural wedge issue of the 2007 session of the General Assembly.

From the Culpeper Star Exponent, citing the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation:

About 45,000 acres of Virginia’s rural lands are lost annually to development and nearly 120 farms disappear every year. Of all the development that has occurred in the commonwealth in the last 400 years, more than one-fourth of it has taken place in the last 15 years.

If quoted correctly, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine made a most perspicacious remark in a speech he delivered yesterday at the University of Richmond. If only his actions conformed with the principle he articulated!

Richmond.com quotes him as follows:

At the end of the day, this transportation issue on the dollar side will just come down to two philosophies. … One, should we find new revenues from transportation users to pay for improvements, or two, should we take money out of existing general fund priorities to pay for transportation?

Should transportation users pay for transportation improvements? Yes, that’s the question. Although Kaine’s quote is pithy, it does oversimplify somewhat. I would clarify the choice as follows:

One, should we set up a system in which those who benefit from transportation spending — both citizens and landowners — pay in direct proportion to which they use, or benefit from, the system? Or, two, should we tax people regardless of how much they drive or when/where they drive, send the money to Richmond, stir it up in a big pot, and give it to politicians and lobbyists to dole out around the state?

My formulation accounts for the fact that landowners are among the primary beneficiaries of transportation improvements and should pay, either through proffers, impact fees, CDA bonds or some other mechanism, some share of the cost of building new roads.

Kaine’s rhetoric does highlight the weakness of the House of Delegates position on transportation spending. Although the House leadership favors tolls, a true user-pays system, delegates also would finance general transportation improvements out of the General Fund — the antithesis of a user-pays system. Doling out General Fund monies has proven itself just as susceptible to political manipulation as doling out Transportation Trust Fund monies — witness the multi-million dollar bail-out of the Richmond region’s Rt. 288 a couple of years ago.

My discomfort with Kaine’s quote is that his policies don’t reflect what he says. He would raise $1 billion a year mainly by taxing auto insurance fees, car titling fees and auto registration fees. In other words, he would tax people for owning a car, regardless of whether they drove it 6,000 miles a year or 60,000, regardless of whether they drove through empty country roads or hyper-congested rush hour freeways.

Would Gov. Kaine raise the gas tax? Noooo. Does he advocate a tax based on Vehicle Miles Driven? Noooo. Does he support congestion tolls? If so, he’s kept pretty darn quiet about it. Bottom line: There must be a rational nexus between the use of the transportation system and the payment for the system — a nexus that is transparent and understandable so the citizenry can respond rationally and change transportation modes as appropriate.

The politically incorrect Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has issued its 2006 analysis of how well the 50 states are educating their neediest children. Disdaining the emphasis on self-esteem and feel-good multiculturalism, Fordham argues that schools should teach children the skills they need to excel in the world. Accordingly, Fordham looks favorably upon the setting of high standards, expanding parental choice in where they send their children to schools, and subordinating the institutional interests of the educational bureaucy to the interests of the children.

So, how does Virginia rate? High grades for curricular content, middling/low grades for standards-based reform and abysmal grades for school choice. (View the Virginia analysis.)

Highlights:

The state’s standards of learning are among the best in the nation, earning a grade of B+ from Fordham Foundation reviewers. Moreover, for requiring that students pass high-stakes exams in five subjects based on those standards in order to graduate high school, Virginia earned an A. The Commonwealth’s commitment to a broad liberal arts education for all — a rarity nationally — appears to be getting results. …

The bad news is that the state’s minority students are still achieving at low levels and have made almost no gains over the past decade on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), except for African-American eighth-graders in math. Poor students’ scores are up in math and science but they’re hardly eye popping. When upwards of 80 to 90 percent of African-American and Hispanic students are failing to read and do math proficiently, standing pat is not enough.

Money is not the problem in Old Dominion; accountability is. … Lil Tuttle, education director at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute … notes that “between 1995 [the onset of current standards reforms] and 2008, state education funding will rise from $2.5 billion to $6 billion [a 137 percent increase],” with little to show for it.

Part of the problem is the lack of rigor in the state’s tests (their defined level of proficiency in reading and math is among the lowest in the land). This is particularly disheartening because the state’s curriculum standards are so good-the state ranks fifth in the nation for quality. But the poor tests undermine this accomplishment, essentially letting children, and schools, off the hook when they do not hit the high marks set by the curriculum standards.

Charter schools are not pushing the traditional system to do better, mainly because there are just five charters in the entire state. The state’s charter bill is among the weakest in the nation. “The original charter bill was written specifically to make sure there were no charters,” says John Taylor, president of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy; and there seems to be little prospect for improvement.

The biggest challenge facing the state, however, may well be its minority graduation rate. At least, better graduation data appear to be forthcoming (though better data have not helped education reform previously). Charles Pyle, director of communications for Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, says the state has already committed itself to a new education information management system that will allow it to “calculate graduation rates for every school and school division based on longitudinal, student-level data using a formula recommended by the National Governors Association.” Armed with this information, Virginia hopes to better target its efforts and track improvements.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has lined up significant support for a Virginia telework initiative, collecting pledges from 32 Northern Virginia technology companies to “expand or implement telework within our organizations” and to encourage their colleagues to do so as well.

According to Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra, the Kaine administration also has set ambitious goals for the state — 20 percent of the eligible workforce will telecommute by 2010. Said Chopra: “The Commonwealth must play a role in leading by doing.”

Telework is only one piece of the larger transportation solution but it’s probably the easiest to put into place. It’s encouraging to see the state committing to getting its employees off the roads. Even more encouraging is to see members of the Northern Virginia Technology Council agreeing to participate actively in the initiative. (Read the NVTC press release.) Beats lobbying for higher taxes.

The Third Crossing over Hampton Roads is slipping further out of reach, reports Christina Nuckols at the Virginian-Pilot. Citing uncertainty about state priorities, the two consortia that submitted plans to build the $3 billion mega-project have asked the state to put the project on hold for two years.

Some legislators have said they regarded the upgrading of U.S. 460 between Suffolk and Petersburg as the highest priority for the Tidewater region. But the state lacks the funds to subsidize that project, much less the far more ambitious Third Crossing.

Tidewater Skanska and Fluor Virginia Inc. had filed unsolicited bids to build the Third Crossing in 2004. Skanska had estimated that tolls could cover the lion’s share of the cost but some $600 million to $1.2 million in state and federal dollars would be needed. Given the state’s uncertain commitment to the project, neither firm wants to spend the money to develop more detailed plans.

House Transportation Chair Leo Wardrup, R-Virginia Beach, raised the key philosophical question: “If we can’t get there with tolls, there’s something wrong with how we’re running our highway program.”

I agree. If tolls won’t cover the construction costs, I would submit, either the project is too ambitious in size and scope, or the demand does not exist to justify building it. There are two exceptions to that line of logic: Subsidies could be warranted (1) if the state regards the Third Crossing as critical to economic development, as in continued development of the ports, and/or 2) if the state regards the Third Crossing as critical for public safety, as in hurricane evacuation. In either case, I would argue, the public subsidy should come from the General Fund, where it would compete with other economic-development and public-safety priorities.

In a tour of Northern Virginia, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine stated that he would push for land use reforms and extra transportation funding in the 2007 session of the General Assembly. In previous statements, he had said that he would steer clear of transportation issues until after the fall 2007 elections when voters would have a chance to throw out opponents to his proposed tax increases.

Although the governor is sticking to his guns regarding the need for more transportation revenues, he apparently sees limited areas of agreement with a House of Delegates where low-tax sentiments run strong. According to a report filed by Washington Post reporter Amy Gardner, Kaine said he would:

• Focus on how to spend the $339 million in surplus General Fund revenues that House Republicans agree can be steered to transportation without raising taxes.
• Resurrect a campaign proposal to give local governments more authority to reject rezoning projects that would swamp local transportation infrastructure.
• Revisit legislation authorizing the Virginia Department of Transportation to conduct traffic-impact analyses of major rezoning projects. With the General Assembly crafting permanent legislation, the measure may encounter more opposition than the pilot project did last year.

Gardner also noted that the legislature is likely to take up proposals that would make developers more responsible for maintaining the subdivision roads they build, and also to require greater connectivity between subdivisions, which would provide more options for traffic flow. The Kaine administration is examining both issues, but Gardner provided no details on the governor’s current thinking.

Kudos to the Virginian-Pilot editorial writers! They really nailed it with an editorial prompted by, of all things, two proposed development projects in Chesterfield County. As the Pilot has come to realize, when the Virginia Department of Transportation pays for maintaining local roads, land use decisions made halfway across the state affect all of us.

Now, with road-maintenance costs rising and state transportation revenues running short, local development decisions such as those in Chesterfield County suddenly pose a question of statewide import:

If localities had to shoulder more of the road-maintenance tab, would they make smarter land-use decisions before approving development? Would they focus on density, alternative transportation and related matters to a greater degree than they do now?

Intuitively, the answer is “yes.”

Aligning transportation and land use decisions is only one of many reforms needed to tackle Virginia’s transportation woes, but it’s a good place to start. Getting the Virginian-Pilot behind the effort represents a huge step forward in the battle for public understanding.

“As a business leader, I am concerned,” declares Katherine Busser, a senior vice president for Capital One and chair of the Strong Start Council. “I need a workforce of critical thinkers, team players, and effective communicators. These skills find their roots in the earliest years. High-quality early-childhood education is a solution.”

We can all agree that Virginia needs more critical thinkers in order to compete in a global, knowledge-based trading system. But a little more critical thinking might have helped Busser in her column in Sunday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch touting a universal pre-K program.

Busser’s column is long on platitudes and short on data. One of the few numbers she cites is this: Last year, Virginia taxpayers spent $90 million on children who had to repeat a grade between kindergarten and the third grade. The number she neglected to mention was that universal pre-K would cost $300 million a year. Even if universal pre-K reduced drop-outs to zero — a proposition for which there is zero evidence — that still would yield a lousy return on taxpayer investment.

The person displaying an ability to think critically in this debate is not a businessman at all, but a lawyer and politician: Del. Kirk Cox, R-Chesterfield. In a companion column, he asked the tough questions that Busser needs to address:

(1) What would Virginia get for $300 million? Does the price tag include the cost of adding 4,100 classrooms plus intangibles such as training, health care, snacks and support services?

(2) Does universal pre-K help all children? Some evidence suggests that at-risk students might benefit, but there is nothing to indicate that students of middle- and high-income families would gain anything. “Is it right to ask Virginia taxpayers to pay for the child care and preschool choices of millionaires when studies show it may not help these children?”

(3) Does the current program work? “What statistical data — actual results — does the state have that demonstrate improved test scores and proficiencies for those children who enrolled in the Virginia Preschool Initiative program versus those who did not?”

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and other supporters of universal pre-K have have to do better than dish out pious generalities about the importance of early childhood learning. Of course early environmental influences are critical. Of course we want to encourage early learning. But that’s a far cry from justifying the expansion of existing programs targeting at-risk children to a universal program for all.

The hot new concept in residential real estate now is to build developments around equestrian centers. The Washington Post notes that there are at least three such communities in the Washington metro area. Additionally, I have heard of equestrian/residential projects downstate: one in New Kent County, one near Lynchburg.

Unlike golf communities, in which golf carts are evolving into a new form of transportation (see previous post), no one is talking yet of the horse as a serious transportation option!