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Arlington County is embracing flex cars: vehicles that subscribers can reserve by the hour and drive when they need
one instead of hassling with owning and maintaining their own.
The county has turned over premium parking spaces near Metro stops in the Ballston-Rosslyn Corridor to two
car-sharing car operators, and is subsidizing the services
to spur local residents to sign up for them.
Judging by raw numbers alone, the flex car initiative will barely dent Northern Virginia’s massive traffic congestion problem. Heck, it probably won’t even make a perceptible ding.
The pilot project will increase the number of “self-service cars” to 20. Even the most zealous advocates of the concept acknowledge that putting
one shared car on the streets takes only four to eight regular cars off. That rule of thumb translates into 80 to 160 fewer cars in a county of 190,000 inhabitants and a region of two million. Fast-growing Northern Virginia undoubtedly adds that many new cars to the transportation system every day.
But the significance of Arlington’s flex-car initiative is far greater than the paltry numbers would indicate. For starters, it’s only a pilot project. If the program proves successful, Arlington will expand it. But it also drives home a crucial lesson about the economics of mobility.
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Koelemay's
Kosmos
Education
Wins!
The Commonwealth's new
budget puts the priority right where Virginians say it
should be.
Contrary
to political pundits who measure results only in terms
of which political leaders or what philosophy seemed to
have prevailed in the
Richmond
, education is the real winner in the budget just passed
by the General Assembly. That means legislators and Gov.
Mark R. Warner have succeeded in putting education
first, which is where both the general public and the
overwhelming majority of elected officials always have
said it should be.
The
education budget numbers that emerge from the work of
the General Assembly in special session are impressive.
Start with $759 million more for K-12 public education
over the next two years. This increase over and above
that proposed by Gov. Warner in December will allow
Virginia for the first time to meet its responsibilities
to fund Standards of Quality practices its state Board
of Education recommends but local school divisions now
fund themselves.
The
result will be more and better trained teachers, a
broader effort to get at-risk four-year-olds into Head
Start programs, stronger English as a second language
programs, even close to full state funding for students
at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science &
Technology, the highly-honored and nationally-emulated
Governor’s School in Northern Virginia. The increase
also will allow the state to shelve the accounting
practices that fiddle federal and local revenues to make
the state share look more robust. And it gets the
education discussion back on educational goals and
objectives and off the destructive budget blame game of
who hasn’t paid which part of whose responsibilities.
More
>>
Sponsored
Content
Workforce
Wizardry
Chmura Economics & Analytics has developed a
Virginia labor-market database with extraordinary
powers. Subscribers can conjure sophisticated analysis
with a few clicks of a mouse.
Down
in Southwest Virginia not long ago, an unemployed worker
filed with a local "one stop" employment
center and applied for training as a truck driver. A
local administrator turned him down on the grounds that
there was little demand locally for truckers. But
someone deep within the bowels of the Virginia workforce
bureaucracy thought otherwise.
In the
old days, there would have been no easy way to settle
that dispute. But the Workforce Investment Board (WIB)
of far Southwest Virginia had access to JobsEQ, a
labor-market database, which allowed its analysts to
drill deeper into local workforce data than, literally,
anyone else in the country.
"We
looked at it and found out that there were 20 percent
more unemployed truck drivers [in this region] than
there were employed truck drivers," recounts George
Hunicutt Jr., vice chair of the WIB. "There was an
oversupply. It didn't make sense to train any more truck
drivers." Case closed. More.
Patrick
McSweeney
Can
the Republicans Regroup?
Ridden
with dissension after the 2004 budget debate,
Republican legislators may be licking their
self-inflicted wounds for a long time.
There
is no way to avoid the conclusion that, even as
Republican leaders in the House of Delegates voted
against the $1 billion tax increase last Tuesday,
they actually helped to secure its passage.
House
Speaker William Howell and House Majority Leader
Morgan Griffith made one decision after another that
facilitated tax bills they publicly proclaimed to
oppose. On the very day the package of tax and
related measures was approved by the House, Howell
sent one of the bills to a House committee likely to
report the bill to the floor rather than to a
committee likely to kill it. He also had every
justification to make a ruling that would have
blocked another bill in the package, but chose to
bring it to a vote.
More
>>
Patrick
McSweeney
They're
Baaaackk!
Now
they want higher taxes for roads -- subsidies
for an inefficient transportation system that has
become too expensive to support.
Here
we go again!
A
number of members of the Virginia General Assembly
have suggested yet another special session to
consider a tax increase, this time for
transportation. Here is further evidence that
the only sure result of a tax increase is pressure
for even more tax increases.
There
has been much hand-wringing by Gov. Mark R. Warner
and pro-tax legislators over the status of
Virginia’s credit rating. After decades of having
the highest rating, Virginia shouldn’t risk losing
it, these officials insist, if only because it is an
important psychological barrier.
Virginia’s
AAA credit rating is not the only psychological
barrier to be concerned about. The traditional
legislative inhibition to raise taxes in response to
constant demands for more funding is another,
perhaps more important one. As a matter of fact, it
is difficult to maintain the highest credit rating
without a strong inhibition against raising taxes.
More
>>
The
Shape of the Future
Were
they Listening?
Or Was it Just Luck?
Nah,
they weren't listening. Still, the inability of
the General Assembly to raise taxes for
transportation gives Virginia one more chance to
get things right.
Virginia's tax reform/budget nightmare is over for two years. It is time to get up and get to work.
For now, there will be more money for the functions of government in the Commonwealth. There are, however, no Fundamental Changes to make education, safety and security, health care and other responsibilities of government more efficient or effective.
In mobility and access (aka, transportation), there is some good news! Without new money for more transport facilities, citizens have the leverage to implement the changes in human settlement pattern necessary to secure mobility and access. For years, it has been obvious that without Fundamental Change in human settlement patterns, building more facilities just makes transport more dysfunctional.
Now is the time to step forward to insure that the right development is carried out in the right places:
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No
Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Double
Take
Excuse
me, what just happened? The Republican
legislature finally passed a budget but I'm getting
cross-eyed trying to figure out what they did and
why.
Let’s
see…
The
Democratic governor asked the Republican legislature
for a billion dollars in new revenue and the
Republican legislature said, "No, that’s not
enough" — and gave him more.
The
Democratic governor asked the Republican legislature
to keep its word and finally end the car tax and the
Republican legislature said, "No," and
re-imposed, in the out years to come, a good half of
it.
The
Democratic governor asked the Republican legislature
to end the estate tax for millionaires and the
Republican legislature said, "No, let’s keep
it."
The
Democratic governor asked the Republican legislature
to kill him politically for breaking his "‘I
won’t raise taxes" word and the Republican
legislature said, "No, we’ll raise them for
you, we’ll take that beating, and make you a
national figure."
What
is this? The
Twilight Zone? What?
More >>
No
Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Common
Sense
The
best thing coming out the 2004 General Assembly was
the cap on car tax relief -- a subsidy for
inefficient local government and a running sore on
state finances.
If
the 2004 edition of the Virginia General Assembly
did nothing more than cap the car tax reimbursement
to local governments in Virginia at $950 million
annually, it would have been a good year for
legislative common sense, even with the clock still
running -- at day 117, and counting.
Of
course, the legislature accomplished quite a bit
more than this, but this action is the single most
significant component of a compromise agreement that
has generally torn asunder alliances previously
thought to be unassailable.
The
idea that the state could, and would, reimburse
boards of supervisors, and town and city councils
for the local taxes they raised on personal
automobiles was a cockamammied one from the
beginning — unless you were Jim Gilmore, who saw
it as a way to the governorship, fiscal
consequences, and fairness, be damned.
More
>>
Guest
Columnist: Jason Sajko
Embracing
Technology
Virginia
has moved to the forefront of implementing
information technology to cut costs and
increase effectiveness of state government.
State and local government spending has experienced historic turbulence over the past three years. Fiscal year 2003 saw the largest gap between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and tax revenues in over 30 years, indicating a disparity in available state funding. Despite
projected growth with the current economic recovery, states are being forced to rethink their organizations, tools, and policies in an attempt to maintain and initiate information technology (IT) projects that were squeezed out by past budget shortfalls.
The Commonwealth of Virginia has established itself at the forefront of state IT practices. In this analysis, INPUT reviews Virginia’s recent IT initiatives to consolidate their IT functions, establish e-procurement tools, and implement progressive policy changes.
Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA)
In May of 2003, Gov. Mark R. Warner signed two bills that together dissolved the Department of Technology Planning, the Department of Information Technology, the Virginia Information Providers Network Authority, the Board of the Virginia Information Providers Network Authority, and the Chief Information Officer Advisory Board. The signed legislation combined the roles and responsibilities of these agencies and boards into the Virginia Information Technologies Agency.
More
>>
Guest
Columnist: James Atticus Bowden
Well,
Bless Their Hearts
Today's
Methodists have lost their way. Jim Bowden's
mother, if she were around, would set them
straight.
This
Mother’s Day I wonder what my Mother, Edith
Henderson Bowden (1918-1986), would say about
her beloved Methodist
Church. She
might say, “Methodists?
Well bless their hearts, too many of
them are lost.”
Her look -- ‘The Look’ -- would
speak more. Anytime
a Southerner says, “Well, bless his
heart”, substitute the words “That stupid
idiot.” Or
stronger words.
Actually,
the sissy Christian Methodists should thank
the cross-dressing, inclusive Goddess of their
imaging that my Mother isn’t around today.
She would loom over them – at five
foot four – and with that pointed finger
raised and aimed, Mama would’ve set them
straight. The
apologists for the holiness of anal sex, would
learn a new meaning for ‘fear of the Lord’
and she would’ve never raised her voice.
Of
course, her Methodist worldview wasn’t the
wimpy, weak, watered-down Christianity of half
the church today.
I teased her on her death bed that she
was the re-incarnation of Jean Calvin.
She laughed and said, “Well, bless
your heart.”
More
>>
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