Bacon's Rebellion

In today’s WaPo Page A 3: “Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says: Researcher Cite Drop in the Average Number of Confidants as an Indicator.” The story reports on the General Social Survey funded by the National Science Foundation being published today. The conclusions receive “I-told-you-so’s” from the likes of Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”) and others.

With those billions of cell phone calls occupying what seem to be everyone’s ear and attention how can there be growing isolation? Is this another failure of IT to overcome the impact of dysfunctional human settlement patterns?

Dysfunctional (disaggregated, scattered, unconnected) human settlement patterns (sometimes called “urban sprawl”) cause social isolation? Who would have thought it?

Anyone who has been reading Bacons Rebellion. For details see the social chapters of “The Shape of the Future.” (Chapters 8 and 9.)

EMR

Hampton Roads Transit has invested $8 million in equipping its buses with Global Positioning System locators, upgrading bus communications and installing signs at some bus stops to tell passengers when the next bus is due. Reports the Virginian-Pilot: “Through GPS, Hampton Roads Transit will know the location of all 250 buses at all times. HRT says it will allow the agency to reduce delays and tell customers at stops just how long they have to wait.”

People hating waiting for late buses, not knowing when they’ll arrive, not knowing if they’ll be late to their destination. In theory, predictability is key to inducing people to rely upon mass transit for transportation. It will be interesting to track what effect these investments have on ridership.

The Virginia Department of Transportation is ceding responsibility for maintaining roads in the City of Suffolk — and turning over $4 million a quarter to pay for it.

I cannot comment upon the significance of this development, as the Virginian-Pilot article describes the turn-over without explaining why it is happening. But the shift does seem to be consistent with a devolution of responsibility for local roads from VDOT to local governments that is taking place in other localities across the Commonwealth. The key points in the agreement, according to the Pilot:

– The city will begin handling all permitting and licensing procedures that were previously handled by VDOT, such a reviewing subdivision street plans and overweight-hauling approvals.

– The city will handle all grass, ditch and stormwater issues. The city has contracted with a private company to handle mowing along all the city’s primary roadways, beginning July 1.

– VDOT will allocate urban-construction funds to the city based on population. That agency will continue to oversee all new construction, although the city can request to handle special projects, Nielsen said.

– VDOT will retain all ownership for the portions of Interstate 664 and Route 164 in Suffolk. Also, the truck scales on U.S. 58 will remain state property.

This chart, prepared by reader/blogger Jim Patrick, breaks down high school graduation rates in Virginia by demographic category, making several points more forcefully than I managed to do in my recent post, “Grievance Mongers Strike Again.”

The good news: Virginia seems to be doing something right — H.S. graduation rates are higher across the board in Virginia than they are nationally. (Hopefully, the difference reflects reality, not just different definitions of “drop out” or different methodologies for calculating the rate.)

Especially encouraging is the fact that blacks in Virginia are graduating at a significantly higher rate than elsewhere in the country. Much work remains to be done, of course. The key is figuring out what needs to be done. Is throwing more money at schools the answer? I’m skeptical.

The bad news: Take note of the disparity in graduation rates between males and females, which exists among both blacks and whites. It is tempting to accuse Virginia’s school systems of bias and discrimination, of favoring girls over boys. Such a ploy would turn the Conventional Wisdom of the grievance lobbies and the Mainstream Media — the notion that American institutions systematically discriminate against girls and women — on its head. It’s tempting, but I won’t take the cheap shot.

The numbers do, in fact, reveal a problem, although it’s not clear whether the problem resides in the schools or in the way we raise little boys. Perhaps it’s both. One possible explanation has gotten insufficient attention: The epidemic of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder among boys. The problem barely existed 50 years ago, which suggests that the epidemic is a cultural phenomenon. But that’s a topic for another post.

In an example of the kinds of land use-impacting decisions that the Commonwealth Transportation Board makes (see previous post for context), the CTB has voted to approve the controversial Battlefield Bypass around Manassas National Battlefield Park. Reports the Times Community Newspapers:

The purpose of the bypass is to reroute traffic around the battlefield. Route 234 and U.S. 29 are now so jammed that visitors have a hard time getting around the park; area residents have an even harder time getting to work. In 1988, Congress ordered the National Park Service to start considering whether it is feasible to close both roads inside the battlefield and reroute traffic onto a beltway instead.

Hundreds of residents have turned out to oppose the route, which they fear will open up development in the county’s Rural Crescent. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has made it clear that he wants to curtail development in areas where the transportation system is inadequate to support it. But does he want to halt the practice of opening up new countryside for development when there is plenty of land closer to the urban core that could be re-developed more efficiently? We don’t know the answer to that question.

Right now, Kaine could plausibly disown the CBT’s Battlefield Bypass decision (if he wanted to) because other governors appointed most of the board members. After June 30, when the terms of five board members, it will be more difficult to disassociate himself from board actions.

As a footnote: The CBT didn’t grant any money for the project, so the road will remain “little more than a line on a map,” writes reporter Tara Slate Donaldson, “unless Congress opts to donate federal funds for construction.”

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has the opportunity at the end of this month to advance his agenda to link transportation and land use planning. The terms of five of the 17 members of the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CBT) expire June 30. Kaine’s choices on whom to appoint, or reappoint, will speak more loudly than any speechifying about how serious he is about addressing the disconnect between Virginia’s transportation system and its human settlement patterns.

Unlike most boards and commission in Virginia, the CBT has real power: It allocates highway funding to specific projects, locates routes and provides funding for airports, seaports and public transportation. It also sets administrative policies for the state transportation system. If Kaine wants to change the way the system works, the CBT is an important place to start.

Unlike Kaine’s failed effort to raise transportation taxes, independent columnist Robert Legge recently observed in the Culpeper Star-Exponent, Kaine doesn’t need General Assembly approval to change course at the CBT. Writes Legge: “He has sole authority over appointments of the members of the CTB. It would follow that he would appoint people who share his view that development worsens traffic congestion.”

Three of the five board members up for reappointment are partners in law firms that assist land developers, Legge observed. A fourth, Helen Dragas of Virginia Beach, is CEO of The Dragas Companies, “a large concern that deals in condos, apartment management, office parks and residential mortgages. Last year, VDOT Commissioner Philip Shucet left VDOT to become president of her firm.”

Links to the real estate sector should not disqualify someone from serving on the board. After all, developers and real estate attorneys have a first-hand understanding of how transportation and real estate interact. But Kaine should take special pains to ensure that whomever he appoints, or reappoints, will not defend Business As Usual. It is imperative that CBT board members share his conviction that Virginia needs to think very differently about transportation policy.

Rarely have I seen a public official hit so many of the right notes regarding transportation in such a short space. In an e-mail summarizing the General Assembly’s budgetary accomplishments, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling says the following:

While I fully support efforts to make a significant ongoing investment in transportation, I remained convinced that we can do this without raising taxes. With Virginia’s economy continuing to grow at a very rapid rate, we can increase funding for transportation without raising taxes if we are prepared to direct our resources to our highest priorities.

There may be other acceptable ways to provide additional funding for critical transportation projects, such as the use of tolls to help pay for projects that are constructed through the Public Private Transportation Act. However, I do not see any appetite at the legislative level for higher taxes.

As the debate over building a transportation system for the 21st century continues, we must also remember two other important areas – improving efficiency within the Virginia Department of Transportation and doing a better job linking land use planning and transportation planning at the local level.

This doesn’t cover every Bacon’s Rebellion priority — fundamental land use reform requires more than “linking” land use and transportation planning — but it’s about as good as it gets from an elected official. No new taxes (at least not now)… a user-pays system (tolls) for financing major new construction… improving efficiency at VDOT… and linking land use and transportation planning…

It’s a start.

The Roanoke Times editorial page has consistently supported Business As Usual transportation policies of tax-build, tax-build. I once deemed its writers impervious to logic. But now Dan Radmacher has proven me wrong. Dan hasn’t totally embraced the side of goodness and light, but at least he has glimpsed it. Indeed, he has demonstrated that he understands the arguments we have been making, even if, in the final analysis, he gives other considerations greater weight.

In a column published this morning, “What If We’re Having the Wrong Transportation Debate?,” Dan does a good job of summarizing the thrust of the arguments I’ve been making in Bacon’s Rebellion. He even agrees that my arguments have merit and should be part of the mix of any long-term solution to Virginia’s transportation problems.

Thank you, Dan, you are a gentleman and a scholar.

Here’s where he parts company. “If the state has been building an autocentric infrastructure for the last 50 years,” he asks, “how long will it take to replace and rebuild that infrastructure into something more suited for the expensive-energy world of tomorrow? Finally, what do we do in the meantime?”

Legitimate questions. If other proponents of raising taxes and adding more transportation capacity framed the issue this way, I would have much more respect for their arguments. Here’s how I would respond to Dan’s question.

First, it won’t take 50 years of building functional human settlement patterns to ameliorate traffic congestion. New projects with the right balance of housing/jobs/retail/amenities, set in the right location, and utilizing the right type of urban design, can transform transportation-inefficient neighborhoods into transportation-efficient neighborhoods and take cars off roads as soon as they’re built. So what if it takes 50 years to reap 100 percent of the benefit? In five years, we can reap 10 percent of the benefit — and that’s enough to cut significantly into projected travel demand.

Second, there are strategies that will allow us to cope until the fundamental land use reforms take hold on a widespread scale: using tolls to finance new construction, embracing telework, liberating mass transit from innovation-stifling government monopolies, adopting congestion tolls to encourage people to seek transportation alternatives like carpooling, investing in corridor management and Intelligent Transportation Systems. None of these alternative strategies will take “decades” to put into place or to make a difference.

At some point, Virginia will have to raise its gasoline tax in order to fund the rising cost of road maintenance. But not yet. There is plenty of inefficiency to be wrung out of VDOT’s maintenance spending by implementing asset-based management tools and outsourcing maintenance to the private sector. Only when those efficiencies have been exhausted should we consider raising the gasoline tax.

Thanks for asking.

Minorities are falling behind — we need more money for schools. That’s the predictable thrust of the Associated Press story based on a study by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.

About three-quarters of Virginia’s public high school students graduate in four years, but there are large disparities between black and white students’ rates, according to a report released Tuesday by an education research group.

There were large gaps between white and black Virginians, with 77.8 percent of whites graduating, compared to 64.1 percent of black students. Black male students had the lowest graduation rate at 57.6 percent….

“The bigger story behind the numbers is that there are huge inequalities in terms of underfunding of local school systems across Virginia,” said Andy Block, legal director of advocacy group JustChildren.

When it comes to race relations, you can always count on the Mainstream Media to emphasize the negative, to reinforce the stereotype of African-Americans as victims, and to uncritically shill for any advocacy group crying for more money for schools.

Here are some perspectives that the research group and the AP writer chose not to take:

• Graduation rates in Virginia are higher for both whites (77.8 percent in Virginia vs. 76.2 percent nationally) and for blacks (64.1 percent in Virginia vs. 51.6 percent nationally). Elementary arithmetic reveals the astounding conclusion that the graduation rate for whites exceeds the national average by only 1.6 percentage points, while the graduation rate for blacks exceeds the national average by 12.5 percentage points — surely an indication that Virginia is doing something better than the rest of the nation when it comes to educating blacks!
• If the graduation rate for black males is 57.6 percent, and the average for all blacks is 64.1 percent, that implies that the graduation rate for black females is about 70 percent, very close to the state average for whites — a fact that the AP story neglects to mention.
• If there is a 12-13 percentage point discrepency in the graduation rate between black males and females, are we to assume that black males are uniquely disadvantaged? Or is there a factor within black culture — not necessarily school funding — that explains the difference?
• For that matter, is there a discrepency between white male and female graduation rates? There almost assuredly is. Does that mean white males are disadvantaged somehow? Is it possible that all males, whether white or black, are disadvantaged by the pedagogy of contemporary schools systems?

Finally, when we’re looking for solutions to drop-outs, I would suggest that the problem is not necessarily mo’ money. I would refer readers to a soon-to-be-published column in Bacon’s Rebellion, “Want Students to Go to School? How About Enforcing Truancy Laws?” by John Butcher. (This was scheduled for publication in the current edition of Bacon’s Rebellion but was omitted through an oversight. I’ll publish it in the next edition.)

I love my alma mater, the University of Virginia, and I love pedestrian-friendly environments, but this strikes me as a trifle excessive: $2 million from the 2007 Transportation, Treasury and Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Bill to pay for a pedestrian crossing over Jefferson Park Avenue as part of the South Lawn project.

According to University of Virginia News, the crossing will link Jefferson’s historical “academical village” on the north side of the busy road with new classrooms and offices to the south.

C’mon — $2 million for a pedesterian bridge? What are they going to do — build the thing with Italian marble? This could be a case study, I’d bet, in how federal rules and requirements drive up the cost of the simplest of construction projects.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has signed House Bill 761, legislation that will allow small businesses — those under 50 employees — to form health-insurance buying cooperatives. States a press release issued by the Governor’s office:

The legislation is consistent with other federal and state statutes related to small group market issues. It allows businesses to have flexibility in how they form purchasing pools, either by establishing one person or entity to be responsible for collection and payment of premiums, or by allowing each company to take responsibility for its own policy. The savings potential of this health insurance pooling depends on the size, composition and administration of the pool.

Gov. Kaine has pushed for legislation like this for a long time, and anything that makes it easier for small businesses to provide medical insurance for their employees is a positive step. I’m skeptical, however, that this measure, by itself, will have a big impact on the healthcare marketplace because, as I read the bill summary, it does nothing to exempt these insurance pools from mandated insurance coverage.

In Virginia insurance plans are required to include every conceivable health care profession and medical procedure, making it impossible for businesses to offer affordable, bare-bones insurance coverage. If you’re a contractor or shop owner, you don’t have the luxury of offering a stripped down Jeep Cherokee to your employees — you can only offer the model with leather seats, tinted windows, racing strips, surround-sound speakers and the rest of the luxury package. Not everyone can afford it.

HB 761 is a part of the solution to Virginia’s health care crisis — but only part.

A good number of bloggers have already provide ample overviews of the Sorensen affair, thus I will only add some key takeaways that continue to resonate with me. First, Michael Shear made strong arguments for why the vast majority of bloggers are not journalists in the classic sense, and Bob Gibson and others reinforced these points in their comments and in subsequent chats. The significant points of departure revolved around blogging’s lack of self-policing with no widely accepted codes of conduct and ethics – and the dearth of editorial and institutional oversight or structure that is typical of most MSM endeavors. This blog, for one, has proposed some voluntary blogging standards of practice, and in light of what was discussed at Sorensen, I would offer that this idea is worth revisiting.

Reflecting on this, it seems that the real issue at hand is not whether blogging is or is not journalism but whether bloggers who are not reporters can be considered journalists on par with opinion writers and analysts. Seeing as how journalism is a broad field, and given the prevalence of “advocacy journalism” with the likes of The Economist, New Republic, Weekly Standard, and most op/ed pages, the disconnect seems to revolve around the absence of editors. In the end, that’s more of a market innovation issue rather than a fundamental flaw of the blogging medium. In the end, those of us who aspire to raise our craft and produce MSM-quality work should not look to reporters like Mike as our standard, but rather to leading local, state, and federal opinion writers (unless we can play both sides of the fence like Norm’s penpal, Jeff Schapiro). We can also look at local newsweeklies and alternative newspapers which tend to relax traditional notions of objectivity.

Second, Gordon Morse excoriated bloggers for shying away from covering and investigating public policy issues. He correctly noted that most political bloggers prefer the daily soap opera of politicking to discussions of critical issues of importance such as healthcare, public finance, education, and the like. In Virginia, the policy implications of legislative and bureaucratic actions are mostly left off the table of the blogosphere, despite going mostly untouched by the MSM. Waldo’s General Assembly blogging and most of Bacon’s Rebellion are notable exceptions, but for the most part, Morse’s observations hold.

Third, bloggers better mind the store when it comes to campaign finance and election laws. One of the more fascinating tidbits that came out of the session on campaign finance (aside from the notes that my buddy Steven Sisson kept passing me) was that MSM institutions are mostly exempt from these laws due the press exception established by courts and legislatures. So far, the legislative and judicial branches have gradually granted status to bloggers, yet they have not delved as deeply into a universal standard of blogging as a MSM equivalent. However, some groups are pushing that envelope fast at the state and federal levels.

It stands to reason that since blogging is a communication medium, is an outlet for public service, and as bloggers are essentially “embedded citizen journalists” (not my creation), we should take steps to build an infrastructure for our own protection. Whether it is incorporating our blogs as businesses or non-profits, joining relevant associations, or banding together to create our own version of the Virginia Press Association, we would all be wise to pre-empt the courts and the legislatures just to be safe.

It will be interesting to compare and contrast the topics covered at the Sorensen Summit with those being developed for the “Bloggers United in Martinsville for free Speech” confab in August. Two months is practically an eternity in the blogosphere, and we will see if any of the lessons learned in Charlottesville will have any practical application in the interim. As I’m on the agenda as a presenter, I will definitely be paying greater attention not only to what I produce but what others do also.

After peaking last August, the six-month moving average of automobile sales in Virginia declined precipitously through February 2006, although the number has ticked back up since then, according to figures compiled by Chmura Economics & Analytics for VA Newswire for publication Wednesday.

The economy is growing and incomes are rising smartly. What could explain the dip other than the rising price of gasoline? Could this be a sign that Virginians are willing to modify their behavior in the face of the higher cost to own and operate a motor vehicle? Could this presage a downturn in the growth in Vehicle Miles Driven?

Deodorant manufacturer Old Spice has declared Richmond to be the 36th “sweatiest” city among the 100 largest in the United States. Washington, D.C., follows at 39, Norfolk at 42 and Virginia Beach at 44. The ranking is based on a composite of average average temperatures and humidity, presumably from the year before.

Among Virginia’s largest cities, Roanoke was clearly the place to spend the summer last year. Roanoke ranked 63. (Bristol, Tenn., across the state line from Bristol, Va., ranked 66.)

Temperatures in Richmond have been surprisingly moderate, even comfortable, so far this June. With the General Assembly winding up its budget negotiations and heading home, the periodic blasts of hot air from the state Capitol should diminish, and temperatures abate even more.

K-12 public education is Virginia’s sacred cow. The Standards of Quality put massive spending increases on auto-pilot. Legislators act as if their job is simply to find the funds to pay for it all. No one dares question how the schools operate: There is very little talk about reforming the delivery of K-12 education in Virginia. And what little there is gets no mention in the Mainstream Media.

From time to time, though, issues do surface. The Virginia Department of Education recently issued a study that says about 90 of Virginia’s 132 school districts have shifted a disproportionately large percentage of minority students into special-education classes. Special ed, it appears, is often regarded as a dumping ground for disorderly students.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch article touches upon the issues raised in the report — are children being unfairly labeled as emotionally disturbed? – but fails to ask any larger questions. fortunately, I do have a few questions.

• Between 1997 and 2004 (the latest year for which figures are available on the Department of Education website), school enrollment increased 8.5 percent to 1,204,808. Over the same period, special education enrollment increased 18 percent to 175,577 — more than twice as rapidly. Why?
• Could the increase in the number of special ed students have anything to do with larger state reimbursements for special ed students?
• Could the increase in the number of special ed students have anything to do with SOL scores? I don’t know the answer, I’m just asking: Are special ed students excluded, or treated differently, in the calculations of school and district performance?
• What percentage of “special ed” students are successfully integrated back into the mainstream school body? In other words, is there any evidence that special ed students are actually being helped?

These are the kinds of questions that our legislators should be asking instead of signing carte blanche checks for Virginia school systems.