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The
Bill Is Coming Due
Government
policy over the decades has fostered an
auto-dependent transportation system. Virginia can't
afford to pump more money into that system without
fundamental reform.
For
perhaps the first time since the automobile came to
dominate our transportation policy, we may see in
the next year a fundamental change in the way we
deal with its impact on settlement patterns.
As with most things, the automobile has had
both beneficial and harmful effects.
The
beneficial effects are obvious.
We enjoy a measure of mobility, flexibility
and privacy in personal travel that was unimaginable
before the automobile appeared.
At the same time, we are increasingly aware
of the costs of the sprawling settlement patterns
the automobile has induced.
It
is a central but largely unspoken tenet of our
culture that anyone with a driver’s license should
be able to travel anywhere he or she wants to go at
any time, day or night.
This devotion to personal mobility has done
more to shape our society than our commitment to
family or community.
Indeed, the automobile has undermined the
bonds of family and community.
Decades
of development have left most of Virginia’s
urbanized areas so dependent on the automobile that
other modes of transportation are either
prohibitively expensive or physically impossible.
Traffic congestion in many cities and suburbs
is so acute at times that the automobile no longer
assures the kind of personal mobility we have come
to treat as a natural right.
Several regions of the Commonwealth suffer
from air pollution caused principally by automobile
emissions.
The
pace of growth, which has been influenced more by
our ability to drive great distances in automobiles
than by the mere increase in our population, is
changing Virginia’s
landscape at an alarming rate.
Some counties have been transformed from
rural to urban in a single generation.
We
have deferred the cost of this type of growth for
decades, but the balloon payment is coming due.
Some fundamental changes are needed to assure
that we can make that payment.
First,
we should recognize that government policies
contributed significantly to our
automobile-dependent system and that those policies
should be reconsidered.
Second, we should hesitate before we adopt
any new government policies because they, too, may
become inflexible and self-perpetuating, and could
have hidden harmful effects of their own.
The
better course is for government at the federal and
state levels to do less, not more.
Government transportation policies have
produced a highly inefficient transportation system
and encouraged development that can’t pay its own
way.
Political
pressures make it virtually impossible for
government officials to make policy choices that
would lead to a truly efficient transportation
system. Only
in a market-based, private enterprise system will
the difficult decisions be made that produce real
efficiency. There
are signs that some of our leaders are awakening to
that reality.
Earlier
this month, the Commonwealth Transportation Board
adopted a state transportation plan that turns away
from automobile dependency.
The plan concludes that paying for all of our
transportation needs through the year 2025 will cost
more than $203 billion, which undoubtedly will not
be generated by higher taxes.
The Board also wisely called on the General
Assembly to resolve the longstanding problem of
leaving land use decisions to local governments
without giving them responsibility and power to
provide or pay for necessary transportation
infrastructure.
The
fundamental flaw in the Board’s approach is that
it assumes government itself can produce an
efficient transportation system through top-down
master planning. We
need more investment in transportation, but we will
see true efficiency only if that investment is made
by the free enterprise system, not the government.
--
November 29,
2004
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