Author: James A. Bacon
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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…
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Two Studies Worth Checking Out…
Review of Disaster Preparedness Planning in Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission Among the key conclusions: “Virginia generally has strong disaster response plans in place, but the State should ensure that agency supporting plans are in place and corrective actions are addressed to facilitate the plan’s successful execution during a disaster.” “State and local…
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Time for Better Scenario Planning
by James A. Bacon A century ago, developers set up street car lines to provide transportation access for inhabitants of the housing and commercial projects they were building. A new neighborhood wouldn’t sell if people couldn’t reach it. By necessity, transportation and land use planning went hand in hand. But when governments took over transportation responsibilities,…
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Two Ways Municipalities Can Save Money
by James A. Bacon I’m sick and tired of the false choice between raising taxes and cutting services. There are many ways that enterprising localities can save money and/or generate non-tax revenue without hosing taxpayers or neglecting core responsibilities. Here are just two ideas that popped up recently. Street lights. Every municipality in Virginia operates…
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Bacon Bits: Schools and Higher Ed
OK, people, you’re out of control. You’re generating way too much quality content that is disappearing into the ether because Virginia’s newspapers and bloggers simply aren’t equipped to cover it all. Once again, I find myself falling back upon the Bacon Bits format, just to ensure that readers know what’s out there. Advanced placement credits.…
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Map of the Day: Wal-Mart Versus Downtown Waynesboro
Kudos to Luke Juday for his latest graphics in “Mapping the Commonwealth.” As an intellectual exercise, he overlaid Google images of ten downtown areas around Virginia with overhead images of nearby Wal-Marts. There was no particular agenda to the images, he says — “I’m not a big Walmart hater or anything.” He just wanted to…
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Visualizing the Unthinkable
by James A. Bacon Combine the power of a Katrina-scale hurricane with the geographic proximity of a Hurricane Sandy, aim it at Hampton Roads, and what do you get? Old Dominion University professors Joshua G. Behr and Rafael Diaz cranked up their supercomputer to visualize what might happen. A “Sandtrina” catastrophe would extend way beyond…
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Bacon Bits
So much to blog about, so little time… New type of interchange. Later this month, the Virginia Department of Transportation will open a new “diverging diamond interchange” at the Zions Crossroads exit of Interstate 64. VDOT chose this configuration (see simulation above) in preference to a cloverleaf interchange because it economizes on land. The diverging diamond…
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Virginia Missing from White House Climate Conversation
by Rachel Cannon On November 1st, 2013, President Obama signed an Executive Order “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change” – the newest addition to the Administration’s Climate Action Plan. One part of the Executive Order establishes the Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience: a collection of state, local and tribal leaders…
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Paving Paradise
by Luke Juday How much space does a car take up exactly? The answer, of course, is that it depends – on the design of the place, the type of driving going on, the density, the tendency of the population to build new lanes and parking lots everywhere, etc. The answer is important because people…
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Time to Overhaul Traffic Engineering Guidelines
by James A. Bacon Employees of the Virginia Department of Transportation, like most transportation departments, see themselves as being in the profession of building roads for cars. The challenge is to move the highest volume of cars as rapidly as possible through a given number of lanes. Designing roads for the convenience of pedestrians, bikers…
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Map of the Day: Dollar Density
Luke Juday has struck again, publishing a fascinating map on his blog, “Mapping the Commonwealth.” This one depicts the amount of household income in each census district. The greater the population and the higher the income, the higher the spike. Green indicates median incomes that are above average, red below average. (Check his blog for…
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Dominion to Upgrade Security of Electric Grid
by James A. Bacon Without electricity, contemporary American civilization collapses. We depend upon electricity to operate the pumps that supply our water, to run the refrigerators that preserve our food and to power the economy by which we earn a living. That’s why, I believe, Dominion Virginia Power will have no trouble winning regulatory approval…
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The House Proposes Overhaul in Allocation of Transportation Dollars
by James A. Bacon In September House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, gave a major policy speech to the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce declaring that money alone cannot solve Virginia’s transportation problems. He called for a “new way” to think about those problems that relies heavily upon new technology and prioritization of projects by…
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Richmond Needs an Innovation District, not a Baseball Stadium
Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones has doubled down on his proposal to build a minor league baseball stadium in Shockoe Bottom, suggesting that people opposing his plan are “anti-growth and anti-economic development,” according to the Times-Dispatch. I can’t speak for other skeptics of the plan, but I’m certainly not anti-growth or anti-economic development. To the…