During the 1970s, local elected officials in the Washington area ignored their own transportation planners’ advice and erased dozens of planned highway projects from regional maps — while continuing to approve residential and commercial development. The result is the mess of overdevelopment and inadequate roads we face today. To understand why the commonwealth of Virginia continues to allow its most prosperous region to sink into gridlock, let’s look at another part of the country that did things differently.
In “The Road More Traveled,” authors Ted Balaker and Sam Staley point out that Houston, the nation’s seventh-largest metropolitan area and home to a major port and more Fortune 500 companies than any other city besides New York and Chicago, faced a similar congestion problem back in 1982. But Houston embarked on an aggressive road- building program, increasing freeway miles 56 percent and expanding capacity on existing arteries. Not surprisingly, traffic congestion eased considerably.
However, when the Texas city abandoned its “mobility first” mentality — adding just 15 freeway miles per year between 1993 and 2000, while the population continued to grow 20 percent annually — peak travel delays almost doubled, even though Houston was also one of four cities to significantly increase transit ridership.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, just a fraction of Northern Virginia commuters use transit compared with those who drive to work alone. Arlington has the highest ratio (22 percent vs. 55 percent), but transit’s share drops precipitously in Fairfax (9 percent vs. 73 percent), Prince William (5 percent vs. 70 percent) and Loudoun counties (2 percent vs. 79 percent). However, most of the proposed transportation funding over the next 30 years is going to, you guessed it, mass transit.
If Gov. Tim Kaine and the General Assembly had a “mobility first” mentality, transportation would be the first thing in the state budget (which increased more than 85 percent since 1997), not the last. The state currently spends just $4.8 billion annually to build and maintain 57,000 miles of public roads — out of a $74.9 billion biennial budget. Meanwhile, the Transportation Trust Fund remains vulnerable to future raids in an economic downturn, which may happen as soon as 2010 — when no more money for new road construction will be available.
Instead of keeping his own campaign promise not to raise taxes until a constitutional amendment puts the TTF off limits to general spending, Kaine is recycling the same transit-heavy $5.2 billion tax package the legislature rejected last year. Sen. Jeannemarie Devolites-Davis, R-Vienna, and Dels. Dave Albo, R-Springfield, and Tom Rust, R-Herndon, are proposing more modest tax hikes they say will raise $400 million a year to expand local roads in Northern Virginia, but not build any new ones. Members of both parties are not even willing to devote the entire projected $1 billion surplus to transportation, much less carve out more room in the state budget.
But unless Richmond’s “mobility last” mindset changes dramatically, Northern Virginia drivers will soon find themselves immobilized — while paying much higher taxes and tolls to support transit. That’s called being taken for a ride.
