On the campaign trail, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine popularized the disconnect between transportation and land use planning. As I chronicled in “Seventy-five Years” in a previous edition of Bacon’s Rebellion, that disconnect did not occur overnight — it stemmed from the inability of Virginia’s governance system to adapt to changing human settlement patterns over the past few decades.
Although Kaine’s big idea was never cast into law — he would have given local governments more authority to deny rezoning requests where development would overwhelm local road networks — Republican lawmakers picked up the transportation/land use theme. In the short, tumultuous September session on transportation, the House Republican Caucus outlined new roles for local government, the private sector and the Virginia Department of Transportation in building and maintaining state roads.
The House legislative package represented the most radical re-thinking of transportation in Virginia since 1932, when the current system was put into place. Although these bills, too, failed to make it into law, the ideas behind them are very much alive. Indeed, there is widespread recognition among key players in the transportation debate that the House raised legitimate issues, even if the details of its legislation need work.
This edition of Bacon’s Rebellion focuses on one of the centerpiece House initiatives: devolving responsibility for secondary roads from VDOT to local government. While everyone agrees that VDOT should build and maintain primary roads and Interstates, most of the people I interviewed agreed that it often makes sense to turn authority for secondary roads over to local governments, particularly the fast-growth counties. The trick, as I explain in “The Devolution Solution,” is devising a funding formula that assures counties that they won’t be left holding the fiscal bag.
The transportation/land use disconnect manifests itself in at least two ways in the treatment of secondary roads. The incentives of the current system are all wrong. Local governments approve hundreds of miles of subdivision roads every year, knowing that VDOT will get stuck with the cost of maintaining them — about $1.5 million more each year… year after year. Likewise, local officials ignore the issue of subdivision connectivity, approving cul-de-sac subdivions that dump traffic onto collector roads and contribute nothing to an interconnected road network. If the collector roads get congested, who cares, that’s the state’s problem.
The issue of who builds and maintains Virginia’s secondary roads is only one piece of the transportation puzzle, but an important one. Devolution won’t cure our traffic woes — but it will limit the introduction of low-density cul de sacs into the state system, and it will improve the connectivity of new subdivisions. It makes no sense to pump more money into a transportation system as badly broken as Virginia’s is. Reform first, money second.
