One of the excuses cited for the appointment of Mr. Pierce R. Homer as Secretary of Transportation is that this will insure continuation of the positive improvements that VDOT has shown over the past four years. But what has VDOT accomplished?
The first Secretary of Transportation and the first Commissioner of VDOT appointed by Warner came forward with good ideas but every year for the past four, mobility and access has gotten worse. The agency is still not working to achieve a balance of transport system capacity and settlement pattern travel demand. (See Mobility and Access: A Report Card at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com 31 Oct 2005)
Because VDOT has never seriously considered achieving a balance between demand and mobility system capacity to serve functional urban areas, they are still stuck on 19th century concepts to provide vehicle mobility. The automobile (cars and trucks) and to some extent trains (commuter rail and “subways”) do not serve well the settlement patterns most favored by the citizens and the market. VDOT (as well as other state DOTs and US DOT) are decades behind the competition on the Pacific Rim and Europe. Can you say PRT?
The bottom line is that traffic congestion continues to grow worse just as it has been for forty years. While citizens are coming to understand that more money without a fundamental change in VDOT strategy (and Fundamental Change in human settlement patterns) will only make congestion worse, there is no sign that those in VDOT are planning to respond to reality. VDOT continues to plan for and build the wrong facilities in the wrong locations.
Well, you say, VDOT improved the percentage of “on-time” and “on-budget” projects. Yes, they have “improved” when measured by the simplistic “performance measures” used by MainStream Media. That is a PR success, not an improvement in mobility or access.
More projects are on time because VDOT has stretched out the contract periods. This allows them to also claim more projects starts. But is taking four or five years to add two lanes to an existing, straight, flat, Interstate within existing right-of-way and no major new structures a step in the right direction? No one is yet using objective criteria for what should be accomplished for the money.
More projects are on budget because current contracts leave out or weakened maintenance-of-traffic-flow provisions. Shutting down one half the capacity of an overloaded Interstate in midday would have been unacceptable a few years ago. We call this form of intentional congestion “personslaughter” in The Shape of the Future. From field observations it would appear that stormwater and sediment control provisions have also been weakened.
VDOT has done a better job of contracting out design work to compensate for loss of senior staff that the Allen administration forced out so it would superficially appear to be “conservative.” Fixing problems caused by the Allen and Gilmore administrations is a good thing but is that real progress?
Recent field work within R=15 in the Virginia portion of the National Capital Subregion indicates that the core problem is not what VDOT did not do in the 80s, 90s and 00s, it is what they did not do inside R=15 in the 60s and 70s. There are thousands of acres of vacant and underutilized land that was bypassed and / or is not being renewed because of lack of access and mobility. This is because there was and is no attempt to create a balance between transport system capacity and settlement pattern traffic generation. It is inside R=15 where a new commitment to improved access and mobility should focus.
Creating a sustainable New Urban Region by evolving Balanced Communities is not on any VDOT screen. The “More-money-for-more-facilities” advocates want roads and rails to open new land and further exacerbate scatteration of urban land uses and this will result in greater immobility and access dysfunction.
The 10-Times savings in total location variable cost (including savings from less Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) and energy consumption) that are possible from functional vs dysfunctional patterns of land use (aka, the creation of Balanced Communities inside the Clear Edge) are still there for the taking if there was an interest in innovation within VDOT.
All we hear about now are ways to mortgage or sell public assets to generate money that will make the problem worse. As we have noted again and again, more money will only exacerbate the problem until there is plan to balance of transport system capacity with the travel demand generated by the settlement pattern.
More money for the wrong facilities in the wrong locations will make congestion worse faster. (See the nine The Shape of the Future columns related to balancing transport and settlement patterns published at https://www.baconsrebellion.com/ between 24 May and 20 September 2004.)
EMR
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