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Richmond
Region Grapples with
Transportation
Solutions
By
Bob Burke
RICHMOND--Given
the drumbeat of bad news about the state’s
dwindling and overcommitted road construction
budget, it seems like a lousy time to ask for more
money. But Richmond-area leaders are going to do
it anyway.
At
a half-day forum on the region’s transportation
needs held Friday, about 250 people from business
and political circles were told that travel in the
Richmond area could soon resemble conditions in
Hampton Roads or even Northern Virginia, one of
the country’s most traffic-choked regions.
“We’re
on our way to catching up,” said former governor
Gerald Baliles, who hosted the event at the
Capital One complex in Goochland County.
Baliles
wants the area’s leaders to agree on what road
or transit projects should come first, “so this
region speaks with one voice” when it lobbies
for scarce state transportation dollars. The only thing you get for free is
congestion,” he said.
In
the Richmond region, the problem is keeping up
with 20-plus years of population growth and
sprawling development that now reaches far outside
the city’s urban core.
“Our
region is consuming more and more land per
person,” said Michael Clements, a planner with
the Richmond Regional Planning District
Commission. In 1970 there were 145 square miles of
urban area, and by 2000 that had climbed to 357
square miles. In the next 20 years it could cover
400 to 450 square miles, Clements warned.
During
a mid-morning break Baliles said forum organizers
understood the problem. “We’ve identified
[land use] as an issue,” he said. “I think
you’ll hear more about it.”
But
except for the occasional reference, none of the
speakers used the forum to explicitly make the
connection between the scattered development and
the expense of tying it all together with a road
network.
Instead,
the thrust of the meeting was about raising money.
Baliles, who in 1986 pushed through the last
gas-tax increase, noted that many new road
projects are being built in public-private deals
and paid for with toll revenues.
That’s
not enough. Replacing the Huguenot Bridge over the
James River or widening Interstate 64 “requires
money, lots of it,” he said. “And it’s not
laying around for the picking.”
That
left some observers expressing reservations.
“We’ve heard a lot about the funding
challenges,” said Tripp Pollard with the
Southern Environmental Law Center, author of a
2003 study in the region’s growth patterns and
one of the forum’s panelists. “I don’t know
if we’ll ever get to what we may call a regional
growth plan, but without a better link between
regional transportation planning and land use, no
amount of roads will fix it.”
Others
made similar points. Anne Oman, an analyst for the
House Appropriations Committee, said finding
efficient ways to squeeze more capacity out of the
existing highway systems would help. “Even if
all the money were available, it’s not as though
you can build new roads in perpetuity,” she
said. “We have to learn how to better manage the
roads that are available to us.”
The
forum was hosted several Richmond-area groups,
including the Greater Richmond Chamber of
Commerce’s Regional Transportation Advocacy
Board.
Near
the end of the session, Baliles and Whittington
Clement, who recently resigned as Gov. Mark R.
Warner’s secretary of transportation, floated
two proposals that could, if enacted, have a major
impact.
Baliles
suggested that localities could be required to
either prove that new developments wouldn’t
overwhelm the existing transportation network, or
identify the funds to pay for expanding it. He
called it a “transportation impact study.”
Clement
suggested going a step further: Make localities
raise the money to build and maintain roads.
Currently, the state pays for transportation
construction, which encourages localities to open
their doors to sprawling development to raise
their tax base, while ignoring the costs of
building roads.
“Do
we really want to be one of three states that
oversees lane miles all the way down the secondary
road level?” Clement asked. “I would like to
see the paradigm shifted.”
Pollard
hopes that the shortage of cash will force
decision-makers to think differently about land
use in fast-growing regions. Such a change could
let transportation planners shift money toward
rail and other mass transit, which now gets far
less than road construction. “There are
obviously still roads that need to be built,” he
said. “But I don’t think we’ll ever make
much progress unless we address the land-use side.
Just putting money in isn’t going to do it.”
Bacon's
Rebellion News Service
June
20, 2005
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