The first major transportation bill to reach the Virginia governor’s desk in 25 years is a compromise package that raises $2.5 billion via bonds, General Fund revenues, increased fees and higher local taxes. Unfortunately, the transportation compromise shows that too many state and local leaders still don’t understand that new roads are needed now, not more mass transit.
Transportation is the lifeblood of the regional economy. Thus, Gov. Tim Kaine and the Republican majority in the General Assembly in Richmond long ago should have made a top priority of building new roads to reduce Northern Virginia’s steadily worsening congestion. Instead, they focused their attention on forcing commuters out of their cars and into Metro buses and trains. Had they put new roads first, Northern Virginia would not now be nearing gridlock. But they didn’t, and now we get a compromise that falls far short of what is needed.
The main problem with the transportation compromise is not that it uses the General Fund to pay off bonds, it’s how those funds are ultimately spent. Northern Virginians will be forced to pay more for a core government service, but will get little or no congestion relief in return. That’s because the $400 million raised in Northern Virginia, mostly from drivers, goes into a special fund controlled by the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority. The authority is only authorized to spend the funds on debt service, Metro, the Virginia Railway Express and the Dulles Rail extension — in that order.
Less than half of the remaining money under the compromise goes to localities and only half of that must be spent “solely on urban and secondary road construction.”
Kaine’s amendments worsened the anti-road imbalance, even though only 13 percent of local commuters use transit. So the vast majority of people in the region who must drive get steadily worsening roads, while their taxes subsidize the small, mostly affluent minority taking bus and subway rides.
Local officials aren’t off the hook, either. All the governing bodies in Northern Virginia lobbied for a regional transportation sales tax in 2002, which was decisively defeated by voters.
Except for Prince William County, local governments have since pocketed windfall property taxes while doing little to ease congestion. So their latest protests about having to raise transportation funds locally have more to do with politics than principle.
Transit has its place, but it is not the solution to traffic congestion. Increasing road capacity is. Yet our state and local officials remain mired in a transit-first mind-set that ignores constituents’ real needs — and is the main reason we have this mess in the first place.
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