In
one of history’s most famous scientific experiments,
the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov rang a bell while
presenting a dog with a piece of meat. Over time,
conditioned to associate the bell with the meat, the dog
began salivating when hearing the bell -- even when
there was no meat. Sometimes I wonder if Virginia’s legislators are the victims of some Pavlovian
experiment gone awry.
By
linking the phrases “transportation crisis” and
“build more roads”, industry lobbyists and editorial
pundits have turned our lawmakers into slavering
advocates of more spending and higher taxes. So deeply
has this conditioned response embedded itself in the
legislative psyche that lawmakers don't even bother to
justify the need to build more roads. They go straight
from "transportation crisis" to "raising
taxes" in a reflexive arc that bypasses the
cognitive process entirely.
The
2005 session of the General Assembly approved a $828
transportation funding package, and that's just a down
payment. Because most of the funds represent a one-time
injection into the system, many legislators are still
clamoring for a "long term" solution. Indeed,
Senate Finance Chair John Chichester,
R-Fredericksburg, and his enablers in the state Senate have every hope of ramming through
a tax hike next year.
Reflecting
Virginia's time-honored planning methodology, the VTrans2025 study lists $108 billion in “unmet
transportation needs” through the year 2025 – over
and above the $95 billion in transportation revenues
projected from existing revenue sources. The study cites
$74 billion in highway projects and $31 billion in
rail/public transit projects that have no identifiable
funding source. If
these needs were fully financed, they would cost
Virginians an extra $5 billion a year.
That's
the part of the VTrans2025 study that our leading
politicians understood. They act as if they stopped
reading at that point.
This
may come as a blinding revelation, but there are alternatives
to building more roads and mass transit projects. The fact
that the General Assembly has systematically ignored these
alternatives does not mean that they do not exist. They
do.
VTrans2025, published
under the signature of Transportation Secretary Whitt Clement, reflects the best thinking of
the state's transportation professionals. Among
other observations, the report highlights the intimate
connection between the pattern of land use and
transportation. In Virginia,
responsibility for planning transportation resides with
the state, while the job of planning land use belongs to
the localities. As the report says:
This
gives rise to a number of problems -- traffic
generated by development may exceed the transportation
system's capacity; land development patterns and
building site designs may not accommodate alternate
travel modes; and transportation investment decisions
may accelerate development in an area that might not
otherwise have developed in the same way or same
place. This is a fundamental problem and until the
governance issue is addressed, no transportation plan
can completely address the issue. (My emphasis.)
I
have yet to read a single quote by a single legislator
acknowledging that the pattern of land use is a
fundamental force, along with population growth, in
driving the exponential increase in traffic. Unless this
basic reality is addressed, spending more money on
transportation projects does little more than funnel
money into the pockets of developers, land speculators
and the construction industry. Of course, given the
tax-and-build lobby's massive contributions to the
General Assembly, maybe that's the point.
Besides
advocating the coordination of
transportation and land use planning, VTrans2025
explores various policy alternatives. "Strategies to
address congestion include: increasing system capacity
(e.g. expanding roads, adding more transit); operating
the system more efficiently (e.g. signal system
synchronization); and reducing system demand (e.g. van
pools and telemarketing)."
Here
are some of the options specifically cited in the report:
-
Providing
information to travelers. "Information can
be conveyed to travelers and commercial carriers
regarding work zones, congestion, weather
conditions, and other potential hazards both before
and during a trip to influence decisions when to
start, what route to take, and which mode to
use."
-
Improving
Traffic Signal Systems. "Signals can be
actualized, synchronized and optimized to facilitate
movement of vehicles along a corridor. ... Advanced
signal systems can control access to components of
the system (e.g. ramp metering), such as HOV lanes
or congested interstate facilities."
-
Reducing
demand. "Technology can eliminate the need for
some trips. ... Telecommuting, also called
teleworking, is performing work away from the
primary office, permitting some employees to avoid
commuting altogether."
VTrans2025
cites a federal study indicating that an investment in
information-technology infrastructure can yield an $8
benefit for every $1 invested. By way of specific
examples, the report described a success story in Tysons
Corner in which a traffic-light optimization project
saved motorists an estimated $20 million a year in
congested-related costs.
Wow,
those sound like some interesting ideas -- and they
don't come close to exhausting the possibilities. (For
details,
read my back columns on transportation options or EM
Risse's columns about land use.) One
would expect that our legislators, in their diligence to spare
taxpayers from raising taxes any more than necessary, would
turn over every stone in the hope of finding cost-effective
alternatives to laying rail lines and asphalt.
Well,
not in the 2005 session, they didn't. Here's what passes for bold,
innovative thinking: The General Assembly created a $75
million local partnership fund and a $50 million
public-private partnership fund which the state can tap
to partner with localities or the private sector to add
more transportation capacity.
Largely
behind the scenes, VDOT
has invested modest sums in alternative projects, such
as building a "smart" transportation system
that alerts motorists to congestion, and an advanced
computer model that forecasts the impact of land use
decisions on the transportation system. Virginia
Department of Transportation Commissioner Philip Shucet
has proposed creating a $1 million seed fund
to stimulate telework and other demand-mitigation
strategies. These are all worthy initiatives, but they
have generated little interest in the legislature, much
less a movement to expand demand-mitigation programs.
I
would like to introduce a simple economic principle to
the lawyer-solons who run the General Assembly. It’s
called Return on Investment (ROI). No one in either government or business has enough money to do all the
things they want. When business executives are
confronted with alternative ways to deploy scarce
capital, they select those projects expected to generate
the highest return on investment. Virginia should apply the same
business logic to its
transportation policy: Invest the Commonwealth's finite resources in those
congestion-mitigation strategies that yield the highest
return on investment or, put another way, that yield the
greatest reduction in traffic congestion per dollar
spent.
Legislators
need to know: What is the rate of return on widening a
particular stretch of interstate, or extending the METRO
line to Dulles? How does that ROI compare to optimizing
traffic light sequencing along heavily traveled
thoroughfares... metering the entrance ramps onto
interstates... providing information services that
alert subscribers to traffic congestion along their
routes to and from work... and promoting a telework/hoteling
strategy that takes commuters off the road?
Most
salient of all, what would be the ROI from expanding
VDOT's computer model of the state
transportation network so it could calculate the impact
of land use decisions in any locality? Just imagine the
possibilities if planners, developers
and citizen groups were armed with reliable information
about the impact of land use decisions--not just in the
immediate vicinity of a project but across the regional
transportation grid. Just this one innovation
conceivably could offset the need for billions of
dollars in highway projects.
Until
we've inventoried all plausible alternatives and
conducted a comparative ROI analysis, lawmakers are
driving blindfolded. That $108 billion in "unmet needs"
could well evaporate if non-conventional strategies
dampened, or even reversed, the anticipated growth in traffic.
It
is the height of irresponsibility for Chichester
and other self-styled "fiscal conservatives"
to foist another massive tax increase on the
state based on the as-yet-
unsubstantiated
premise that building
more roads is the most cost-effective way to mitigate traffic
congestion. If our elected officials can do no better, I
see little to distinguish them from Pavlov's dog....
except that the dog is less likely to bite the hand that feeds
him.
--
March 14, 2005
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