Bacon's Rebellion

The Sept. 25, 2006, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion has been published. You can view it here. Not only can you read this week’s punditry and profundity, you can peruse our archives. Why not subscribe, and get the e-zine sent directly to your in-box?

Today’s columns include:

The Swedish Solution
If congestion pricing works in Sweden, why not in Virginia? Tolls that vary by congestion levels could dampen demand for added roadway capacity while raising new revenue.
by James A. Bacon

A Congestion Pricing Primer
Answers? You want answers? I asked the U.S. Department of Transportation about its congestion-pricing policies. The answers were so good I had to reproduce them whole.
by James A. Bacon

Future Still Shocking
In our age of accelerating change, some institutions adapt more quickly than others. Insights from the Tofflers’ new book help explain the challenges facing Virginia.
by Doug Koelemay

Jackpot Winner
Americans are like the overweight Lotto winner who squanders his winnings. The discovery of oil deep in the Gulf of Mexico will do little to halt the coming energy crash.
by EM Risse

A New Transportation Equation
Virginia once led the nation in seeking private- sector solutions for transportation problems. We will have a chance in few days to burnish our tarnished capitalistic credentials.
by Geoffrey Segal

Pouring Water on Sand
Virginia legislators propose increasing subsidies for the Washington Metro — an unaccountable organization plagued by operational blunders and financial mismanagement.
by Phil Rodokanakis

No Regional Goverment!
If you like the idea of taxation without representation… if you’re looking to enrich your cronies without public oversight… you’ll love the idea of regional government.
by James Atticus Bowden

Who’s Watching the Richmond Media?
Part I: Community weeklies diverge on news council idea.
by Conaway Haskins

Who’s Watching the Richmond Media?
Part II: Blogs to the Rescue?
by Conaway Haskins

The Five-Legged Dog
Asserting that Rail to Dulles is an effective solution to Northern Virginia’s transportation problems does not make it so. The project is broken, and it’s time to re-think mobility solutions for the Dulles corridor.
by William Vincent

The Bridal Path to Nowhere
How Virginia can beat its traffic woes: Stop wasting money on dumb projects, establish performance measures and don’t give municipalities more power over land use!
by Ron Utt

Nice & Curious Questions
A Heartbeat Away: Vice Presidents from Virginia
by Edwin S. Clay III and Patricia Bangs

What the legislators are missing, or not, is this paragraph in bills for Hampton Roads Regional Governments:

“To the extent funds are made available to the Authority to do so, to employ employees, agents, advisors, and consultants, including WITHOUT LIMITATION, attorneys, financial advisors, engineers, and technical advisors, and, the provision of any other law to the contrary notwithstanding, to determine their duties and compensation.”

Don’t give that power to a council of city and county officials and some reps from the General Assembly.

Of course, this is precisely what the politicians want.

You can take Del. Leo Waldrup’s Bridge and Tunnel Authority and strip out this paragraph. Have the Bridge and Tunnel Authority collect money and decide what big projects to do, but give the executive function to adminster, manageand oversight to VDOT and the Governor.

I spoke to a very Conservative delegate this weekend. The delegate didn’t get the idea that the authority needed to be limited. Maybe I didn’t say it clearly enough.

It looks bad. Republicans are going to create a new level of unelected, unaccountable government for Hampton Roads. They may not do in the House Finance Committee, but they will roll in the Conference because they don’t understand what they are doing, or cynically, they understand exactly what they are doing.

The voters be damned. Our votes in ’98 and ’02 (and some in 05 against Kilgore’s Regional Governments) were meaningless when they come between politicians and much more power.

Sen. John Chichester, R-Northumberland, has been eerily quiet the past few months. While the House of Delegates has unveiled one new transportation initiative after another, the powerful chairman of the Senate finance committee has said very little. But in a column published today in the Free Lance-Star, he has finally laid out his thinking.

The bottom line: Nothing’s changed. His top priority is creating “a reliable and sustainable funding source ” for transportation — in other words, raising taxes. He comes across as a philosophical fossil, his views etched in stone, impermeable to new thinking.

While Chichester does give lip service to the goal of “squeez[ing] as much as we can out of every transportation dollar,” his heart isn’t in it. He writes:

During its 2006 session, the General Assembly made progress on the reform front. We passed laws that better connect land-use and transportation planning; laws that require performance measures to be used to reduce traffic congestion and improve traffic safety; and laws that promote private investment through partnering opportunities. We do not need more legislation to do what has already been done.

That’s it. Nothing more needs to be done. The House has introduced far-reaching VDOT reform proposals and is preparing to roll out a sweeping land use reform package early next week, but Chichester has written them off as inconsequential. He doesn’t simply disagree with the House recommendations, he acts as if they do not exist.

Furthermore, Chichester doesn’t see much good coming from privatization initiatives. He totally mischaracterizes the thrust of the House platform:

Those same people say the solution is simple — just attract more private capital to our transportation system. If that means selling a road that already has been paid for by taxpayers to a private entity so taxpayers have the pleasure of paying a second time, I call that double taxation. Some prefer to call it private enterprise.

That’s a straw man. The House privatization initiative does not call for selling roads. It calls for creating a “a detailed Action Plan to increase the role of the private sector in the development of transportation projects in Virginia as well as the use of public-private partnerships.” That doesn’t preclude selling existing roads but the obvious thrust is to aggressively identify opportunities to invest in new construction.

Chichester goes on: “Those same people say we can solve all of our problems by outsourcing more to the private sector. That’s well and good, but it ignores the reality that we already outsource more than 70 percent of road maintenance and more than 90 percent of new construction.”

Balderdash, no one says that privatization can “solve all our problems.” Privatization advocates say that outsourcing is only one piece of a comprehensive solution. Furthermore, Chichester fails to draw a distinction between “outsourcing” as currently practiced — hiring private contractors to handle piece-meal jobs — and the kind of outsourcing that reform advocates call for. With genuine outsourcing, VDOT would contract with private companies to manage maintenance for defined stretches of roadway over several years. VDOT would set performance standards and the contractor would accept the financial risk for failing to meet those standards.

As in the past, Chichester has provided no indication that he understands the connection between land use and transportation — that scattered, disconnected, low density development generates longer and more frequent automobile trips than do more efficient patterns of urban design. He never mentions telework or telecommuting. He never mentions congestion pricing. He never mentions Intelligent Transportation Systems. He never mentions Transportation Demand Management.

It is scary: The most powerful man in the state senate embodies a transportation philosophy that seems frozen in the amber of the 1970s: Tax, spend, build — and trust the politicians to get it all right.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has stated that, while he also wants to raise taxes, he is willing to work with the House to find common ground. Unfortunately, Chichester has made it very clear that he sees no common ground. We can only hope that Senate Democrats and a handful of low-tax Republicans will craft a Senate majority willing to follow the Governor’s lead in working with the House.

Last night I watched “The New World,” about the founding of the Jamestown colony. Although the movie focused mainly upon the interaction of the English and the Indians, the movie played out upon a backdrop of the Chesapeake Bay and James River. The pacing of the movie was insufferably slow, but the photography was stunning. The Bay, its tributaries and their wetlands are as beautiful as any place on earth. I find it heartening to see that the Virginia Tidewater still has spots of wilderness, that we have not totally destroyed our natural inheritance.

Which brings me to the news of the day…. Four hundreds years later, give or take a few months, the governors of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, the mayor of Washington, D.C., the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have proclaimed that they have “stopped the bleeding” in the Chesapeake Bay. But they acknowledged that much remains to be done to fully restore the Bay to health. Reports Scott Harper with the Virginian-Pilot:

It was Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s first meeting with the Chesapeake Bay Executive Council, and the freshman Democrat used the occasion to urge a faster cleanup pace but also to keep some perspective.

Kaine said the vaunted cleanup of North America’s largest estuary has shown “steady improvement,” despite frustrations that it has taken more than 20 years and billions of dollars to reach this break-even point.

If we can say that we’ve halted the downward spiral of the Bay’s ecology, that’s progress indeed. But it will take billions more and decades more to restore it to the pristine condition of 1607. If you watch the movie, you will know that the effort is worthwhile.

(As an aside, “The New World” provides a vivid depiction of indian culture that is refreshingly free of Politically Correct claptrap in which the English settlers are the bad guys and the Indians are the noble savages. The movie portrays, correctly in my book, the interaction of two mutually uncomprehending civilizations.)

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine voiced strong support for the application of information technology to solve Virginia’s transportation problems. Meeting with Northern Virginia congressmen and business leaders yesterday, he said, “We’re all committed to the notion that part of the answer to some our transportation challenges is going to be more effective use of technology.” Reports Leesburg Today:

“We shared with the executives the things that we already do with nearly a thousand sensors in the statewide system, significant traffic cameras, and how that information is available in the public,” Kaine said, mentioning the commonwealth’s 511 traffic information system. …

But the thing that these executives really put on the table was a strong marker [of what’s to come]: “Be committed to giving consumers the most information possible about traffic, alternate routes, traffic conditions, the length of time a particular trip is taking today so you can see if it’s too long and you can decide to go another way,” Kaine said, adding that the current information could be integrated and expanded to provide consumers a better package.

The kind of data that Kaine is talking about can be downloaded real-time to websites and cell phones. It won’t be long before it is integrated with navigation systems in peoples’ automobiles. As Virginia starts experimenting with congestion pricing (make sure to read next Monday’s edition of the e-zine), which uses variable tolls to encourage motorists to time-shift their commutes or take alternate transportation modes, it will be indispensable to have robust tools that tell drivers where the problems are.

I know that Kaine remains committed to raising taxes for transportation, but he deserves credit for working diligently also to make the existing system work more efficiently.

The House of Delegates leadership has announced a legislative package that would dedicate $50 million a year in state funds over 10 years in order to qualify for matching federal funds to upgrade METRO service to Northern Virginia.

According to a press release from the Speaker of the House, the package would dedicate the first $20 million annually of the existing tax on automobile insurance premiums to Metro, and increase the portion of recordation tax receipts directed to localities by an additional $60 million, which would mean an additional $30 million for Northern Virginia.

The funding, says the press release “will support the Metro’s 10-Year Capital Improvement Program, developed to adequately recapitalize the system and keep its assets in a state of good repair.” Legislators provided only the barest of details of what METRO improvements they have in mind.

“These funds will help preserve and expand the commuting options for the citizens of eastern Prince William,” said [Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick, R-Woodbridge]. “Hopefully, as Metro does more to eliminate waste and make their operations more efficient, this investment, combined with the federal match, will help bring Metro into the 21st Century and begin the process of expanding the system to Woodbridge and points south.”

The METRO website says that its $12.2 billion, 10-year capital improvement plan would replace depreciated assets, increase the length of trains from four/six cars to eight, and add 114 miles of rail in multiple projects.

It was big headlines in the Mainstream Media when a coalition of twenty-some Northern Virginia business groups endorsed more taxes for transportation, but no news at all when 19 environmental/ conservation organizations sent an open letter to state lawmakers outlining their consensus position.

Because you didn’t see them anywhere else, I’m summarizing the key recommendations here:

• Reduce travel demand. Existing transportation plans are unaffordable even with additional funding, and should be reevaluated with an eye to reducing travel demand. No more open-ended commitment to endlessly expand capacity.
• Volatile energy prices are combining with a changing real estate market to change the type of transportation investments needed Translation: Developers are designing more pedestrian- and transit-friendly communities. State and local government is behind the curve.
• Performance standards at the state, regional and local levels should include goals to reduce per capita Vehicle Miles Traveled; increase market share for transit, carpooling, biking and walking; and increase the share of jobs and residences within walking distance. Transportation funding should be tied to meeting these goals.
• Evaluate alternatives. A full range of alternatives should be fairly and transparently evaluated for transportation projects, rather than zeroing in on a pre-selected approach.
• Public-private partnerships must maintain public oversight, make the planning process transparent, ensure that the private sector really invests new money, and funds transit alternatives where congestion pricing is utilized.
• Change allocation formulas. More investment for transit, freight rail, pedestrian and bicycle needs. More money for local streets. Less money for mega projects.
• Improve street connectivity. Better connectivity of streets accepted into the VDOT system would reduce the burden on the few large arterials the state can afford to build.

You don’t have to agree with every one of these proposals to acknowledge the vitality of thinking that is taking place. Between the market-oriented House of Delegates and the “smart growth” prescriptions of the environmental/conservation community, virtually every core assumption about transportation policy in Virginia is being called into question. Yet, judging by the news and editorial coverage of the Mainstream Media, you’d never know an intellectual revolution was occurring.

When will those guys open their eyes?

The High School student from Waynesboro could make a t-shirt with these images of Confederate veterans and the Battle Flag.

It would be interesting to see if this is provocative speech.

Tolerance means tolerating things you don’t like seeing or hearing. It means controlling yourself. If schools can’t teach that individual self-control, then what do they teach – Nannyism?

My 4th grade teacher of Virginia history, Mrs. Scharf from NYC, didn’t have problems teaching about the complexity of issues in Virginia during the late Unpleasantness. Of course, that was in the 50s, when schooling was about education more than indoctrination.

Speaking of white elephants (see previous post about U.S. 460), the Virginia Department of Transportation has nixed the idea advanced by STAR Solutions to build an an eight-lane, border-to-border upgrade for Interstate 81 that included truck-only tolls and lanes. Instead, writes Ray Reed with the Roanoke Times:

Transportation planners said Virginia needs to move faster on I-81 by making safety improvements such as more truck-climbing lanes and longer ramps at a few interchanges.

Rail upgrades are part of the planners’ picture, too, with a study led by Norfolk Southern Corp. that could lead to government transportation dollars being used to upgrade tracks on NS’ north-south lines.

The quick fixes don’t change the need to add lanes to I-81, the transportation planners said. The highway is sure to be heavily congested by 2035, with double today’s cars and triple the number of trucks.

Three conglomerates who want to build a new, improved U.S. 460 between Petersburg and Suffolk have submitted cost estimates ranging from $1 billion to $1.5 billion — two to three times what the Virginia Department of Transportation thought it would cost. And all three companies want public money to help defray the costs, Malcolm T. Kerley, chief engineer for VDOT, told the Commonwealth Transportation board yesterday.

Writes Bill Geroux with the Times-Dispatch: “Among the questions Kerley did not answer yesterday was how much of the financial risk the companies had volunteered to bear in case the highway ran far over budget or attracted too few paying customers.

Bottom line: The project cannot pay for itself. It is not economical. One must question whether it should be built.

This is hard news in many ways. It undercuts the hopes of those (like myself) who hoped that toll-financed projects could pay for many of the transportation projects on the drawing boards.

But the news also undercuts those who would pay for such projects through taxes. The beauty of soliciting private bids is that it forces people to take a hard look at the economics of a project. In the case of U.S. 460, either the design is too expensive, or the demand for the improvements is too meager, or insufficient economic value is being created in property aligning the route. If the project can’t pay for itself… if the private sector isn’t willing to assume the risk of failure… maybe the project shouldn’t be built!

Indeed, when the private-sector proposals come in at two or three times VDOT estimates, it calls into question the cost estimates of a lot of other mega-projects. Like the $4 billion price tag on building the Rail to Dulles project — championed by Bechtel, the guys who brought the Big Dig to Boston. Is anyone believing that forecast? How much risk is Bechtel willing to assume on that project?

(The good news: It sounds like the transportation board was asking good questions: Who would assume the risk if the project tanked? Very, very good.)

Sixteen-year-old Steven McDonaldson, who attends Waynesboro High School, has been twice expelled from class and lectured by the principal — for wearing a t-shirt bearing the Confederate battle flag. As the News Virginian reports:

The school dress code prohibits clothes that “reflect adversely upon persons because of their race, sex, color, creed, national origin, or ancestry,” and administrators have deemed the controversial Civil War battle flag to fall into that category.

This is not a case, as in South Carolina or Georgia, where controversies erupted over the state-sanctioned display of the flag on state property. This is a case of an individual wearing a t-shirt in school. Leave the kid alone. He wasn’t misbehaving in any way. Isn’t it time we all stopped hyper-ventilating over this sort of thing?

As many have argued in this blog, the gas tax has its flaws as a vehicle for raising money to fund ongoing roadway maintenance and construction. The flaws will become increasingly evident as Americans shift to vehicles with better gas mileage — or to electric automobiles that don’t consume any gasoline at all. Some, including myself, have argued that Virginia should move to a system that charges automobiles on the basis of Vehicle Miles Driven: The more you drive, the more you pay.

The issue has been this: Does the technology exist to track Vehicle Miles Driven cheaply and unobtrusively? We have an answer: Almost. A Canadian company is developing technology, which it expects to roll out in a year, that will transform the way people think about transportation.

Toronto-based Applied Location Corporation was profiled by Business 2.0 magazine in a list of 11 disruptive new technologies. Founder Bern Grush has created a satellite-based system, Skymeter, for toll collection, traffic congestion management, and pay-as-you-drive insurance. Writes Business 2.0:

He says he’s created an algorithm that corrects for the noise and missed signals to which GPS is prone, especially in urban canyons, so Skymeter can reliably pinpoint a car’s location to within 1.5 meters. Once that becomes possible, cities can start to manage traffic better by charging more for driving during peak times. (London already does this, but with an expensive system of cameras.) “The problem is congestion,” Grush says. “We need to send pricing signals to motorists to drive at alternate times.”

Skymeter is disruptive more for the new economic models it might spur than for what it might displace. For instance, in addition to congestion tolls, it could be used to charge for parking anywhere in a city, even where there are no meters. Or the technology could enable insurance companies to offer better rates to safer drivers, since it records speed, time of day, and driving route. …

Grush thinks his product could ultimately help to supplement or even replace the fuel tax now used to pay for the upkeep of our roads. “The need to fix road financing and congestion is so acute,” he argues, “that a dramatic shift will necessarily occur.”

Virginia is running out of money to maintain its road network. We need to envision a future that abolishes the gasoline tax and replaces it with a tax based on Vehicle Miles Driven, adjusted perhaps for the weight of the vehicle. This tax would cover the maintenance of the road network. As maintenance costs increase (or conceivably decrease, if we outsource maintenance), the tax would adjust automatically each year.

Funds for new construction would come from tolls — ideally, tolls that varied the price according to congestion levels. With such a two-track system, Virginia could ensure that (a) all maintenance costs were covered, (b) that tolls encouraged people to drive during off-peak periods or to shift to carpooling, buses, rail or telecommuting, and (c) that the money for new construction came directly from the people who used the new facilities. We could then turn the conversation from how much money we need, and where to get it, to a more productive dialogue: how best to align our transportation systems with our human settlement patterns.

As lawmakers discuss Virginia’s transportation funding in the soon-to-convene special session, they need to be thinking about the larger context: emerging technologies and new, user-pays transportation-funding models that are sweeping the world.

The stories are flying fast and furious as the General Assembly prepares to convene again to discuss transportation. Among the more significant:

• Congestion pricing pilot project. Garren Shipley with the Northern Virginia Daily writes about a legislative package filed by Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton, to authorize a congestion-pricing pilot program. On an interstate yet to be selected, the state would set up variable, time-of-day tolls to encourage motorists to drive less during periods of peak demand. Saxman would make the scheme “revenue neutral” by eliminating the gas tax in the transportation corridor for the duration of the pilot project, and he would allow voters to determine in a referendum whether to make the tolls permanent.
• Tolls for Hampton Roads. Christina Nuckols with the Virginian-Pilot quotes House Speaker William J. Howell as saying that he supports the idea of a regional tolling authority to pay for Hampton Roads road projects. Howell predicts that the idea will pass the House.
• Pilot Pundits Wrong Again. The editorial writers at the Virginian-Pilot are back to form, distorting the transportation debate beyond recognition. “The House’s leadership,” says the Pilot, “prefers a solution that includes almost no new revenue, which makes it no solution at all.” Guys, let me explain something. Tolls = new revenue! Read your own writer’s story!

As veterans of the 2004 tax debate recall, Warner administration officials forecast that Virginia would face chronic budget deficits within a few years. Thanks to the 2004 tax increase — and economic growth — Virginia now may be facing chronic budget surpluses. The magnitude of these surpluses are obscured by the wise General Assembly practice of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in one-time investments — roads, Chesapeake Bay clean-up, mental health restructuring — instead of ramping up spending for ongoing programs. But the surplus of revenue over spending on ongoing programs continues to be large.

Now we’ve entered a new budget cycle, and once again Virginia is running ahead of forecasts. In her August report on state finances, Secretary of Finance Jody Wagner reported that General Fund revenues for July and August 2006 had increased 8.6 percent over the same period in 2005 — double the 4.2 percent increase estimated in the budget.

By way of caution, July and August are not major revenue-generating months. September, Wagner notes, will provide a more reliable indicator of where the budget is heading. However, when legislators meet in a few days for the special transportation session, July/August budget numbers are all they have to go on. Given the chronic, recurring budget surpluses that Virginia has been running since 2004, it is increasingly difficult to make the case that the state needs to raise any more taxes.

As readers of the Rebellion know, we avoid commenting upon electoral mud-slinging and the politics of personal destruction in favor of focusing on the issues. The particular issue that I want to address arises from the much-blogged flap over Sen. George Allen’s ethnic heritage. But I don’t give a hoot whether or not Allen’s grandfather was Jewish, and I’m not interested in dissecting the Senator’s reaction to what he perceived to be a hostile question from television reporter Peggy Fox. I am interested in an insinuation made by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank:

Fox’s question, while a matter of some intrigue, seemed out of place in the debate, which focused on more urgent matters such as Iraq. But Allen turned on the questioner with ferocity. He may have been irked that the question was a follow-up to one noting that “macaca” was a racial slur that his mother may have learned in Tunisia. He may have been concerned that Jewish roots wouldn’t play well in parts of Virginia. (My italics.)

Now, that’s an interesting statement. What “parts of Virginia” could Milbank be talking about? Could he be referring to Allen’s culturally conservative, red-state constituency of blue-collar bubbas? Is he insinuating here that anti-semitism is a feature of the Virginia cultural landscape? Is not the undertext of that statement that “parts of Virginia” are prejudiced against Jews? Milbanks, it seems to me, may be engaging in some stereotyping of his own.

I wonder if Mr. Milbank would like to clarify his remarks.