Bacon's Rebellion

This week the Commonwealth lost a key player in the game that is the legislative give and take on revenues and appropriations, tax and spend, budget and implement, Finance Committee chairman, Delegate Harry J. Parrish.

Delegate Parrish wore both his green Finance Committee sport jacket and the title “honorable” with equal aplomb. He could be almost impish at times, yet never lost his dignity and respect for the institutions in which he served us. A true war hero and patriot, Parrish was still a gentle soul. Successful and an unrelenting force when he needed to be, he was still humble. He always addressed me as “gal,” and I always felt respected and honored rather than diminished.

I will miss his good humor, the warmth of his smile, and the civility that he brought to the legislative process. It can sometimes be difficult to be a person both liked and respected … not so for Harry. If current and future legislators were guided by the “standards of conduct” set by the gentleman from Manassass, the Commonwealth would be well-served.

In my most recent column, “Liberate Mass Transit,” I argued that Virginia could stimulate shared-vehicle ridership by scrapping local transit monopolies and fostering a wave of private sector innovation. Government, I suggested, could deploy its scarce resources far more effectively by investing in transit “infrastructure” — particularly the public places where people gather to catch a bus or jitney — instead of subsidizing money-losing transit operations.

Writing for the Transport Innovator, a newsletter published by the Bus Rapid Transfer Center, Derek Trusler cites a busway network in Brisbane, Australia, where bus ridership has increased 120 percent in the last four years. A key factor in Brisbane’s success was the construction of attractive, functional bus stations. The stations offer a number of features that improve the customer experience:

• Protection from the weather and the elements
• Real-time passenger information signs and public announcements
• Station access through bicycle and pedestrian paths, as well as park-and-ride lots
• Closed-circuit TV and other security measures
• Attractive landscaping
• Adequate customer facilities such as ticketing machines, maps, drinking fountains, rubbish bins, toilets, bicycle parking and storage
• And more…

A network of bus stations like Brisbane’s in Northern Virginia would do a lot to encourage road warriors to trade in their car keys and take a bus for that hour-long commute.

(Read the full article in the “Transport Innovator,” published on the Bus Rapid Transit Policy Center website.)

The second most important thing to understand about the great victory at the Vienna / Fairfax / GMU METRO station is that it is just 22 years late. The most important thing is that there is still time to make amends, but it will just cost a lot more.

In the early 1970s, the 1960s decision to end the Orange Line at what became known as Vienna / Fairfax GMU was reconfirmed. This decision and the reconfirmation was based on the fact that there were nearly 800 acres of vacant and underutilized land here and the alternative in Tysons Corner was “all built out.”

Since then Tysons Corner has intensified by a factor of 4 and adding METRO or some other shared-vehicle system to make it functional will cost billions.

In the 70s and early 80s the Fairfax “comprehensive plan” provided incentives for land assembly to create transit oriented development (long before the term TOD was coined) so that the capacity on the Orange line could be used in both directions in peak periods.

Public action reduced the available vacant land to 100 +/- acres by the time the Orange Line got under construction beyond Ballston. Subdivision Recycling projects for the METRO West site and others surfaced as the opening of the station neared. To thwart the Virginia Center plan on still vacant land, the county’s “comprehensive plan” was amended to strip out the incentives for parcel consolidation. Project after project with METRO supporting patterns and densities of land-use were turned down by the County.

The main players on the public side for this activity were former county supervisor and now Virginia Delegate Jim Scott and former county supervisor, county board chairperson and recently appointed Secretary of the Commonwealth Kate Hanley.

But for their efforts there would already be the sort of development that the market documents is in the most demand. The Orange line would be carrying more people in the off peak direction, it would be taking in more revenue and would come closer to being part of a functional shared-vehicle system.

Hundreds of acres now must be recycled at great cost and disruption to evolve a real METRO oriented urban enclave.

There is a silver lining: 45 +/- acres of land in public ownership lies at the heart of this area and is being wasted in road rights-of-way, surface parking and deck parking with no urban uses on the top. To make matters worse there is no provision to add them without tearing down the garages.

This 45 acres could be decked over and at modest density, replace the employment uses at AOl and World Com and Wal*Mart-in-the-Weeds in Loudoun County and with the adjacent 400 +/- acres within one half mile of the METRO platform, create a village-scale station-area urban agglomeration with a relative balanced of jobs / housing / services / recreation / amenity.

It would have cost so much less to do it right the first time. We would have saved thousands of acres of Countryside and provided the sort of places the market demonstrates that people want to live, work and play.

Will METRO West perform as advertised? We will all have to wait and see. The current project has one hand tied behind its back by the pattern of land use on the rest of the 800 acres that were part of the original reason to put the METRO station in this location.

Any analysis of the project will be hamstrung by the failure to create a comprehensive plan for the station area and to develop an intelligent vocabulary to describe the organic components of the station-area settlement pattern. See “Words Matter” and our Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 three part series on Vocabulary at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

There are three overarching lessons from this experience to date:

The loss from the scrapping of an intelligent plan to capitalize on the METRO potential at Vienna / Fairfax / GMU that evolved from the late 60s to the early 80s can never be fully recovered.

The lost of opportunity due to the refusal of the public agencies (especially between 25 and 20 years ago) to allow the market to reflect the potential of METRO access effects not just Fairfax County but the entire Virginia portion of the National Capital Subregion.

The loss of potential public revenue due to the failure to create public-private partnerships to assure public benefit from the public expenditure on the METRO would pay for much of the needed public infrastructure and services needed to support an urban enclave.

The record shows there were many of us who spoke out on these public agency failures at the time.

EMR

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has approved a proposal by Pulte Homes to build 2,250 townhouses, condominiums and apartments near the Vienna Metro station, overriding vocal opposition by neighbors who feared an increase in localized traffic congestion. This is arguably the most important zoning decision that Virginia will see all year.

Details at the Road to Ruin blog.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine made an interesting remark Saturday to a gathering in Rockingham County, according to the Daily News Record:

Kaine said his proposal will put the burden of payment on users of highways by raising auto-sales fees, car-insurance premiums, registration fees and license-reinstatement fees for what Kaine termed “abusive” drivers: motorists with poor driving records, including habitual offenders.

It is encouraging to see that the Governor believes that the burden of maintaining and building Virginia’s roads (and transit projects) should fall upon those who use (and abuse) the roads — as opposed, say, upon the non car-owning population. It’s a baby step toward a rational transportation funding formula.

But Kaine could do a lot better. He proposes taxing car ownership, not car usage. Under his schema, it doesn’t matter if someone drives a car 6,000 miles a year or 30,000 — they pay the same. A rational transportation-funding system would make people pay on the basis of two main variables: (1) how much they drive, and (2) when/where they drive.

The more someone drives, the more wear and tear they put on the transportation system. People who drive more should pay more. The most practiical user fee in Virginia today is the gas tax. (An ancillary point: People who drive heavy vehicles, such as trucks, should pay more than those who drive small cars. The trucking lobby, it appears, has successfully fended off any move to make trucks pay their fair share. The Virginia Trucking Association needs to give Executive VP Dale Bennett a raise!)

Motorists who choose to drive during periods of peak traffic congestion cause more stress on the system than those, such as telecommuters, carpoolers or bus riders, who arrange their affairs to share rides or drive during off-peak periods. Peak drivers should pay more, and the others should pay less. The most effective way to ration scarce highway capacity is tolls and congestion pricing.

Kaine apparently has made a political calculation that it will be easier to convince voters to swallow a grab-bag of miscellaneous titling and insurance taxes than to raise the gasoline tax and move to a system of congestion pricing. Too bad. Kaine’s plan will raise taxes, but it won’t modify motorist behavior. The preferred method of raising taxes also would create incentives for people to change their behavior and, thus, reduce somewhat the need to build more roads.

For those who think misuse of eminent domain is the main scourge facing civilization-as-we-know-it, Mark Trail over on the comic page has your story.

Knowing Mark, you will win.

The real problem? Pattern and density of land use. They should never have approved a casino on Crystal Lake in the first place. Henry George voted against it in the General Assembly but the home builders and the gun lobby supported the bill.

EMR

This morning, House Speaker William J. Howell issued a press release expressing “dissatisfaction” with Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s “deliberate campaign of misinformation” in a series of radio ads and automated phone calls. In particular, Howell was incensed that Kaine was touting the benefits of his transportation-financing plan without mentioning the fact that, oh, by the way, it requires an extra $1 billion in taxes.

It’s the usual spin we’ve come to expect in the 2006 Tax Wars and, even though I’m sympathetic to the Speaker’s position, I gave it a pass. There was nothing new enough here to warrant posting on the blog.

Just now, “Inside Virginia,” an electronic newsletter distributed by the Department of Business Assistance to several thousand subscribers, has arrived in my in-box. The lead story is an “article” from Gov. Kaine entitled, “Keeping Virginia Open for Business Requires Transportation Reforms.” I’ll spare you a critique of the now-familiar arguments, and I’ll question only fleetingly whether a state newsletter, paid for with tax dollars, is an appropriate P.R vehicle for disseminating the Governor’s propaganda on a legislative issue.

Of greater interest is this: Kaine actually enumerates the “user fees” he would increase to pay for the transportation improvements.

My plan includes a modest increase in user-related fees: most drivers will see only an $18 increase in their annual insurance premiums and less than an $18 increase in their annual registration fees; most new car owners will pay only $4-10 more per month on their car loans; and drunken and reckless drivers will pay increased fees for abusive driving.

I’ve been pretty critical of Kaine over the tax issue. But I give credit where credit is due. In this missive at least, he lays out clearly what his transportation plan would cost. I don’t know if this “article” was amended to address the Speaker’s criticisms or not. Regardless, thank you, Governor, for telling it like it is.

Will Vehrs at Commonwealth Conservative has picked up on a press release from the Governor’s office touting Virginia’s No. 2 Business Climate ranking in an annual survey by Pollina Corporate Real Estate, a corporate site relocation firm. The press release from the Governor’s office said:

“Virginia’s aggressive and focused economic development efforts together with our positive business climate have earned this high praise,” said Governor Kaine. “Attracting jobs and investment is a top priority of our Administration and we’re proud of this continuing accomplishment.”

The ranking is based on 29 criteria over which states exercise policy control, including taxes, human resources, right-to-work legislation, energy costs, infrastructure spending, workers compensation legislation and jobs lost or gained. Pollina won’t release its report unless you pay for it, and Bacon’s Rebellion is too cheap to fork out the $75 bucks, so we don’t know why Virginia rated so favorably. The Governor’s press release adds only the following vague statement:

While many states are losing ground to global competition due to poor efforts at keeping jobs and attracting businesses, the report praised Virginia’s “pro-business policies that result in job growth,” said Dr. Ronald R. Pollina, the study’s author and president of Pollina Corporate Real Estate.

Vehrs’ caustic response: “You’d think [the Governor] would decline the award, what with the crippling ‘transportation crisis’ and businesses allegedly deserting the state en masse because of it.” (Click here to read the rest of his commentary.)

Touche, Will. Some observers may use the study as ammo to suggest that the 2004 tax increase did Virginia’s economy no harm. My advice: Don’t go there. The 2004 Pollina study ranked Virginia Number One. Virginia fell a notch to Number Two in 2005, the year the taxes went into full effect. Coincidence? I think not. (Virginia’s most noteworthy strength, noted by Pollina in 2005, was the professionalism of its quasi-independent economic development agency.)

Further, I would reiterate my old argument that no single tax hike is big enough, by itself, to put a big dent in a state’s business climate. It’s the cumulative tax policy over a long period of time — many small changes adding up to something big — that make the difference. Combine the 2003 increase in “fees,” plus the 2004 tax hikes, plus the proposed 2006 tax hikes, and you’ve got enough to make a difference. If Gov. Kaine’s tax increase is enacted, let’s see how Virginia ranks next year.

Let’s conduct a mental exercise. Let’s pretend it’s the fall of 2005, when Tim Kaine and Jerry Kilgore were running neck-and-neck in the gubernatorial polls, and let’s pretend we have no foreknowledge of events to come.

Last fall, Kaine was campaigning on a transportation platform that detailed wide-ranging reforms but made no mention of new taxes. Indeed, he specifically stated that he would not increase taxes until a Constitutional amendment protected the Transportation Trust Fund from budgetary raids — putting off any prospective tax increase for at least three years. Kaine’s campaign rhetoric cut along the same lines: Virginia can’t pave its way out of congestion, he said repeatedly. As an alternative to Business As Usual, he proposed strengthening the power of local government to block rezoning projects in the absence of adequate roads.

Now, let’s imagine that Kilgore attacked Kaine as a tax-and-spend liberal. Oh, that’s right, he did attack Kaine as a tax-and-spend liberal. And he got his butt handed to him. Kaine was indignant. Editorial writers in most of Virginia’s major dailies rushed to Kaine’s defense. How dare Kilgore run such a negative campaign — appealing to peoples’ fears? Kilgore’s charges gained no traction, and he fell behind in the polls.

Of course, even Kilgore never imagined the switcheroo that Kaine would pull. Even Kilgore could not conceive of the audacity, less than two months after winning the election, of unveiling a plan to boost taxes by $1 billion per year, and then stumping the state for a proposal he never hinted at during the campaign, and launching an expensive radio advertising blitz in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to convince voters to support a spending program that he’d implied was unnecessary only months before.

Of course, the pundit-apologists who run Virginia’s editorial pages (outside of Richmond) all shifted direction in lock-step. Rather than castigating Kaine for breaking faith with voters in such dramatic fashion, they’re castigating House Republicans for failing to follow along.

It is interesting to note how Kaine is pursuing his P.R. campaign, however, Jeff Schapiro hit the right now in this morning’s Times-Dispatch when describing the radio ads: “Gov. Timothy M. Kaine doesn’t use the ‘t’ word in his radio commercials urging higher taxes for roads and transit.” Instead, the Governor touts the benefit of his transportation-funding plan over that of the House of Delegates, as if there were no price tag.

This is an interesting laboratory experiment in just how stupid voters are, and how short their attention spans are. Will voters follow, lemming-like, Kaine’s call for more spending without realizing that there’s a bill in the form of a $1 billion tax increase? Will they forget that only a few months before, they voted for a guy who said nothing about big spending programs and higher taxes?

Maybe Kaine’s tacticians are right. Maybe the voters are too stupid to put it all together. Maybe they do have the memories of fruit flies. With the pundit-apologists in Virginia’s editorial pages providing cover, maybe voters will suffer collective amnesia. But maybe the tacticians are wrong. Maybe, just maybe, voters will say, this isn’t what we voted for. And maybe the duplicity will boomerang.

On the topic of transportation alternatives, I’ve been playing around with the idea of creating a “maritime highway” — running commuters between point to point along Virginia’s abundant coastline on speedy boats. It may be one of those ideas that sounds better in theory than in practice, as is clear from recent correspondence from Edward Baird, who helped found HarborLink, the fast ferry that ran between Norfolk and Hampton between 1999 and 2002.

Baird and his buddies charted a ninety-foot, twin-engine, single-hull boat. Their goal was to provide commuters and tourists a way to get around the traffic jams on the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel. HarborLink got the tourists, and lots of day trippers as well, but only one commuter. Concludes Baird: “The single hull boat did not provide the speed, reliability and frequency of service that commuters need.”

So, the first experiment didn’t work out. Does that mean water-borne vessels aren’t a viable commuting option? No, a single experiment doesn’t tell us much of anything, only that one particular configuration of the idea didn’t work. Baird isn’t giving up. “We are working on a new fast ferry service in a much different form,” he reports.

Anyway, Baird makes some interesting observations in response to my recent “Liberate Mass Transit” column, which I’ve replicated (and edited slightly for grammar and clarity) in the comments section of this post.

In comments on the CONSERVATION OF INK, BITES AND BILE blog below Anon 12:14 / 1:34 / 6:55 raises important questions. These are issues that confuse many who “look into” transportation / settlement pattern relationships. Here are some quick responses with references.

“Is the prediction of 70 million new citizens over the next 25 years hype?

Just 15 years ago we and others could say: “If there is not a Fundamental Change in immigration or Fundamental Change in the birthrate, by 2030 the United States will join other First World nation-states (Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, et. al.) with no net population growth.

To fill the need for technical skills that our educational system was not meeting, to meet the need for labor that existing citizens were unwilling to do for the wages offered and other reasons immigration – legal and illegal – boomed. These new citizens also contributed to a shift in the birth rate. At this point 70 million more citizens in 25 years is not hype.

What is hype is that these 70 million – or 140 million – new citizens will require massive expansion of the urbanized area in the United States. The issue is per capita consumption of land and resources. The market says the desired patterns will require less land than is now devoted to urban land uses.

At the New Urban Region Level the population in the northern part of Virginia is driven by the rapid expansion of government in The Great Communicator years and even more rapid expansion of government spending in the Bush II years.

Both expansions were leveraged by reductions is taxes and massive deficits. This was and is great for those who see “economic growth” as an unquestioned goal. It is not so good for those who see quality of life and long term sustainability of economic prosperity, social stability and environmental heath as a measure of human intelligence.

As with the nation-state level, at the New Urban Region scale, population growth is far less important than the pattern and density of land use (human settlement patterns) and overall resource consumption. See “Five Critical Realities the Shape the Future” at https://www.baconsrebellion.com/ for a review of the facts on this issue.

“There was a plan for transportation and land use (for the northern part of Virginia) in the 1970s and the problem is that it was not built out.”

Wrong.

The last plan to balance land use and transportation in the what is now the National Capital Subregion (the Washington D. C. Metropolitan area plus) was the 1792 L’Enfant plan.

Starting in 1960 with the “Plan for the Year 2000” there were a series of land use plans for most of the National Capital Subregion, including ones for the northern part of Virginia in 1965 and 1967 that had transportable patterns and densities.

Outside of the sketch schematics in the Year 2000 Plan there was no transportation plan to match these land use plans that would create a balance of travel demand with system capacity.

One data point is that the vaulted 1975 “comprehensive” plan for Fairfax county included a transportation plan the had capacity to serve only 75% of the land uses shown on the plan and nothing for the land uses that were booming at the time outside the county and needed access to jobs at the centroid of the Subregion or even jobs and services in Fairfax County.

There were transportation plans in the 60s, but they did not match / serve the land use plans.

There was a METRO plan and a VDOT (nee VDH and VDH&T) plan.

METRO is based on a fundamentally flawed concept of regional mobility. See “It is time to Fundamentally Rethink METRO” at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com.

The VDOT “plan” was a series of looping circumferentials that when superimposed on 1965 land use plan served only cows-in-the-green. (See the plan by the predecessor of the NVRC (nee NVPDC). There were also a number of radials shown on various plans, many redundant and conflicting.

None of these transportation plans were ever matched with or calibrated to balance a desired settlement pattern for the National Capital Subregion or the Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region.

Faced with overwhelming travel demand generated by dysfunction settlement patterns, the three major transportation plans for the northern part of Virginia since 1988 have continued the tradition of ignoring land use, the driving force of travel demand. For a description of this process see “Anatomy of a Bottleneck” and “Regional Rigor Mortis” both at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

These realities of the northern part of Virginia transportation “plans” are spelled out with historic maps and graphics in “Transport in “November Election” at https://www.baconsrebellion.com/ and in “Priority Transportation Improvements” one of the PowerPoint programs included on the CD containing the third printing of The Shape of the Future available at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

The bottom line is that the “we had a plan” is a smokescreen by the asphalt gang paid for by land speculators and road builders.

“Where is the formula?”

If you agree with us that a free market is the best way to allocate resources and that a democracy is the best way to manage a government, then a sustainable society depends on better informed citizens in the market palace and in the voting booth.

The first step is that location-variable costs must be allocated fairly and equitably.

Under these conditions if federal, state, regional and municipal agencies are forced to create a plan for a balanced transport system to serve a desired (as demonstrated by the market) settlement pattern we will be on the way to sustainability.

One way to get there is spelled out in Handbook: Three Step Process to Create Balanced Communities and Sustainable New Urban Regions. A sketch view of how this process works is included in “The Shape of Richmond’s Future” at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

We hope this helps Anon 12:14 / 1:34 / 6:55 and others with a sincere interest in making the world a better for all citizens.

EMR

House Speaker William J. Howell is undertaking an interesting political gambit with his high-profile defense yesterday of tax credits for conservation easements (see details in the Charlottesville Daily Progress): He’s aligning House Republicans with the environmental/conservation community, a community that is heavily (though not exclusively) Democratic in its sympathies. I interpret this maneuver as a bid to resurrect the conservationist/taxpayer alliance that defeated the regional taxes-for-transportation proposals in 2002.

Conservationists and their Smart Growth allies are one group of Democrats who have not been lobbying for higher transportation taxes. They oppose Business As Usual road-building programs that accelerate scattered development that ruins country vistas and degrades the environment. This constituency could prove a useful ally for House Republicans as Gov. Timothy M. Kaine ratchets up the political pressure in support of his taxes-for-transportation plan.

I’m not suggesting that Howell’s position on the conservation tax credits is disingenuous. Howell strengthened the conservation credits back in 2002, regarding them as an effective, market-based tool for preserving farmland, woodland and open space from encroaching development. “Sprawl is a real concern to me, conservation organizations and to most Virginians,” Howell said in a press release yesterday.

What’s interesting is that Howell chose to go public on the issue in such a high-profile way, holding a press conference, issuing press releases in conjunction with the Piedmont Environmental Council, and targeting the state Senate for criticism. Senate legislation to cap the level of individual tax credits, on the grounds of fiscal responsibility, would deter many landowners from protecting their lands, Howell charged, making it more difficult to meet Virginia’s commitment to conserve over 400,000 acres in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, as stipulated in the Chesapeake Bay Agreement of 2000. “We pledge to fight Senate actions encouraging sprawl.”

As much as Howell genuinely believes in conservation, my guess is that he has his eye on a larger prize: the upcoming budget negotiations over transportation funding. He’s going to bat for the conservationists on an issue that’s important to them, in marked contrast to the way in which Gov. Timothy M. Kaine abandoned his commitment to push for zoning-and-transportation reforms. I have no insider knowledge here; I am simply observing the logic of the situation. I think Howell is trying to resurrect the conservationist/taxpayer alliance that beat back regional sales taxes-for-transportation referenda in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads in 2002. It will be interesting to see if that alliance will come back to life in 2006.

KSI, a Vienna-based developer of mixed-use projects, has announced its intention to build eight transit-friendly projects in the Washington metropolitan area, including six in Virginia. The projects will offer proximity to Metro and bus transit, and make Flexcar rentals available to homeowners. As I read KSI’s announcement between the lines, the developer is embarking upon a new business model: selling real estate by creating an environment where buyers can shed the nearly $7,000-per-year cost of owning a car. For details, see the full post on the Road to Ruin.

If this idea proves itself in the marketplace, the implications are momentous for Virginia’s transportation debate. Stay tuned.

Well, folks, I’ve returned from a pleasant, week-long vacation to find that the General Assembly has not come to any agreement on the transportation budget. It looks like we’re facing a special session of the General Assembly.

As I’ve written before, the Axis of Taxes strategy will be to portray the tax-averse GOP in the House of Delegates as obstructionist and uncompromising. I would argue that that pro-tax forces are the unbending ones, utterly committing to a strategy of tax-and-build and totally uninterested in exploring alternative strategies to addressing traffic congestion. (Weak nods to land use “reform” will not bring about meaningful change.)

The House could strengthen its hand in the upcoming public-relations battle if it showed itself willing to entertain alternative approaches to coping with traffic congestion — approaches that the Axis of Taxes will dismiss out of hand. Over the past year, Bacon’s Rebellion and the Road to Ruin project have systematically explored these alternative strategies.

In yesterday’s edition of the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine, I touched upon the potential to reignite mass transit ridership by giving the private sector a greater role. Municipal transit monopolies and taxicab franchises dampen the ability of the private sector to adapt to changing settlement patterns, implement new technologies and introduce innovations into the marketplace. By re-thinking the way we approach shared ridership, we could reinvigorate this alternative to One-Man-One-Car. (See “Liberate Mass Transit.”)

In a similar vein, we’ve written about NuRide, an Internet-based service that allows commuters to identify other carpoolers traveling the same route at the same time — a technology that offers the potential to revive the declining practice of carpooling. (See “Carpool Comeback.”)

We’ve explored the potential for telecommuting (working from home) and telework (working outside the main office and staying connected through cell phones, BlackBerries and laptops). (See “Rush Hour Will Never Be the Same.”)

We’ve shown how local governments can work with developers to create real estate projects with a smaller “traffic footprint” through better urban design and creative use of shared ridership. (See “Traffic Buster.”)

We’ve shown how new zoning codes and new templates for urban design can reduce the length and number of car trips and reduce traffic on congested thoroughfares. (See “Albemarle Place,” and “Street Cars and Zoning Codes.”)

We’ve shown how it’s possible, with modest investments, to significantly increase the capacity of existing thoroughfares without expensive widening projects. (See “Seeing the (Traffic) Light” and “Aroused about Roundabouts.”)

We’ve argued in favor of congestion-pricing tolls as a way of rationing scarce peak-highway capacity and encouraging commuters to change their driving behavior, whether carpooling more, riding buses, or resorting to telecommuting and telework. (See “Congestion Pricing” and “Roads and Reason.”)

There is no “silver bullet” for addressing Virginia’s congestion woes. But there are many narrow-bore policies, each of which can address a piece of the problem and all of which together can make a huge difference. Sadly, we have seen another session of the General Assembly come and go with none of these ideas being discussed seriously. The House has not embraced any of the ideas I’ve been pushing but, unlike the Senate, it has at least been willing to think outside the box, aggressively exploring ideas such as privatization.

In the PR battle to come, the House suffers a big disadvantage. The Governor has the power of the bully pulpit, the working journalists have defined the transportation debate as a tax-and-spend issue, and editorial writers across the state are salivating at the prospect of another big tax increase. But it will be difficult to portray House Republicans as the obstructionists if they are the ones embracing new ideas and their pro-tax foes are the ones nixing everything but big spending plans and tax increases.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Down three posts on this Blog, (“Transportation Snow Job in March”) fellow columnist James Atticus Bowden takes on those daemons (aka, evil doers) who are hell bent on raising taxes to pay for transportation “improvements.”

Almost no one likes to pay taxes but almost all say they want to improved access and mobility.

Some who commented on Mr. Bowden’s post are not sure he has all the facts and relationships straight but everyone would agree that he is stirring up a lot of bile and spilling a lot of ink and bites on the issue of taxes and transport.

There is a way to get beyond this conflict, aggravation and waste of time / resources. To do this citizens must look beyond the “tax issue” and get to the root cause of the mobility and access problem. Instead of fighting over the contentious issue of “taxes for transportation” about which there are many strongly held opinions, Mr. Bowden might focus his efforts on getting across a more focused and generic message. It might go something like the following:

No amount of money, regardless of how it is raised or distributed will alleviate community-scale, subregional-scale or New Urban Region-scale mobility and access dysfunction unless there is Fundamental Change in human settlement patterns so that a balance between vehicular travel demand and transport system capacity can be achieved.

No transportation professional can argue with this position. Even those who have hallucinations about the access and mobility “solution” being to scatter urban land uses across the Countryside cannot argue with the need to achieve a balance between transport system capacity and the travel demand generated by the human settlement pattern.

A sharp point can be put on this issue by checking out Mr. Bowden’s current column at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com . In “The Truth Shall Set You Free” Mr. Bowden argues that the cause of declining family disposable income is that “government” is collecting too many taxes.

Again his focus on “the tax issue” has pushed him a few clicks off target.

The core issue is that citizens and their governments have evolved a settlement pattern that is very expensive to support. For this reason, “government” is spending huge sums to subsidize imported energy and in an attempt to secure foreign sources of petroleum.

Even more important is that the costs of all location-variable goods and services continues to rise at an increasing rate. Beyond direct mobility and access costs, these expenditures include “public / utility” services such as energy, communications, water supply, waste disposal, education and health care. Citizens demand these services. “Government” has no choice to raise taxes to pay for them. Enterprises and institutions also most raise rates, fees and prices to pay for dysfunctional settlement patterns.

The place to focus on the issue of functional settlement patterns and a fair allocation of location-variable cost is in ones own community and in ones own New Urban Region. Mr. Bowden has chosen to live in a village-scale urban agglomeration called the City of Poquoson. From afar and based on Mr. Bowden’s own descriptions, it appears that Poquoson has the potential to become an Alpha Village. A fair allocation of location-dependent goods and services would greatly benefit Mr. Bowden and his fellow Poquosonians. By shifting to user-fee based charges instead of advalorem, sales or income “taxes” he and his village-mates could take advantage of Poquoson’s more efficient and functional human settlement patterns.

Attacking either party in the current the political duopoly that caused the current governance dysfunction is not likely to change the underlying problems. Attacking these issues at the nation-state, state and municipal levels with a shotgun is not likely to get much attention.

Unless citizens understand the root cause of issues that impact them every day like Regional Rigor Mortis and the Shelter Crisis they will continue to support more taxes to “solve the problem. Until they understand the causes of traffic congestion, the lack of affordable and accessible housing and other indicators of dysfunctional human settlement patterns, they will just pressure governance practitioners to provide services and the costs (aka, taxes) will continue to go up.

PROPERTY DYNAMICS is coming soon to an Alpha Neighborhood near you. It could come to a potential Alpha Village like Poquoson.

EMR