Month: February 2014
-
VPI Snags another Connected Cars Contract
Virginia Tech is stepping up its involvement in developing technologies for connected cars. The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute has won another $1 million federal grant to design the communication framework that will allow vehicles to “talk” to their drivers as well as other cars on the roadway. States a Virginia Tech news story: The projects goal:…
-
Marriage, Children and the Millennials’ Preference for City Life
by James A. Bacon How long will the return-to-the-cities movement of the Millennial generation last? Smart Growthers think that a fundamental lifestyle shift is occurring. Millennials are different: They are the smart-phone generation, the shared-ownership generation. As long as they can readily access a car when they need one through Zipcar or a peer-sharing service,…
-
FHWA Deals a Body Blow to Charlottesville Bypass
Big news! The Federal Highway Administration has informed the McAuliffe administration that it will need to conduct an environmental assessment of the Charlottesville Bypass before getting federal authorization for the controversial, $240+ million project. The decision creates an enormous procedural barrier for the project which, combined with a likely vote by the Albemarle County Board…
-
The Risks of Building Highways on Spec
by James A. Bacon State governments take on major risks when they fund transportation mega-projects to stimulate economic development — not that they ever acknowledge those risks at the time. The U.S. 460 toll road between Petersburg and Suffolk is a classic case study. Last time I checked in, the Commonwealth of Virginia had committed…
-
Flood Insurance: Subsidizing the Rich
Owners of expensive condos and beach houses along the coastline are petitioning the Federal Emergency Management Agency to redraw flood-zone maps to exclude their maps from the flood zones. Getting the maps redrawn saves as much as 97% in flood insurance — but gives petitioners the same protection as their neighbors inside the flood zones.…
-
How to Get Trucks to Pay their Fair Share of Road Maintenance
by James A. Bacon Once we embrace the logic of basing road-maintenance expenditures on Return on Investment analysis, as I discussed yesterday, we should address a related matter: the fact that some vehicles cause far more damage to roads than others. In an equitable and economically efficient world, vehicles would pay for damage in proportion…
-
The Virginia HOA Power Grab
by James A. Bacon When I was elected president of the Countryside Homeowners Association last month, I joked with our treasurer Russ Gambrell that our first order of business would be to plot our path to world domination. First we take over the homeowners association. Then we take over Henrico County. Then Virginia, the United…
-
Dem Billionaire Runs With Big Dogs
By Peter Galuszka A major funder of Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe plans on putting $100 million into this year’s mid-term election races to warn of the danger of climate change and beat back global warming deniers and their conservative financiers. Tom Steyer, a billionaire hedge fund founder, plans on targeting the Florida gubernatorial race where…
-
Calculate ROI on Pothole Repairs, Too
by James A. Bacon Del. Christopher Stolle’s transportation-prioritization bill (described here) has passed the House of Delegates and has been referred to the Senate Committee on Transportation. The bill would create a methodology for prioritizing the expenditure of transportation funds, including such factors as congestion mitigation, economic development, accessibility, safety, and environmental quality. Given the fact that…
-
Big Talent from a Little Town
By Peter Galuszka It’s curious in Virginia and other states how many times true talent emerges from small towns in rural areas. That is the case of Claudia Emerson, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry who now teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. Emerson, 57, grew up in the Chatham area in Southside known…
-
Koelemay Takes Helm at OTP3
I’m a little late getting to this news, but better late than never: Tony Kinn, the McDonnell appointee who built the Office of Transportation Public Private Partnerships (OTP3) into a nationally recognized pioneer in public-private partnerships, is out. J. Douglas Koelemay, former vice president for community relations at Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), is in. The…
-
Koch Brothers, Time to Run with the Big Dogs
The billionaire Koch Brothers, owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the United States, have been demonized by the left for their insidious influence upon American politics. Lefties have painted the Kochs as the evil bankrollers of conservative America, with their moneyed tentacles reaching everywhere. With a six-degrees of separation kind…
-
Virginia’s Philosophical Crossroads
—
by
in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Environment, Federal issues, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, LGBQT, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t OversightStanding before a trim, white, clapboard house off Lafayette Boulevard in Norfolk last week, friends and supporters of gay rights cheered loudly as two same sex couples approached a front-yard podium to celebrate their legal victory in having Virginia’s gay marriage ban overturned. The night before, U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen, citing Abraham Lincoln…
-
Setting Goals, Measuring Results
In its final section on building better transportation systems in an era of fiscal austerity, “The Innovative DOT” manual tackles the issue of how to improve internal DOT processes. The chapter makes a number of useful points but the one that stands out in a Virginia context is this: “Define acceptable and measurable goals, and…
-
Chart of the Day: Virginia’s Land Inventory
This 2010 Natural Resources Inventory data was published back in October but I haven’t seen anyone do anything with it, so… here it is. Key stats: Of Virginia’s 27.1 million acres of surface area, 1.3 million were developed between 1982 and 2010. Dig into the details, and you’ll find that cropland and forest are declining…