The Hampton Roads chapter of the Axis of Taxes is riding the wave of public frustration with traffic congestion to generate public support for higher regional taxes and big regional road projects. But two of the biggest projects topping the list of regional priorities — the Third Crossing and the U.S. 460 upgrade — won’t address traffic congestion at all: They are economic development projects. The purpose of this post is not to denigrate the economic development potential of either project — that’s an entirely separate issue — but to point out that many citizens in Hampton Roads are likely to be quite unhappy if they find themselves $200 million a year lighter in their wallets and still stuck in traffic.
A number of this blog’s readers have been making that very argument in the comments section. But the point was really driven home by numbers cited in a press release issued by the Coalition for Smarter Growth. Describing the U.S. 460 project as “a symbol of waste and misplaced priorities in our transportation program,” Executive Director Stewart Schwartz writes:
Route 460 would be a new 55-mile interstate equivalent highway between Suffolk and Petersburg. The cost of the road is currently estimated at $1.5 billion, but some estimates go to $1.9 billion. The state’s taxpayers would have to pay at least $1 billion toward a project that VDOT wants private toll-road builders to construct under the Public-Private Transportation Act.
The PPTA isn’t living up to the promises made by its boosters. This amounts to a substantial public subsidy…
Remarkably, the existing Route 460 is predicted in VDOT’s Environmental Impact Study to be at Level of Service A (free-flowing) in 2030, except in small towns with traffic lights. Today, the highway carries fewer than 10,000 vehicles per day compared to average daily traffic volumes on I-64 on the Peninsula of 43,000 to 80,000 vehicles per day in the Williamsburg area.
Says Schwartz: “Roads like 460 have been pushed through the [Commonwealth Transportation Board] process by VDOT and would make an early claim to both the $2 billion in bond funding and the increases in fees, taxes and tolls in the Hampton Roads region. This will siphon money away from real congestion problems within the metropolitan areas of the state.”