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Good
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Look,
Ma, No Taxes
Rebounding
quickly from its November election disaster, the
Warner administration has crafted a credible
transportation strategy that doesn’t stiff
the taxpayers.
You
have to give credit to Whitt Clement and the rest of
the Warner transportation team: They can turn on a
dime.
Clement,
Virginia’s
secretary of transportation, spent the better part
of a year promoting proposals in Northern
Virginia
and Hampton Roads to raise sales taxes to pay for
transportation projects. After voters shot down both
referenda at the polls, he could have responded by
sulking, pointing fingers or insulting the
intelligence of the electorate. But he didn’t. He
listened. “We got the message,” Clement says.
“We know we need to do business differently.”
Now,
barely a month after the Warner administration’s
worst political defeat to date, Clement has cobbled
together a new transportation strategy built on the
premise of no more taxes. The new agenda is still a
work in progress, and it sidesteps some thorny
issues that transcend Clement’s authority to
address, but it represents a radical rethinking of Virginia
transportation policy.
Gone
are the expansive road and transit construction
programs that were the hallmark of the Gilmore
administration and Warner's first year. Focus has
shifted to
exploring alternatives to building more roads, and
casting a wide net for fresh ideas. Clement
is looking at “hot lanes” and congestion
pricing, telecommuting, carpooling and small-scale,
congestion-mitigation projects such as the redesign
of highway entrance ramps. He also is the first
transportation secretary in Virginia
to address the disconnect between land use planning
by localities and transportation planning by the state.
Perhaps
the most momentous change is the realization that
father VDOT does not always know what’s best. He's
soliciting ideas that originate outside the VDOT
bureaucracy, says Clement: from private contractors,
from local governments, from entrepreneurs who are
thinking outside the roadbed. In all likelihood,
many of these unconventional notions will be put
into effect.
Reforming
that bureaucracy is the first order of business.
VDOT, once one of the most respected highway
departments in the country, lost massive credibility
during the Gilmore administration for massive cost
overruns on major highway projects, from the Springfield
bypass to the U.S. 58 corridor.
To put it charitably, VDOT’s six-year program --
the road map of future construction projects –
lost touch with reality. Funding for many of the
projects outlined in the plan did not exist.
Last
April, Gov. Mark R. Warner appointed a new
transportation commissioner to lead the overhaul.
Philip Shucet moved aggressively to ensure that VDOT
delivered projects on time and on budget, and
revised the six-year plan to include only those
improvements that could be paid for. Based on the
roadwork of the past year, Warner recently announced
reform legislation for 2003 to create a
VDOT “that the public can trust and rely on, a
VDOT that is a wise steward of tax dollars.”
Warner
has emphasized administrative reform from the
beginning of his administration. Shucet’s work represents a return to financial
integrity and managerial competence that Virginians
demand of government. By contrast, the
administration’s about-face on its
pave-first-ask-questions-later philosophy constitutes
a dramatic departure from the past. The Warner
administration is truly mapping a new strategy.
Gov.
Gerald L. Baliles hoisted into place the scaffolding
of Virginia’s
current transportation program in 1986. He
created a larger and more reliable funding stream
for highways, rail, ports and aviation by hiking the
sales and gas taxes. Despite a nod to
“inter-modal” transportation, however, VDOT remained in
the business of designing, building and maintaining
highways. If traffic was congested, the solution
invariably involved building
a bypass, adding a cloverleaf, or grafting on a
bypass.
By
the early 1990s, political pressure mounted to raise
taxes again in order to build more roads. Resisting
tax increases, Gov. George Allen explored
alternatives to the tax-and-pave model. His
administration pioneered a number of strategies –
most notably a “smart roads” program to inform
motorists of adverse traffic conditions – that
favored increasing the capacity of the existing
transportation system over expanding the size of the
system. He also passed legislation that enabled the
private sector to propose and participate in
toll-financed projects.
Allen’s
programs gave VDOT options it didn’t have before
but they did not dent the perception, particularly
in Northern
Virginia,
of worsening traffic congestion. Rather than
challenge the premise that laying asphalt would
solve the region’s problems, the Gilmore
administration focused its energies on finding the
funds – without raising taxes -- to accelerate the
road-building program. The beg-borrow-or-steal
philosophy contributed to the fiscal disaster
inherited by the Warner administration.
Upon
taking office nearly a year ago, Warner moved
quickly to address VDOT’s grievous managerial
flaws. In this instance, good governance happened to
coincide with good politics: The Gilmore
administration made a convenient, and legitimate,
whipping boy for Virginia’s
transportation woes. But Warner never questioned the
remedy proposed by his supporters in the
Northern
Virginia
development community: raising local taxes to build
more roads and fund more mass transit projects.
In
retrospect, it appears that the transportation
“crisis”
was a P.R. conjuring trick. As
explained here in “Handicapping
the Referendum” (October
28, 2002),
average commuting times for most Northern
Virginians
had not gotten appreciably worse over the 1990s.
More agitated by taxes than congestion, voters
soundly rejected the opportunity to raise their
sales tax.
Clement heard
the message loud and clear. Indeed, the
transportation secretary has converted into a
zealous promoter of alternative transportation
solutions. Last week, he outlined several new
initiatives to a statewide audience of Chamber of Commerce
executives. And judging by his enthusiasm for the
task, he will unearth more good ideas in the
months to come.
As
my fellow columnists Fred Williamson and Joanna
Hanks might say, "Everything is on the
table." Here are some of the ideas that Clement
is examining:
-
Hot lanes on I-495. The cost of acquiring right of way makes it
prohibitive to add another lane to the
Washington Beltway. What can be done to manage
traffic congestion? One proposal, submitted by a
private-sector consortium, would be to create a
“hot lane” on the Beltway. People would pay
a variable-priced toll for the right to use the
lane. The price would rise during periods of
peak demand and drop when traffic eases. The
proposal would relieve stress by allowing people
in a big hurry to buy a route past the
congestion.
-
Virginia Railway Express.
The line between
Fredericksburg
and
Washington,
D.C.,
is the second fastest-growing commuter rail in
the
U.S.,
currently accounting for 14,000 passenger trips
daily. Although adding more rail cars would be
expensive, it might be a less expensive way to
boost capacity than adding a lane to I-95.
-
Ride sharing. A Northern Virginia
entrepreneur is promoting an innovative way to
encourage carpooling. His business, NuRide,
would pay people 50 cents a head per day to
share rides. To collect, they must click on the
NuRide website, where they will see
location-specific advertisers. If a commuter
gets off the Interstate at Crystal
City,
say, the Crystal City Subway might pay to
advertise the next day’s special. Clement is
open to the idea, within state procurement
guidelines, of boosting the enterprise.
-
Tolls and public-private partnerships.
Tolls may be one politically acceptable way to
raise money for big-ticket transportation
improvements. Clement wants to elicit more
creative suggestions on how the state and the
private sector might collaborate on the
financing and building of new projects or better
utilization of existing assets. For instance, a
private consortium has proposed building
dedicated truck lanes down I-81, financed
through tolls on trucks. Clement is
not opposed to the idea, but he would like to
see what other ideas surface for dealing with
congestion on the Interstate.
-
Congestion mitigation.
Clement is looking for ideas from local
governments, smart growth advocates, planning
districts and anyone else to propose highly
focused, quick-payback traffic mitigation ideas.
The state will develop a list of the Top Ten
congestion-relief projects in Northern Virginia
and Hampton Roads to work into the six-year
plan. Each project must cost less than $2
million and be completed within 12 months. As an
example, Clement cites a proposal to improve the
Van Dorn entrance ramp to I-395 in Fairfax
County.
-
Rural Rustic Roads. Rural roads must be built to strict VDOT
safety standards. But some little-traveled roads
may provide perfectly adequate transportation
for small numbers of people without the
acquisition of rights of way, clearing of trees
and straightening of curves. Clement wants to
expand a pilot program to allow local boards of
supervisors to designate so-called Rural Rustic
Roads, which carry between 50 and 500 cars per
day, to “pave in place.” These roads can
cost one-tenth the normal amount. Says Clement:
“They beat dirt, mud and gravel.”
In
potentially his most far-reaching initiative,
Clement tries to patch the gap between state
transportation planning and local use planning.
Here’s how the process works now: Localities
develop comprehensive land use plans, trading off between anticipated tax
revenues from new development and the cost of
providing infrastructure and services. Localities
then hand their plans to VDOT to use in devising its
transportation plan. VDOT has no input in the local
process.
The
process is “a system that’s designed to fail,”
says Clement. “It’s
frustrating to know that a high-growth county can
implement zoning policies that increase its tax base
without worrying about transportation infrastructure
because the state will pick up the tab.”
The dysfunctional system, which arises from the deeply embedded
division of powers between the state and localities,
is beyond his power to change, says Clement.
Localities will guard their powers jealously, and he
senses little appetite in the General Assembly to
fight them. What he can do, however, is offer VDOT’s planning capabilities to those localities
interested in taking transportation into account.
VDOT is undertaking pilot projects with Botetourt County, outside
Roanoke, and Caroline County, south of
Fredericksburg – counties on the urban fringe that
are beginning to feel the pressures of growth.
“The [development] battles aren’t being fought
there yet,” says Clement. “But they’re on the
cusp of having to deal with some significant issues.
… We will lend our professional staff and insight
to the extent that they are welcomed.”
Such guidance represents, at best, a baby step forward. It treats
planning as a local issue, rather than a regional
issue cutting across an entire metropolitan area (or,
as fellow columnist Ed Risse would say, an entire
“New Urban Region”). Furthermore, it has no
teeth; there are no sanctions against counties that
ignore VDOT’s advice.
Even so, the measure is significant. Clement, to my knowledge, is
the first transportation secretary in
Virginia
to ever advocate closer collaboration between the
state and localities in planning land uses and
transportation. He deserves credit for tackling an issue that his predecessors never
even acknowledged to be a problem. If Botetourt and Caroline
counties experience positive outcomes, Clement may have
latitude to
expand the program.
The
causes of traffic congestion are complex. There are
no easy solutions. If there were, some state or
region in the great laboratory of democracy that is
the
United
States
would have stumbled across them. Given Clement’s
openness to innovation and his energy in seeking
alternatives, it seems churlish to
point out that his program amounts to fine-tuning
Virginia's transportation system rather than
fundamentally changing it.
Despite
Virginia's massive investment in road and transit,
traffic congestion steadily gets worse because, on a
macro scale, metropolitan-wide planning does not
exist, and, on a micro scale, our vision for
urban/suburban design is flawed.
Virginia
needs to
create better balanced communities; land use plans
must permit a finer-grained mix of land uses, allowing
people to live, work, shop and play in locations
within close geographic proximity. A
better mix would make it possible for people to take
fewer, shorter trips in cars -- or even walk, bike or,
gadzooks, ride a Segway
human transporter -- taking a load off the
transportation system.
Virginians also need to change the feeder-artery configuration of
its streets and highways, which funnels traffic into
a handful of highly congested roads. The
traditional grid pattern of development does a much
better job of distributing traffic more evenly. We
need to embrace an urban design that makes it easier
to walk from place to place rather than, as happens
in many commercial areas, force people to hop in
their cars to cross the street.
Finally,
Virginia
needs to develop strategies for
infill and urban/surburban redevelopment, making greater
use of underutilized streets and thoroughfares. VDOT can take the
lead by reallocating funds in its six-year plan.
Instead of following development into greenfields,
the state should be using transportation funds to
steer development back into the metropolitan core.
The good news is that these policies don’t call for raising
taxes and spending more money; they won’t alienate
taxpayers. The bad news is that they require
changing a complex, interlocking system of
governmental institutions; they will alienate entrenched
business and political constituencies. Clement can't
fight that battle by himself: He's focusing on
changes that he, as secretary of transportation, has
the power to implement. But if Gov. Warner
truly wants to be known as the governor who
transformed the
structure of Virginia
government, there is no
evading the task.
--
December
16, 2002
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