The January 13 The Shape of the Future column ("Smoke and Shadows") last year explored the role of The Washington Post in providing information on mobility, access and human settlement patterns.

 

A year has gone by. Traffic congestion has grown worse. Mobility has become an evermore hotly debated issue, especially during last Fall’s election season. One would hope the National Capital Subregion’s major print media outlet would have altered its position. The Washington Post documents that mobility is a major regional problem, and editorials, news stories and columnists say that they want to help improve it. However, that does not appear to be the net result.

 

The editorial side of The Post continues to support the delusion that just building more transport facilities will improve mobility and access.

 

The news side, as it did in 2002, provides useful and often insightful perspectives in stories, columns and features. However, in order to make sense of this input, readers need to understand the overall context. Without this framework, citizens cannot fit the stories into a comprehensible whole. The news coverage and columns focus on stories -- vignettes and fragments -- that lack an overarching context. In addition, there is a trend to focus on short-term “fixes” without a tie to longer-term strategies.

 

This column examines The Washington Post’s editorial treatment of access and mobility. The next one will address the news side of transport coverage.

 

One-Theme Editorials

 

The one-note editorials which attempt to sell the position that “more money to build transport facilities is what is needed to improve mobility” continued throughout 2003. Sometimes the “just build it” theme is coupled with the suggestion that a “regional” agency to spend the money would be a good idea. 

 

While the editors talk about the need to create a regional agency to spend money, they do not mention the need first to have regional and subregional plans and strategies to create transportable human settlement patterns. These plans, if implemented, would shape the distribution of travel demand and thus determine what new facilities, if any, are needed. There must be a balance between land-use and transport that does not exist.

Editorials focused on transportation facilities appear nearly every week. It would be pointless to single out one or two. Hundreds of column inches of valuable editorial space that could have built regional and subregional understandings have been wasted on one-theme opinions.

 

Beyond Editorials

 

The editorial staff also puts together “substantive” material in the form of carefully screened and scripted op-eds and “community feedback.” Typical of the op-ed material was a set of items in the Sunday, November 16, 2003, Outlook Section. “Getting In Gear About Traffic...” and “...A Tale From The Trenches” took up nearly half a page. An “authoritative” item by John Mason is paired with an entertaining vignette by John Kropf. 

 

John Mason is a well-known politician with years of experience as a military officer and a senior executive of a Beltway Bandit consulting firm. This firm, SAIC, has done millions of dollars worth of government and developer transportation consulting work. Mason, also the former mayor of a village-scale municipality within Fairfax County, was defeated for reelection recently by a candidate who professed to support more intelligent policies impacting settlement patterns in the jurisdiction. The op-ed page caption bills Mason as “a former Mayor of Fairfax City and a former member of the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board.” This is true, but there is no mention of his employer SAIC and its work.  

 

John Kropf has experience living in Alexandria and abroad but now drives to a VDOT park and ride lot just east of the town of Warrenton in Fauquier County to catch a ride to his job in the core of the federal district. This park-and-ride lot is 40-plus miles from the Memorial Bridge.

 

Two things would have made better use of the ink and paper consumed by this November feature. I develop these recommendations in some detail because they could do much to cure what ails The Washington Post’s editorial position on mobility and transportation.

 

Reality One

 

The Washington Post could offer substantive help to John Mason and fellow former municipal and state officeholders along with those now in office. This assistance should extend to the staffs of U.S. DOT, VA DOT, MD DOT, WV DOT, PA DOT and DC DOT plus the academics and consultants who provide advice to these agencies. The Post needs to provide a special forum and the incentive for all these parties to clearly state:

As long as millions of individuals in the region believe it is in their families’ and their organizations’ best interests to live wherever they want, work wherever they want and then seek services and recreation wherever they want, there can be no solution to the National Capital Subregions mobility crisis, period!

 

There can be little professional disagreement with this statement. It is, however, painful for elected officials, road builders or consultants to admit this axiomatic truth. The truth is hard to state now because they all have been silent for so long. It not possible to design or build a transport system for a large New Urban Region that provides mobility and access to dysfunctionally scattered trip origins and destinations. This point has been made repeatedly since the 1970s by those who recognize the need for a balance between the travel demand generated by the settlement pattern and the transport system created to provide mobility and access. 

 

The fact that a dysfunctional distribution of origins and destinations cannot be served by an economically feasible and physically effective mobility system is not a matter of policy or politics: It is a physical reality based on the Natural Laws that govern the known Universe and the market-driven democracy that now exists in the United States. 

 

The only response to the statement of trip-distribution reality by governance practitioners is silence. This silence allows conditions on the demand side to grow worse and worse as documented by measures such as “person hours of delay” on roadways. When mobility becomes a matter of public debate, officials in one agency blame those in another agency rather than the core reason for congestion. When immobility gets so bad that citizens are willing to change their pattern of activity, they are given no guidance or help in understanding what changes will improve access and mobility. If citizens understood the truth at the outset, they could make intelligent decisions that would benefit all. 

 

The Myth Behind Ill-Advised Location Decisions

 

Most citizens act as if they believe the Private Vehicle Mobility Myth which would be refuted by the joint declaration suggested above. This myth is reinforced daily by auto, oil and development industry advertising and lobbying. There are several variations of the Private Vehicle Mobility Myth; here are two:

 

Individuals and families can live wherever they can afford and work wherever they can find a job. In addition, they can seek services and recreation wherever they choose. After citizens make these choices, the myth holds it is their right to have government build a roadway/highway/expressway system that would allow everyone to drive a private vehicle wherever they want to go, whenever they want to go there and arrive in a timely manner.

 

Entrepreneurs believe they can start an enterprise wherever they want, hire employees from wherever they want, seek customers wherever they want, and then it is their right to have government provide them with a roadway/highway/expressway system so that employees can get to work and company vehicles can deliver goods and services wherever the enterprises want them to go whenever they want them to go there. Additionally, these entrepreneurs believe they entitled to have their employees and the company vehicles arrive at their destinations in a timely manner.

 

So long as citizens and their organizations believe these and/or other variations of the Private Vehicle Mobility Myth and they make location decisions based on this belief, all the things John Mason warns against in his November op-ed will happen. Traffic congestion will get worse, air quality will get worse, and citizen frustrations will continue to grow. John Kropf and his family will continue to suffer, and eventually the Subregion will sink into economic stagnation, social conflict and physical gridlock. This future scenario is sometimes termed “ Bangladesh on the Potomac.”

 

Inappropriate and uninformed location decisions by a few citizens does not present a problem, but these same actions by thousands upon thousands of individuals, families and organizations spell GRIDLOCK.  Making this fact clear is the first step to securing access and mobility.

 

Reality Two

 

The Washington Post editors and those who write items that the Post editors favor need to better understand the role of transport facilities in providing mobility and access. For instance, in the November op-ed, John Mason spends five and one-half paragraphs in a discussion of short-term and long-term goals to achieve a balanced transportation system. One might disagree with the priorities outlined, but they are points worth making. Mason then jumps into the abyss of confusion with the sentence: “At the same time, we must ensure that there will be more crossings of the Potomac and that new highway capacity ensures a balance of transportation network ...”   

 

Having made the point detailed under REALITY ONE above and having listed all the grave consequences of not improving mobility, the same voices that spoke out to refute the Private Vehicle Mobility Myth must next call for fundamental changes in land use to create functional human settlement patterns. 

 

Only with functional patterns and densities of land use can an efficient and effective transport system be provided. Without fundamental change in human settlement pattern to achieve the creation of Balanced Communities in a sustainable New Urban Region, more river crossings and more highway capacity will just make mobility worse.