The pundits at the Virginian-Pilot are making progress: They’ve finally acknowledged that there’s more to solving Virginia’s transportation woes than raising taxes. Instead of blowing off the remedies proffered by the House of Delegates leadership as meaningless obstructionism, the Pilot stated in an editorial yesterday: “Somehow, some way, the House, the Senate and the executive branch have got to start dealing with one another.”
In times past, such rhetoric meant that the House had to do all the compromising. But not this time. Yesterday’s editorial highlighted three points of agreement with House Speaker William J. Howell and Del. Leo Wardrip, chairman of the House transportation committee:
- With Medicaid and pension “crises” looming over the next few years, Virginia can’t address every financial need with higher taxes. “By branding everything as a ‘crisis,’ we sometimes don’t get in and look at the roots of a problem,” Howell said.
- The private sector is going to play a significantly larger role in 21st century transportation solutions. We don’t go so far as Del. Wardrup in embracing tolls on interstate highways (“We’re just going to have to have that, and that’s going to be good in my opinion,” he said), but we don’t doubt that the largest projects will require private investment, repaid through tolls.
- Virginia needs to stay abreast of innovations such as congestion pricing, maximize the effectiveness of the Virginia Department of Transportation, and hold localities more accountable for land-use decisions that drive up the demand for roads.
The Pilot disagrees, legitimately, that House Republicans are the only ones pushing these other reforms. Indeed, the Kaine administration is pursuing a number of initiatives administratively, and a number of positive ideas are bubbling out of VDOT itself.
The breakthrough here is that Pilot pundits finally acknowledge (in more than a perfunctory manner) that the transportation debate encompasses more than the issue of raising taxes. Now, if we can convince them that the issue of how new revenues are generated is just as important as how much new revenue is brought into the system.
