Baaah! Baaaaaaah!
by James A. Bacon
Virginia Beach’s ongoing debate over light rail is emblematic of everything that is wrong with Virginia’s system for determining which transportation projects get built. While the Virginia Department of Transportation is implementing a mechanism for ranking road and highway projects, there is no mechanism for ascertaining the proper balance between roads/highways and mass transportation or even to prioritize mass transit projects. Those choices remain as muddied and politicized as ever.
The latest episode in the long-running saga of Virginia Beach light rail, which would extend Norfolk’s existing The Tide rail line to the Virginia Beach resort area, revolved around a bid yesterday by Virginia Beach Councilman John Moss to use $10 million dedicated for light-rail plans to plug a projected $33 million budget hole. City Council rebuffed the measure, but a vocal minority of citizens continue the fight against the rail line. (See the Virginian-Pilot coverage here.)
Foes oppose a rail line that will require heavy up-front subsidies to build and ongoing subsidies to operate. They make a legitimate point. Rail supporters retort that building and maintaining roads also entail taxpayer subsidies. They, too, make a legitimate point. Ever since Virginia abandoned the user-pays principle of transportation funding in the bipartisan transportation-funding legislation of the McDonnell administration, all forms of transportation are subsidized to a greater or lesser degree. Because everything is subsidized, it is exceedingly difficult to determine whether any project is economically justifiable. Anyone can make any claim without any effective way to test it.
In an ideal world, Virginia Beach’s mass transit project would pay for itself through (a) fare revenues, (b) ancillary revenues such as advertising, and (c) revenues from special tax districts surrounding rail stations to capture some of the increased real-estate value created by the rail service. A transit authority would issue bonds to be repaid from those revenue sources, and bond buyers would exercise an independent, non-political judgment as to whether they were likely to earn a competitive, risk-adjusted return on their investment.
But it’s not an ideal world. Mass transit advocates argue rightly that rail competes against subsidized roads. No longer does Virginia pay for its roads mainly through the gas tax. But, rather than hold road funding to a higher and stricter standard, Virginia carves out a percentage of transportation allocations for mass transit. Funds are spread around to appease regional constituencies and ideological enthusiasms.
To see where fuzzy logic of transit funding leads us, read this op-ed by Nelson Reveley, a co-coordinator for the Richmond Clergy Committee for Rapid Transit. Reveley invokes social justice, the environment, public safety and economic development in support of a “comprehensive transportation system for the sake of all our citizens” in the Richmond region. Writes Reveley, a doctoral candidate in religious studies at the University of Virginia:
This isn’t about any singular neighborhood. It’s about all our neighborhoods, as we appreciate and celebrate our intimate interrelation as one metro ecology of education and commerce, employment and leisure, justice and mercy, beauty and creativity, vulnerability and mutuality.
My stomach heaves in rebellion against such treacly sentimentality. Nowhere in his op-ed does Reveley wonder how much this majestic mass transit system might cost. Obviously, the concept of “alternate opportunity cost” is not taught in the UVa religious program, for nowhere does Reveley wonder what could be accomplished by expending the same sum in other ways. Nor does he much care who will pay for this vision of his, although we can be certain it will not be the people who ride the buses or otherwise benefit from the transit lines through the higher property values he insists will occur or workforce benefits accruing from the young talent he suggests will be attracted to the region.
Further, nowhere does Reveley acknowledge the emergence of an alternative, private sector-driven model as epitomized by companies like Uber, Lyft and Bridj, which, given sufficient time and dismantling of regulatory barriers, could provide a shared-ridership transportation alternative far more robust and comprehensive than a public system.
The prevalence of blinkered, woolly headed thinking in the Old Dominion is just staggering. It goes a long way towards explaining our stagnation and relative decline among the 50 states.
