Bacon's Rebellion

Patricia Nicoson, president of the Dulles Corridor Rail Association, puts an optimistic spin on the recent decision by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to pursue the “aerial” option rather than the “tunnel” option for the METRO rail extension through Tysons Corner. Many advocates of the project were dismayed by the decision because running the rail above ground would disrupt connectivity between destinations, making it all the more difficult to redevelop Tysons along the lines of a pedestrian-friendly business district.

In a column in the Reston Observer, Nicoson writes, running the rail line above ground provides a “challenge and an opportunity” to produce “memorable building designs serving as landmarks within Tysons Corner…. Thoughtful design and use of air rights could create a unique urban form at the four stations in Tysons, creating a sense of place missing today.”

A rail line hoisted on pylons need not necessarily interfere with the creation of a walkable street grid or “a public realm of plazas, parks, paths and open spaces.” As Tysons redevelops, she suggests, connectivity can be provided by means of pedestrian bridges.

As a bonus, Nicoson suggests, an elevated METRO line will create a better experience for passengers looking out the window. “An elevated line provides the opportunity to view Tysons as one travels through it, which ought to be an enjoyable experience for riders. … Many are likely to prefer an above-ground experience of rail to descending 80 or more feet below ground in a high-speed elevator to a train station in a tunnel.”

I can’t blame Nicoson for putting the best face on an unfortunate decision, which Gov. Kaine was forced to make or run the risk of losing federal funding for the project. But I’m not sure I’m buying it. As the saying goes, “Puttin’ lipstick on a hog don’t make it purdy.”

Note: See Ed Risse’s response by clicking on “comments.”

The price of gasoline, which hovered above $3 per gallon not long ago, has dipped beneath $2 a gallon at an Exxon gas station in Gainesville, the Washington Post has reported. The relief from high prices is certainly welcome. But no one should be deceived that the era of cheap gasoline is returning for any length of time.

One of the reasons that gas prices soared so high is that uncertainty over petroleum supplies prompted businesses up and down the global supply chain to hold higher inventories. As fears of supply disruptions subsided, businesses have lowered their inventories, creating a temporary glut on the market. By all means, let’s enjoy the respite while it lasts. And let us hope that it takes a year or two before prices return to $3 per barrel.

But the fundamentals remain intact: Global petroleum consumption, led by China, India and the United States, continues to climb. Global petroleum supplies have peaked. Old, cheap oil is being depleted, and it’s being replaced by new, expensive oil. The recent discovery of a new oil basin in the Gulf of Mexico won’t change anything. The oil find will take years to exploit and, because the oil resides in very deep water, it also will be very expensive to extract.

Virginia still needs to prepare for an expensive-energy future. That means embracing new forms of energy, and it means conservation. To be meaningful, conservation must entail more than installing energy-efficient light bulbs. We need to evolve towards a more energy-efficient transportation system and human settlement patterns.

Today’s Daily Press editorial (‘Going Somewhere? Transportation progresss requires action, not more roadblocks’, Sep 18, 2006) cites Bacon’s Rebellion as an ‘asphalt adverse Internet blogger’.
Their story about Republican delegates Glenn Oder, Terrie Suit and Sal Iaquinto supporting Republican delegate Chris Jones’ unelected, unaccountable, tax-and-spend Regional Government solution for Hampton Roads leaves out the part about the unelected, unaccountble, tax-and-spend Regional Government and the new, additional sales tax they will impose for perpetuity.

This is the same government the Hampton Roads voters rejected soundly in ’98 and crushingly in ’02. Suit, Oder, and Jones supported the ’02 Sales Tax Transportation Scam. Apparently, their Republican committees and voters are docile or uninformed.

They will stay uninformed, because the DP doesn’t tell the whole story on Jones’ plan. The Regional Government with taxing authority isn’t needed to just collect tolls. Many Republicans will support user fees – tolls – but not the unaccountable. No elected officials will review their policies or spending or be able to fire their board.

The newspaper doesn’t ask, because it isn’t interested, how much the politicians on the new Regional Government will be paid. How big will the staff be? What will they be paid? What will they do besides collect the additional sales tax? And on and on. It is a jobs program for politicians and friends of politicians. It is the biggest invitation to corruption – the Regional Government will have billions in revenue – that I’ve seen in Virginia.

The bid, if I got it right, is $375m a year for Hampton Roads to get a Third Crossing and pour the concrete for other projects that will result in more congested miles 20 years from now (the ’02 study said) than today. That money can be assured annually in user fees and from tax revenue (up to a $72b budget now) pouring into Virginia’s coffers now.

A Regional Government isn’t needed to make this happen.

Maybe a 10% tax on newspapers would help.

The American Dream Coalition, a think tank funded by Dulles-area developer Chris Walker, has published a paper, “The Planning Penalty: How Smart Growth Makes Housing Unaffordable.”

The starting premise of this report is that the price of the house pictured above can vary region by region by as much as a factor of eight. The four-bedroom home, which sold for $150,000 in Houston recently, would cost as much as $300,000 in Portland, Ore., $600,000 in Boulder, Colo., and $1.2 million in San Jose. Some of that difference can be accounted for by demand — some localities are simply more desirable places to live. But most of the difference, argues the report, can be explained by restrictions on housing supply associated with “growth management.”

What author Randal O’Toole calls the “planning penalty” can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars per dwelling. Writes O’Toole: “Between 1999 and 2005, regions with growth-management planning saw prices grow by 4 to 11 percent per year, while regions without such planning saw prices grow at only 1 to 3 percent per year.”

Northern Virginia and increasingly Hampton Roads, it seems, have devised the worst of both worlds. Segregation of land uses, low densities and beggar-thy-neighbor planning by local governments has created both high-cost housing and traffic congestion. Congratulations, guys!

The solution is not giving more power to local governments. It is not social engineering. What we need is a market-based solution that honors consumer sovereignty — homeowners would be free to live where they want and in the kinds of community they want — with the proviso that people pay the locational costs associated with their choices.

The challenge for Virginia is to revamp funding mechanisms for roads, utilities and public services in order to create a locationally level playing field, and to give developers more freedom to innovate new types of communities that address housing affordability and traffic congestion in creative ways. Rather than micro-manage growth, planners should define the “Balanced Communities” and “Clear Edges” (see Ed Risse’s writings for details), which provide the broad parameters within which free markets would function.

The Victoria Transport Policy Institute has published a report, “Smart Transportation Investments: Reevaluating the Role of Highway Expansion for Improving Transportation.” This study argues that investment in urban highway capacity suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Early investments generated a high return on investment. But comparable investments today will generate a much lower rate of return.

The paper summarizes the issues thusly:

• “The first highway projects are generally the most cost effective because planners are smart enough to prioritize investments. For example, if there are several possible highway alignments on a corridor, those with the greatest benefits and lowest costs are generally built first, leaving less cost effective options for subsequent implementation.
• “Interregional highways (those connecting cities) are generally constructed first. They tend to provide greater economic benefits and have lower unit costs than local highway expansion, due to numerous conflicts and high land costs in urban areas.
• “Adding capacity tends to provide declining user benefits, since consumers are smart enough to prioritize trips. For example, if highways are congested, consumers organize their lives to avoid peak automobile period trips. As highway capacity increases, they travel more during peak periods, perhaps driving across town during rush hour for an errand that would be deferred, or moving further away from their worksite. Each additional vehicle mile provides smaller user benefits, since the most valued vehicle-miles are already taken.”

The chart at the top of the post shows the declining rate of return on dollars invested in highways. As recently as the 1970s, public investment in highways generated higher returns than did private capital. By the 1990s, however, the return on highway investment trailed the return on private investment, representing a loss of economic efficiency.

That’s not to say that carefully selected individual highway improvements won’t be economically efficient. But any large-scale plan by a state, city or region to build its way out of traffic congestion is likely to be very inefficient.

A quick note about Bacon’s Rebellion‘s endorsement policies: We don’t endorse political candidates and we don’t endorse political parties. Contributing bloggers are, of course, free to vote for and endorse anyone they like on their own websites — and they do. But this blog eschews partisan politics. We focus on state and local issues, most of which transcend party lines.

If you want the latest tit-for-tat in the Allen-Web race for U.S. Senate, there are many excellent websites to consult on both sides. Virginia is blessed with an incredibly vibrant blogosphere.

Patrick Michaels, Virginia’s state climatologist, is not alone in questioning global warming hysteria. He has allies among other state climatologists in departing from the putative “consensus” among climatologists regarding the severity and urgency of the global warming crisis. Now, according to the Washington Post, the “irregular system” of state-supported offices of climatologists is coming under criticism. Writes the Post:

A root of the conflict is that, although state climatologists and atmospheric scientists study “climate,” they can attack the same problems very differently. State climatologists often are trained to rely on past weather data — records that show how much the Earth has already warmed.

State climatologists’ critics in the scientific community study much broader periods and use computer models to determine how much warmer the Earth will become if pollution isn’t curtailed. The view of critics often is simple: State climatologists are behind the times.

Ah, that’s it. The state climatologists are rustic simpletons who can’t keep up with the times. Rubes that they are, they deal with real-world data rather than computer models that often fail to replicate that data when projected backwards in time. Although the Post article was generally fair toward Michaels, the authors left out what is perhaps his most controversial argument of all: how the political economy of global warming distorts the science of global warming.

Critics have sought to delegitimize Michaels’ scientific arguments by pointing to the fact that he has obtained some of his funding from the fossil fuel industry, presumably biasing his findings. But that argument cuts two ways.

As Michaels argues in his book, “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media,” most climatologists in the United States get their research funding from the federal government. In an environment in which the mass media fan the flames of hysteria — systematically hyping evidence that supports the global warming paradigm and ignoring the evidence that doesn’t (a phenomenon that Michaels documents copiously) — and in which politicians respond to public opinion informed by that bias, the only scientists who will get federal funding are those who tout the party line. Professional advancement follows funding. To win big federal grants, win tenure and rise in the academic establishment, aspiring professors must support the tenets of the prevailing paradigm. To go against the tide of global warming is to court professional suicide.

State climatology departments are independent — their funding comes from states, not the federal government. State climatologists don’t court professional suicide by speaking truth to power. Little wonder that state climatologists have been among the more outspoken critics of global warming hysteria. How ironic: Those who point to a supposed scientific “consensus” in regard to global warming enforce that consensus by stigmatizing and driving out through political means those who do not conform to that consensus!

(For the record, I believe that global warming is a real phenomenon, but it is far from clear how much is due to human causes and how much the consequences are to be feared. There are many other environmental threats — deforestatation, erosion, loss of habitat, and pollution as traditionally understood — where we should be focusing our attention.)

Talk show host Rosie O’Donnell may think that “radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have separation of church and state.” But one indisputable difference should give her pause: When offended by blaspemy, radical Christians don’t riot and kill the people who offend them.

UVa’s student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, caused a flap recently when it printed a cartoon depicting “Christ on a Cartesian Coordinate Plane,” with Jesus crucified on the X and Y axes of a mathematical grid, and another, “A Nativity Ob-scene,” in which the Virgin Mary tells Joseph that her bumpy rash was “immaculately transmitted.” So reports the Charlottesville Daily Press.

When Christians get in an uproar, they write letters and call into talk radio. Conservative Fox News Bill O’Reilly termed the cartoons “an unbelievable assault on Christianity” and urged UVa alumni not to donate to the school until the newspaper is “forced off campus.” Ooooh, how horrible! But please note: There were no riots, no lynchings, no acts of arson. No repressive legislation was passed, no one was fired, no one got punished. (For the record: The CD did pull the cartoons.)

In America, gays can’t get married. In Iran, they get executed. But radical Christians and Islamicists are equally dangerous. What kind of bizarro world does O’Donnell live in?

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has finally announced his appointments for Commonwealth Transportation Board seats that expired June. Two of the five appointments are reappointments: Mary Lee Carter, a former chair of the Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisors, and John J. “Butch” Davies, a Culpeper attorney and former member of the House of Delegates.

Bringing new perspectives are:

• E. Dana Dickens III, of Suffolk, vice chairman of the Suffolk Planning Commission and CEO of the Hampton Roads Partnership.
• Peter B. Schwartz, of Delaplane, a former commercial real estate developer and now vice chair of the Piedmont Environmental Council.
• Cord A. Sterling, of Stafford, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association and former legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Warner, responsible for advising key issues such as military construction projects and Base Realignment and Closure .

Kaine is to be credited for appointing three new individuals who bring strong areas of expertise and a variety of new perspectives to the CTB. Here’s how the Governor is spinning the appointments:

These public servants demonstrate our Administration’s continued commitment to innovation and reform that will help us maintain Virginia’s reputation as a national leader,” Governor Kaine said. “With the addition of VDOT Commissioner David Ekern, we are assembling a team of individuals who share practical, front-line experience in the critical linkage between local land use decisions and state transportation planning.

My gut reaction: If Kaine wanted a true change of thinking on the board, he would have selected five new appointees, not three. Of the three newbies, only Schwartz is likely to challenge Business As Usual head-on. (I say that based only on the formal credentials of the appointees. I know nothing about their personal philosophies, and am willing to stand corrected.)

Based on the contents of the press release, I see this as a cautious step in the right direction, not a dramatic departure from the old way of doing things. Can anyone else lend any insight?

Business and political elites in Virginia are far more agitated about traffic congestion than average voters are, and they are far more willing to pay higher taxes to address it. Why is that? This chart, excerpted from “Smart Transportation Investments,” published by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, provides important clues why.

This chart compares various costs, both personal and societal, of automobile travel. The report doesn’t say where this data comes from, so I don’t know how valid it is, but the larger point seems unassailable: Traffic congestion is a relatively small component of the total cost structure associated with automobile travel. When you compare the value of time, gasoline and engine wear-tear associated with congestion to the cost of buying a car, maintaining it, and paying for gasoline, insurance, crash damages and parking, congestion costs are almost trivial.

Of course, the chart provides average numbers. Congestion costs in places like Northern Virginia are significantly more acute than they are in, say, Roanoke. But even in Northern Virginia, the elites tend to be more upset than the Average Joe. Why is that?

Because the elites, by definition, have higher incomes and have more disposable income. They also tend to work harder, longer hours and place a higher value on their time. The Average Joe earning $25,000 to $50,000 a year has less money to spare to pay higher taxes but more spare time. While a member of the business/political elite might value his/her time at $100 to $200 per hour, Average Joe might value his time at $10 to $20 per hour. As a percentage of the total cost of car ownership/operation, the cost of congestion simply doesn’t loom as large for the little guy. But the cost of taxes does loom large because the little guy tends to be hard-pressed financially and less discretionary income to part with.

In sum, the little guy doesn’t like stewing in congestion. But he is more more likely to prefer paying the costs of congestion with his time rather than his taxes.

Of course, business elites are better organized than Average Joe — witness their recent proclamation in Northern Virginia in favor of more taxes for transportation — more vocal, more articulate and have more access to power. The voices of the elites carry much farther in Virginia’s political process than the voices of the little guys.

(Hat tip to Ray Hyde for bringing the VTPF study to my attention. Ray bears no responsibility whatsoever for the conclusions I have drawn in this post. But there’s more in the study to blog about, and I will make more posts in the future.)

Greg Pearson is the publisher and editor of the Chesterfield Observer.

Regarding the News Council blog, my differences with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, WWBT or any other daily media does not concern their size. The issue is simply accurate and fair reporting. All of the media, regardless of size, need to be monitored, including the Chesterfield Observer. A News Council concept would allow a citizen, business, government, or group to access a venue for redressing poor reporting wherever it occurs locally. Saying “Pearson is not a big fan of Media General or many media conglomerates” is not really correct. There is a need for big media. Most of the good reporting done in the Richmond metro is written by RTD reporters. To cover some stories, you have to have the resources, and that means adequate staffing. Six months ago, I said so at an RTD public forum.

The blog seems to imply that I’ve been a defender of the county (as in “to chastise the larger news outlets for what he considers to be shabby treatment of Chesterfield.”) Actually, I consider myself to be informed about the county, and therefore, I’m writing about subjects that I believe I have sufficient knowledge to comment on. Finally, to date, there has never been an editorial in the Chesterfield Observer that has criticized any media. Criticisms of the media have only been written in the “Media Watch” column.

– Greg

The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority has released its $46.6 billion transportation plan, TransAction 2030 (See the April preliminary report), and the Coalition for Smarter Growth is quick with a response.

Executive Director Stewart Schwartz praised the Authority for “developing the first set of evaluation measures and for prioritizing projects based upon those measures,” but expressed concern that the plan kept “sprawl-inducing outer beltways on the map” that would have the effect of fueling development speculation, which in turn would create even more transportation challenges.

Schwartz reiterated the familiar position that transportation cannot be considered in isolation from land use, and suggested that the following land-use measures should guide transportation investment:

• Providing significantly more residential housing in a redesigned, and more pedestrian-friendly Tysons Corner would offer the opportunity for many more people to live close to work, to walk and to take transit.
• Designing suburban communities with enough local street connections so that not every trip has to travel on a single arterial road.
• Designing suburban neighborhoods so that many daily needs, including schools, libraries, day care and stores, can be reached in less than a 15-minute walk or a very short car trip.
• Focusing corporate offices within walking distance to transit stations to maximize the number of commuters that use the transit system to get to
  work.
• Converting large areas of strip-shopping centers into a pedestrian-friendly main street with other local street connections would reduce driving on traffic-choked corridors.

Pithy Schwartz quote: “We must target limited transportation funds to support reduction in driving demand, in energy consumption, and in overall infrastructure needs.”

In the comments section of one of our posts, someone asked whether former VDOT Commissioner Philip Shucet ever espoused any transportation reform other than raising taxes for more road projects. I alluded to a letter he had written to the General Assembly last October in which he recommended 10 reforms. I provide a copy of that letter now.

The General Assembly embraced the idea of adopting more design/build contracts in the 2006 session, and the Kaine administration has moved on “telecommuting” and developing “access managment plans” for major thoroughfares.

It’s illegal to discriminate against minorities in U.S. housing markets. It’s illegal to discriminate against old people. It’s illegal (I think) to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation. But it’s OK to discriminate against families with children. Indeed, it’s perfectly acceptable for local governments to institutionalize that discrimination with their zoning codes.

A case in point comes from Goochland County. This comes from the Goochland Courier:

COURTHOUSE VILLAGE — Not that long ago, when developers’ representatives presented residential rezoning applications, they told the Goochland County Planning Commission and the board of supervisors that the homes their clients planned to build would sell for more than $400,000. People who buy homes in that price range, they contended, rarely sent their children to county schools.

The problem, according to the Courier, is that things have changed. Houses in that price range are being purchased by families with children — and Goochland schools are coping with higher-than-expected enrollments.

Hmmm. Maybe Goochland supervisors can solve the problem by permitting only houses that cost $1 million or more.

When rolling out his legislative package for transportation reform, House Speaker William J. Howell criticized the Virginia Department of Transportation’s performance in negotiating new public-private partnerships. As the Speaker said in his prepared statement:

We will never effectively and affordably address this challenge without incorporating the lessons of the private sector, harnessing the power and creativity of the free enterprise system, and enlisting [it] in this process. Our plan, therefore, includes requiring that the VDOT Commissioner provide a detailed plan to increase the role of the private sector in meeting our Commonwealth’s transportation needs.

Despite Virginia’s pioneering Public-Private Transportation Act of 1995 having been in effect for more than a decade, the Commonwealth lags behind other states in utilizing these cost- and time-saving opportunities.

I’m not sure what Howell is basing his criticism on. In his press release, he said, “VDOT has taken too passive of a role in expanding private-sector involvement in public infrastructure, simply waiting for proposals to be submitted to them instead of soliciting private sector expertise to solve identified and prioritized transportation problems.” (My italics.)

I don’t speak with any authority whatsoever, but it was my impression that Secretary of Transportation Pierce Homer, during his less-than-two-year tenure in the Warner and Kaine administrations, had acted more aggressively than any of his predecessors to solicit deals from the private sector. He has solicited private-sector bids to upgrade Interstate 95, the Washington Beltway and, most recently, U.S. 460. That’s over and above proposals for Interstate 81 and the Rail-to-Dulles project, which originated before he took the helm.

Perhaps that’s just not aggressive enough for the Speaker. Perhaps Virginia needs to move even faster. Fair enough. I’m all in favor of public-private partnerships as long as they are structured so that those who pay for the transportation improvements are the ones who benefit from them…. and as long as they support functional land use patterns.

I don’t like the structure of the Rail-to-Dulles project, which would transfer billions of dollars of wealth from toll-paying commuters on the Dulles Toll Road to landowners who own property near planned METRO stops. I do like plans for the Interstate 95 HOT lanes, which would be paid for by tolls from those who used the HOT lanes.

Action plan. Speaker Howell wants to create “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.” As he explains, “This reform will require VDOT to become more pro-active in identifying opportunities for private sector involvement.”

Privatization has many advantages. The private sector is far more likely than even a reformed VDOT to complete road construction on budget and on time. Private sector involvement increases the odds that only economically viable projects are built — at least when investors put their own capital at risk. The private sector also is more likely to introduce technological, financial and managerial innovations.

Caveats. But simply privatizing a project doesn’t necessarily make it a good project. For instance, in the case of the U.S. 460 corridor (“The U.S. 460 Project Ain’t Peanuts“):

• Would a toll road accelerate the pace of dysfunctional human settlement patterns (scattered, disconnected, low density) out of Hampton Roads? What strains would such development place on the local secondary road network?
• What would a toll road do to the mobility of the people who live in the tiny towns — Wakefield, Zuni, Windsor, etc.) who rely upon U.S. 460 as their major thoroughfare?
• Has anyone examined a public-private partnership that would increase freight rail capacity out of Portsmouth?

Privatization is a big part of transportation reform. But only a part. More roads, even privatized roads, won’t do much good if they aren’t analyzed in the context of the transportation system as a whole and the human settlement patterns they are designed to serve.