Bacon's Rebellion

In my column this week, “Rail Rip-off,” I tout the benefits of the heavy-rail transportation option in Northern Virginia, as long as it can pay its own way. Were the planning process not so far along, making it politically impossible to consider an alternative mass-transit system, I would urge the Kaine administration to take a close look at Personal Rapid Transit, or PRT.

In his column today (“The Problem with ‘Mass” Transit“) Ed Risse takes a detailed look at the PRT option. In theory, PRT would be less expensive to build and far more flexible than rail. Because it’s so new and relatively untested, PRT is not a political option for Northern Virginia, which is demanding answers right now. But other metropolitan areas no so deeply committed to heavy rail — e.g. Hampton Road and Richmond — should consider it.

Heavy rail like the Washington METRO is a wonderful thing… as long as it can pay its own way. As I argue in today’s e-zine column, “Rail Rip-off,” the extension of METRO rail to Dulles Airport could catalyze billions of dollars of redevelopment in Tysons Corner, transforming Virginia’s leading business center into a much more livable, workable community. Rail to Dulles is much to be desired.

My problem with the project is the financing mechanism the state has cobbled together to pay for it. The financing scheme and zoning plan (as currently articulated) sticks Joe Blow commuters along the Dulles Toll Road with $1 billion in tolls while it lavishes the benefits of higher densities and METRO access upon select landowners in Tysons Corner and along the Dulles Corridor.

This financing package represents an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the poor (or middle class) to the super rich. How this could take place under a Democratic Party administration is a mystery to me. Where are all the populists who stand up for the little guy? For that matter, how can Republicans, who supposedly recoil from the corporate welfare state, remain silent?

Enough wealth would be created by a METRO line and increased density around the rail stations that property owners — the primary beneficiaries — are perfectly capable of footing the cost. There is no need to bilk highway commuters. Conceptually, the financing solution is fairly simple, as I explain in my column. The devil is in the details, I’ll concede. But there should be enough wealth created to negotiate a win-win scenario for everyone.

The May 15, 2006, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion has been published. You can read the entire edition online here. Our columns and departments this week include:

Rail Rip-off
Extending METRO rail to Dulles Airport will enrich select landowners to the tune of billions of dollars. Why, then, are Fairfax County commuters being forced to pay so much of the project cost?
by James A. Bacon

Sense and Census
Opinions about new and different Americans are fine. Facts are better.
by Doug Koelemay

Shades of Francis Nicholson
Like the power-hungry royal governor of old, Gov. Tim Kaine seems willing to misuse the powers of his office. But his budget brinksmanship could backfire.
by Patrick McSweeney

Another Grandiose Plan
Apparently, $120 million to renovate the state Capitol complex is not enough. The state Senate wants to spend another $400 million.
by Patrick McSweeney

The Problem with “Mass” Transit
Light and heavy rail are expensive, inflexible alternatives to the automobile. It’s time to consider a 21st-century solution to mobility in New Urban Regions: Personal Rapid Transit.
by EM Risse

Learning from Pocahontas
Gov. Kaine smartly bailed out the Pocahontas Parkway project by granting a concession to a private toll-road operator. Too bad he didn’t apply the same creative thinking to the Dulles Toll Road.
by Geoffrey Segal

Republican Blues
The GOP has more than the Democrats to worry about this November. The Party is struggling from internal divisions, as seen in the convention battle in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District.
by Philip Rodokanakis

Stuck on Stupid
The Senate Republicans who worked out a proposed regional transportation authority are the same geniuses who thought up the Transportation Tax Scam that voters rejected in 2002.
by James Atticus Bowden

Nice & Curious Questions
Have You Ever Seen the Rain: Droughts in Virginia
by Edwin S. Clay III and Patricia Bangs

Blogology
Ten Questions for Will Vehrs
Conaway Haskins

It turns out that Bacon’s Rebellion isn’t the only media outlet enthralled with the minutiae of traffic planning in Virginia. According to Washington Post columnist John Kelly, Tom Cruise plays a traffic engineer in the upcoming movie, “Mission Impossible III.”

Actually, Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, a member of the Mission Impossible team, whose cover story is that he’s a traffic engineer with the Virginia Department of Transportation. Writes Kelly:

How do we know Tom/Ethan is a traffic engineer? Because in a party scene early in the movie, some civilian friend asks him, “How’s the Department of Transportation?” And then Tom delivers a moving little monologue about how fascinating traffic is, about how a single motorist tapping on the brakes can slow things for miles behind him.

“Booooooring,” says the friend.

No, NOT boring! The dynamics of transportation flow are fascinating stuff…. OK, OK, Maybe not as fascinating as saving the free world. But definitely less dangerous.

Had enough of the saccharine, over-commercialized Mother’s Day fare?

Try going to npr.org and downloading Tom Wolfe’s National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture delivered last Wednesday.

We have always thought that “From Bauhaus to Our House” was Wolfe’s best work. Think what he could do with McMansions (and on what they mean for mothers)!

In the meantime, Wolfe’s Jefferson Lecture on the impact of “modern” language is outstanding (nothing directly to do with mothers or Mothers Day).

Wolfe is off in his time-frame by a factor of 5. He is a novelist after all. The perfection of the voice box and brain organization which enabled the articulation of “modern” language occurred 50,000 thousand years ago +/-, not 11,000 years ago. These enablers evolved about the same time as a new generation of tools and artifacts in what Jared Diamond terms “The Great Leap Forward.” By 11,000 years ago the earliest urban places were already 2,000 years old +/- and they required language for sure.

Like most novelists Wolfe uses far too many words but his perspective on language and communication’s impact on religion, status and what it means to be human is worth wading through the verbiage. Actually the lecture is 34 paragraphs long and if you read the first five and the last three you will get the core message:

Language and what we call “Civilization” has terminated the process of evolution.

We will expand on a theme we addressed in The Shape of the Future in an upcoming column: Society is too complex for Homo sapiens (or Homo loquax as Wolfe calls us) to navigate with dysfunctional settlement patterns. The Forest Gumpp perspective.

Wolfe adds a new twist: If evolution is over why bother to create functional human settlement patterns since we are doomed anyway?

EMR

I have posted this for Jim Bowden whose Blogger controls still aren’t operating properly. – Jim Bacon

The Peninsula’s Daily Press offered their two kopecks on L’Affaire Will Vehrs in an editorial, “Blogger Blow-Up” (May 13, 2006). The DP is the only one commenting, that I’ve seen, on Will Vehrs’ political persuasion. He “works from the right side of the street.”

“Which is why those engaged in blogging may wish to recall the adage that “politics ain’t beanbag” and take care not to leave themselves vulnerable. By blogging on the job, Vehrs effectively affixed a ‘hit me’ sign on his back. Furthermore, the DP said, “Such is life in the Blogosphere, venue of the ad hominem attack.”

That’s funny coming from the DP. Why does their editor, Gordon Morse, read and comment on blogs? To learn how to sharpen his ad hominem attacks?

The reporting in the DP is so bad and biased that Republican Delegate Melanie Rapp will answer only their written inquiries – in writing so there is a clear paper trail of truth.

I laughed seeing the DP put its little claws out. BTW, who are bloggers vulnerable to…?

Back in 2003, Dr. Hassan Aref, dean of the Virginia Tech School of Engineering, generated national headlines by overseeing construction of what was then the world’s third fastest supercomputer — and the fastest university supercomputer in the world. Comprised of 1,100 Apple MacIntosh computers networked together, the supercomputer was known officially as “System X” and unofficially as “Big Mac.” System X was a triumph in more ways than one: Aref built the machine for about one-fifth the cost of supercomputers with comparable performance.

Next to Virginia Tech’s winning football team, System X probably did more to generate positive publicity for Virginia Tech than any other achievement in the university’s 130-year+ history. And it gave Tech scientists and engineers a valuable tool to assist in their research.

Barely one year later, in January 2005, Virginia Tech President Charles Steger announced that Aref would step down from his position as engineering dean, although he would stay on as a tenured professor. The university press release read like an accolade:

“Over the past two years, Hassan Aref implemented a number of changes that position the college for sustained growth and development in the years ahead,” said [Provost Mark] McNamee. “His leadership in faculty recruitment, curricular enhancement, the development of the System X supercomputer, and the launch of the new Institute of Critical Technology and Science, are significant achievements during his tenure as dean.”

Remarkably, there was no explanation as to why Aref was stepping down. Family reasons? Desire to spend more time teaching? No explanation whatsoever. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t add up. There’s a lot more to this story than was ever made public.

By all accounts, the new dean, Richard C. Benson, brings many strengths to the engineering program. Benson came from Penn State University, where he headed the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering. But the question lingers: Why did Aref step down?

“Who cares?” some may respond. “That’s ancient history.” No, it’s not. As documented in a recent post, “What is Happening in Hokie Town?”, Virginia Tech’s national ranking as an R&D powerhouse had been slipping between 2001 and 2003. The engineering school had been plagued by a series of short-tenured deans. But as vividly demonstrated by the System X coup, Aref created enormous excitement and buzz during his two years in office. I hear that he was extremely popular with engineering alumni, although he had trouble “managing up” — handling relations with the Virginia Tech administration in Burruss Hall.

Here is the question: Are Tech’s slipping R&D rankings during the early 2000s a momentary dip that can be blamed on temporary factors like the wrong dean or external causes such as state budget cuts? Or are there deeper, more pervasive problems? Virginians need to know. Virginia Tech is Virginia’s No. 1 research university, and it’s an economic anchor of Western Virginia. It’s too important for the Commonwealth to let fall behind.

The captions on two front page pictures in today’s WaPo tell a lot about the obliviousness of MainStream Media and of governance practitioners.

Under the picture of the New Wilson Bridge Span the caption reads:

“The new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, a project almost 20 years in the making, is opened to the media in advance of an official gala ceremony next Thursday. The 1.1. mile-long span will begin carrying traffic early next month and is expected eventually to ease some of the region’s worst congestion – at least for a while.”

First, credit where credit is due: The caption and the story correctly notes that this 2.44-billion (that is a “B”) dollar “solution” is only temporary. The story focus is on the upcoming “celebration” and self-congratulations by governance practitioners and their contractors. The caption (and the story) provides no clue about the overarching cause of the traffic congestion that makes this bridge only a temporary fix. See “Self Delusion and Fraud,” 7 June 2004 at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

Under the picture of a verdant yard the caption reads:

“Sean Kelley kisses his wife, Shannon (a Charles County Commissioner), goodbye before going off to work (in a car), while James P. Gates prepares to pump out the septic tank at their La Plata home.”

The Page 1 story is about unsuspecting home-owners (including County Commissioners) coming to the realization that at low density one cannot just flush and forget. It is also about citizen education concerning a major source of groundwater contamination. Unfortunately the story is laced with Core Confusing words. See three columns on vocabulary starting with “The Foundation of Babble,” 28 November 2005 at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

There is no indication anywhere in the story about the overarching connection between septic tanks, driving to work and subregional traffic congestion. The nexus is, of course, dysfunctional human settlement pattern.

Based on these front page stories it can be predicted that had WaPo been publishing in Florence during the spring of 1348 it would have run two stories during May. One about workers on a new bridge across the Arno becoming sick and dying in alarming numbers and another story (deemed to be unrelated to the first by the editors) about an infestation of rats on the docks at Pisa where dock workers had died earlier in the year.

In 1348 there was little knowledge about the cause of the disease that later would be known as “The Black Death.”

In “The Shape of the Future” it is noted that about as much is known in 2000 concerning the function of human settlement patterns as was known about maintaining human health 500 years earlier. See opening sections of Chapter 4. In 1348 the level of understaning about human health was not much different than it was in 1500. In 2006 the level of understanding about human settlement patterns is not much different that it was in 2000.

EMR

Every cloud has a silver lining. I’m sure that Will Vehrs wishes the whole Martinsville blog controversy would go away, and he may well wish that his friends would stop defending him and let the whole matter drop. But, as one of Virginia’s earliest political bloggers and a zealous blogging advocate, Will can take some degree of comfort in the publicity his case is generating for Virginia’s blogosphere. Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Ray McAllister used the kerfuffle as the occasion to highlight Virginia’s political blogs.

McAllister sums up much of the blogosphere by citing the cartoon in The New Yorker in which two dogs are talking. “‘I had my own blog for a while,’ one says. ‘But I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.’” But he concedes that some are worth reading, from One Man’s Trash to Raising Kaine, from Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball to Not Larry Sabato.

And if anyone should doubt the influence of Virginia’s blogs on the Mainstream Media, check out the lead editorial in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch. The T-D picked up on the hypocrisy of Del. Ward Armstrong, D-Henry, in calling for Vehr’s resignation — first noted by Virginia Virtucon and then spread by this blog, among others.

The latest buzz word among transportation managers in the Kaine administration is “corridor management.” The idea is simple: Virginia can do a much better job of increasing capacity of its major transportation corridors.

Take a four-lane or six-lane traffic corridor in your community. Observe how cluttered it is with intersections, turning lanes, subdivision gateways, shopping center entrances and curb cuts to innumerable gas stations, fast food stations and stand-alone stores. Everybody wants direct access to the main drag. But carrying capacity dies a death by a thousand cuts when drivers are entering and exiting the corridor willy nilly.

The Kaine administration thinks that state and local governments can increase the throughput of existing thoroughfares by limiting the points of access. The Kaine crew is pushing for closer cooperation between local land-use and state transportation planners, and it is asking for $50 million to buy back rights of way along selected corridors. Peter Galuszka, writing for the Road to Ruin project, has the scoop in “Corroding Corridors.”

I would add only a couple of brief editorial comments. First, $50 million would be money well spent as an experiment to see if this strategy has merit. It is crucial, however, that someone track the “before” and “after” performance of the traffic corridors so a Return on Investment analysis can be calculated. Secondly, traffic light synchronization (TLS) should be considered as another tool in corridor management. If the Kaine administration is looking at TLS, no one emphasized it to Galuszka.

Chris Walker, a real estate developer active in the Dulles Corridor, was the principal behind a $1 billion proposal to build 122 lane-miles of roadway along the Dulles Toll Road, which he would have financed privately and paid for with congestion tolls. Needless to say, he was not happy when Gov. Timothy M. Kaine scrapped his submission, along with competing proposals, and turned over development of the corridor to the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority. Under Kaine’s plan, the state will spend some $4 billion to extend heavy rail to Dulles.

Walker has fired off a letter to House Speaker William J. Howell proffering advice on a number of transportation-related matters. Clearly, Walker’s views are colored by his self interest, but that doesn’t necessarily make him wrong. I think he does a good job of clarifying important issues in the debate. His key points are (with my comments in italics):

1. Stop “playing politics” with transportation. In particular, stop diverting resources to mass transit. He writes: “In the Washington, D.C., area, the Council of Governments official 25-year Metropolitan Planning Organization Constrained Long Range plan, which includes Northern Virginia, allocates $57 billion of the $93 billion available, to transit. This is 60% of the budget to a mode which today serves only 4% of the actual demand, a percentage with is scheduled to decline to 2.5% in 2030. Of this, heavy rail is projected to decline from 2.5% to 1.8%. (Comment: Transit could serve a much larger percentage of the traveling public if the proper zoning were put into place around rail stations, and even more if the price of gas continues climbing.)
2. Don’t increase the public commitment to Metro. Metro is a fiscal black hole, he says. “If it were run as efficiently as London’s system, with slightly higher fares and outsourcing of most of its functions, it would make money every year and not need operating subsidies.” But it’s not. Metro is a mess. (Comment: Metro is a mess, and Virginia should insist that it clean up its act. But additional support may be unavoidable if service is extended to Dulles.)
3. Rank all transportation projects by their cost-effectiveness — how much congestion relief do they deliver per dollar spent? (Comment: I totally agree. I’ve made this point over and over: Determine the Return on Investment for every proposed transportation project — roads, rail, intelligent transportation systems, telework, etc. — and fund those with the highest returns. Take the decision away from the politicians!)
4. For new projects, adopt a “user pays” philosophy to the greatest extent possible. Tolls and gas taxes are preferable to other revenue streams. (Comment: Again, I totally agree. The people who pay for transportation maintenance and improvements should be those who benefit from them.)

Walker reserves special scorn for Kaine’s support of the Rail-to-Dulles extension of the Washington Metro. That project, he says, will absorb half of VDOT’s six-year budget for Northern Virginia while satisfying less than one percent of travel demand.

Why is this happening? Perhaps the [House] conferees could request full disclosure of the Kaine administration. Governor Kaine’s father in law has received six-figure lobbying fees to promote Dulles Rail, despite the fact he is not a registered lobbyist. The same situation applies to John Milliken, former transportation secretary, transition advisor to ex-governor Warner, and Democratic party power broker and lobbyist, again not properly registered. Isn’t the public entitled to know what is going on behind the scenes with these mega-projects?

Read the full text of his letter here.

Virginia Tech is the Commonwealth’s flagship research university, and it has set ambitious goals to increase R&D funding and rise in the rankings of the nation’s top research universities. Unfortunately, during the early 2000s, during the most recent years for which data is available, Tech didn’t rise in the rankings — it slipped.

The competition between research universities is brutal. Every research institution has set its sights upon increasing its rankings, so a university like Virginia Tech has to run hard just to stay even. According to TheCenter Top American Research Universities, the most authoritative ranking available, Tech pulled in $216.3 million research dollars in 2001, enough to score 45th nationally. Two years later, the Hokies raked in $247.8 million, a 14.6 percent increase, but still fell to 50th place.

Clearly, there was an enormous amount of research money sloshing around, and other universities were more adept at getting it. During the same two years, the University of Virginia surged from a rank of 76 to a rank of 66. Even Virginia Commonwealth University squeezed out a few extra notches, rising from 103 to 100.

What’s the problem in Blacksburg? TheCenter offers at least one clue. Virginia Tech may suffer a competitive disadvantage from its small endowment — $371 million, ranking a meager 126th among the 200 research institutions surveyed. Universities rely upon their endowments to supplement the salaries of prestigious faculty and to support teams of graduate students. Tech also generated $67 million in annual given, only enough to rank it 66.

The good news is that Tech seems to be beating the odds — its No. 50 ranking is clearly superior to its financial metrics. So, the university must be doing something right. As an institution lacking a medical school, typically a major magnet for research dollars, Tech leans heavily upon its highly respected engineering school to find research dollars. Any serious inquiry into Tech’s enduring strength, and its recent tumble in the rankings, needs to focus there. We will take a closer look in a future post.

The Region 2000 Local Government Council will hold a regional planning forum later this month to examine how land use can affect transportation in Central Virginia. Says the News & Advance:

Campbell County Community Development Director Paul Harvey … pointed out how more rural areas along U.S. 29 are zoned as agricultural residential, while areas such as Madison Heights are zoned business.

As cars drove through the area, the speed limits decrease in the business-heavy sections to help the traffic flow and minimize accidents, Harvey said.

“Any time you look at an area with a traffic problem, it’s usually the result of a land-use decision or a series of land-use decisions over the years,” Harvey said.

“If you don’t get people to think about (land use and transportation) at the same time, you can have some unintended consequences.”

Even smaller metropolitan areas in Virginia experience localized congestion. Addressing underlying land use issues could make a significant improvement to the quality of life. Too bad that Virginia’s larger metro areas, where traffic congestion is far more acute, have yet to achieve the same level of understanding.

The Virginia Virtucon blog calls for the resignation of Del. Ward Armstrong, D-Henry, the delegate who objected to Will Vehrs’ humor in an online caption-writing contest that made light of economic misfortunes in Armstrong’s home district. Armstrong, it seems, has used inappropriate humor himself, at times.

According to a May 2, 2006 article in the Cavalier Daily about sexual harassment:

However, sexual harassment is not confined to lobbyists and at times has found its way to the House floor. Del. Jeannemarie Devolites, R-Vienna, the majority whip, said she had negative experiences with three delegates when first elected to the House.

In particular, Devolites said Del. Ward Armstrong, D-Henry, publicly embarrassed her on several occasions, including doing an impression of Bill Clinton and comparing her to Monica Lewinsky. Later, Armstrong apologized for his comments on the floor of the House.

“I think they considered it part of my initiation,” Devolites said.

Luckily for Armstrong, Devolites didn’t choose to make a federal case out of the incident, or he might not have remained in the General Assembly long enough to call for Vehrs’ resignation.

Chad Dodson weighs in on the issue here. And Waldo Jaquith here. An Associated Press story appears here. Writer Kristin Gelineau characterizes Vehrs’ captions as “snarky.” Does snarkiness (or is the noun form of the word simply “snark”) warrant a 10-day suspension?

First question: Is a state employee allowed to hold personal opinions contrary to the official position of the department he works for? The answer is easy. Of course, everyone is entitled to a personal opinion. The state does not engage in thought control.

The next question is a little trickier: Is a state employee entitled to publicly express his opinions if it’s clear that he’s speaking in a private capacity, not his capacity as a state employee?

That second question goes to the crux of the mini-firestorm swirling around Will Vehrs in the photo captions he submitted to Commonwealth Conservative last week, in which he made light of the Martinsville region’s economic decline. The story, first filed by the Martinsville Bulletin — picked up by Conaway Haskins here — was published this morning as the lead Metro & Virginia story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Even though Vehrs has apologized profusely, local politicians and economic developers have called upon the Governor to fire him.

Said Del. Ward Armstrong, D-Henry: “I understand his apology, but he’s in a position where he’s going to be working with economic development. How can he work with a potential prospect after having in a public fashion demeaned the area? … It’s not a criminal offense, but it does destroy his effectiveness in economic development.”

Three observations:

1. Del. Armstrong needs to get his facts straight. Vehrs works with the Department of Business Assistance, not in “economic development.” He mans a hot-line dispensing information to small businesses. He does not interact with business prospects that Martinsville and Henry County might attempt to lure to their region. His job assisting small businesses, even those from Martinsville and Henry County, is in no way compromised.
2. More to the point, Vehrs was not speaking in an official capacity, either for the Virginia Economic Development Partnership or the Department of Business Assistance. He was clearly blogging in his capacity as a private citizen. Has Vehrs violated any state policy? Has he violated any departmental protocols? What grounds would the Governor have for firing him? Does the Governor really want to set a precedent of quashing a state employee’s right to free speech in the blogosphere?
3. Armstrong’s strong-arming of Vehrs is likely to backfire. Everyone can sympathise with the economic plight of Martinsville and Henry County. But few will sympathise with Armstrong’s seemingly vengeful lashing out against a mid-level state employee for words that, objectively speaking, caused no harm. This is not the kind of visibility that Martinsville-Henry County wants to generate for itself. The last thing the region needs is for the blogosphere to mobilize in Vehrs’ defense. No one would benefit from the story going national.

Best solution: Let it go. Vehrs is obviously remorseful. He’s learned his lesson. Let the story die, and get back to economic development.

Update: The Kaine administration has suspended Vehrs from his job for 10 days. Will blogs about it on Commonwealth Conservative.