Category: Infrastructure
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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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Why Are Virginians Such Weather Whoosies?
By Peter Galuszka The other day I tried to book a lunch date with the Blogger in Chief but was informed that inclement weather was looming on the Old Dominion and he might be hibernating for a few days. Imagine my surprise this morning when I awoke to find a few inches of snow and…
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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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Tar Heel Grief Just Down the Road
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Health Care, Housing, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, LGBQT, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Water-waste waterBy Peter Galuszka It’s sad to see two states to which I have personal ties – North Carolina and West Virginia — in such bad ways. The latest raw news comes from the Tar Heel state where we are seeing the handiwork of hard-right- Gov. Pat McCrory who has been on a tear for a…
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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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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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Squeezing More Capacity from Existing Roads and Highways
by James A. Bacon Thanks to tax increases enacted in 2102, Virginia has roughly $800 million more to spend each year on transportation projects. But that money won’t stretch very far if we use it all to build more lane-miles of roads and highways. An alternative approach is to invest in making our existing assets…
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Coming up: Cars and Traffic Lights that Communicate
There are smart roads, and there are smart cars. The next step in the evolution of the digital city is smart cars that communicate with the smart roads. As Jennie Xie writes for Atlantic Cities, there is considerable innovation in traffic signals these days. An increasing number of signals are synchronized to accommodate changing traffic…
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Dominion Proposes to Bury Problem-Plagued Electric Lines
Dominion is pushing a bill that would allow the electric utility to raise rates to pay for moving interruption-plagued power lines underground. The plan calls for burying 350 miles of line per year until 4,000 miles have been relocated, reports the Washington Post. The task would cost about $175 million per year, to be recompensed…
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Henrico’s $6 Million Surprise
When last we heard from Henrico County officials about the parlous state of the county budget, we were told that it was necessary to impose a 4% meals tax because there was no other way to balance the budget without raising taxes or gutting the school budget. Tax foes argued that the county would not…
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Federal Transportation Funds Running Short? Try Local Innovation.
There are two ways to respond to the shrinking federal budget for transportation projects: You can whine and mewl and curse the injustice of things, or you can look for other ways to cope with the country’s transportation challenges. Smart Growth America (SGA) has chosen the latter course, publishing “The Innovative DOT: a handbook of…
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Housing Supply, Demand and Affordability
by James A. Bacon The Hampton Roads and Richmond housing markets are “moderately unaffordable,” according to the 10th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2014. While not exactly a kudo, that classification puts the two of Virginia’s three largest metros in the top one third of housing affordability for major markets (one million people and…
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West Virginia’s Lessons on Fracking
By Peter Galuszka Tap water is now drinkable for most of the 300,000 residents in the environs of Charleston, the capital of Virginia’s sister state to the west, but the mess has ample warnings for future problems notably fracking for natural gas. The national newspapers are filled with interesting pieces this morning about the problems…