“A Conservative Transportation Alternative” rejects Business As Usual transportation policy on the grounds that the existing transportation system is broken, and no amount of money raised through taxes and allocated by politicians, is likely to fix the problem. The authors marshal a powerful body of evidence to make their case.
First, they make the point that, contrary to assertions by the Axis of Taxes, Virginia has dramatically increased transportation spending since 1986, when the modern era of transportation funding began. The chart below shows that spending outstripped growth in the number of licensed drivers and even growth in Vehicle Miles Traveled.
(Click on image to enlarge.)(I would add one important caveat to this data: It appears not to adjust transportation spending for the inflation in construction costs. There has been little if any increase in real spending, as opposed to nominal spending. Still, the data demonstrates that Virginia’s transportation system has hardly been starved for funds.)
Over the years, the General Assembly has supplemented the 1986 Baliles-era funding sources with several additional revenue streams: the state recordation tax, a state tax on insurance premiums and General Fund appropriations in 2000 ($307 million), 2002 ($147 million), 2005 ($348 million) and 2007 ($661 million).
No amount of spending under the current system, the authors argue, will ever be enough to solve traffic congestion. I will quote the document at some length because I couldn’t say it better myself:
The model of urban development that the Virginia legislature has been funding for decades simply doesn’t work anymore — if it ever did. … Virtually all of the assumptions underlying the model are flawed. It is foolish to assume, for example, that every resident in a region should be able to move by automobile from one point in the region to any other without substantial delay.
Another assumption is that interstate motorists can be whisked around or through urban centers on new highways. Whenever a highway is built for that purpose, it serves as a magnet for development, resulting in yet another clogged corridor.
The model also assumes that the public should be required to pay to extend roads and utilities to new residential and commercial developments located far beyond urbanized areas where the price of land is relatively low. Perhaps more than any single factor, this proposition has produced the sprawl that characterizes Virginia’s metropolitan areas.
The prevailing attitude is that traffic congestion is a problem that can be relieved by constantly constructing new roads and adding lanes to existing ones. … Government tends to respond with a single formula: raise taxes and build more of the same. … Elected officials have been too quick to pass over the most equitable, efficient and disciplined option for paying the staggering cost of transportation projects. That option is tolls or other user charges, land or cash contributions by adjacent property owners who will benefit or other methods of having special beneficiaries rather than taxpayers pay for new projects.
Well said, gentlemen! Well said!
