Category: Infrastructure
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Sunnier Skies for Virginia Solar
Thanks to a new law making it easier for non-utilities to sell solar electricity, backers of solar power are viewing the future with cautious optimism. By Andrew Jenner Virginia gets enough sunshine, relative to other states, to give it better-than-average potential for solar energy development. A 2012 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated…
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Under-Funding Street Repair in Richmond
I’ve been ragging recently about how Virginia state and local governments are doing a poor job of taking full life-cycle costs into account when making infrastructure-investment decisions, and how some are doing an equally poor job of setting side money to replace their assets when they wear out. A perfect example of such blinkered thinking…
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Life Cycle Blues
by James A. Bacon Beneath the surface, the Washington Post informs us, the Capital Beltway is crumbling. Writes Ashley Halsey III: Under the surface of all but some recently restored segments, fissures are spreading, cracks are widening and the once-solid road bed that carries about a quarter-million cars a day is turning to mush. ……
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In Defense of Proffers
by James A. Bacon A new business-backed group in Chesterfield County has sprung up to fight the county’s cash proffer system for new houses, arguing that the fees make new houses more expensive, hinder development and hurt jobs. The group has hired Capital Results, a government affairs firm, and launched a website, Citizens Against Proffer…
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What’s Your Government’s Growth Portfolio?
by James A. Bacon If local governments want to avoid Detroit-style insolvency and financial collapse, they need to be savvier about how they make capital investments, argues Charles Marohn on the Strong Towns blog. They need to ask themselves three questions: Will the capital investment generate a real rate of return (ROI)? Will that rate…
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The Remarkable Renaissance of Virginia Rail
By Peter Galuszka Many decades ago, Richmond was a major, and colorful, train hub. Crack passenger lines of all liveries, the purple and silver of the Atlantic Coast Line, the citrus colors of Seaboard, and the blue and yellow of the Chesapeake & Ohio, all went through town. Cars and aircraft reduced rail to dirty…
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A Light Rail Public-Private Partnership in Virginia Beach?
by James A. Bacon Philip Shucet, savior of the runaway train project that was Norfolk Light Rail, has submitted a proposal to to extend the rail line into Virginia Beach. Under the proposal, the Tide rail service would become operational in the Virginia Beach Town Center, nearly halfway to the Oceanfront, by November 2016 —…
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The Rise of Civic Tech
Call it digital cities, call it civic tech, call it what you will — information technology is transforming the way local governments deliver services. This brief video by Ben Hecht, CEO of Living Cities, gives a flavor. My favorite example he cites: The Boston Bump. Instead of dispatching engineers around the city to survey the…
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Virginia Ports to Stay Public
After 18 months of review, the board of commissioners of the Virginia Port Authority has decided to drop all bids for port privatization. “We are transforming The Port of Virginia to meet a changing and increasingly competitive environment,” said William Fralin, chairman of the VPA board in a prepared statement. “We will move forward as…
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The “New” Mind of the South
By Peter Galuszka What is “the South” all about? It’s a great question about what could fairly be described the most unique, tortured and remote region of the United States. Being “Southern” requires not only a special state of mind, but a special spirit that is, by turns, as alluring as it is odious. It…
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First, Fix Virginia’s Roads
by James A. Bacon Virginia’s infrastructure rates a “D+” in the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2013 report card on American infrastructure, released earlier this week. That’s a lousy rating in line with the national score of D+. The civil engineers have been accused of overstating the woes of American infrastructure in order to justify…
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Playing with Other Peoples’ Money
I have started following Charles Marohn’s blog, “Strong Towns,” and am gratified to see that great minds think alike. In his most recent post, Marohn applies the thinking of Nassim Taleb, author of “Antifragility,” to the discipline of building more prosperous, livable and fiscally sustainable communities. (See my post, “Fragility, Antifragility and Virginia.”) One of…
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The Limits of the Creative Class
In a blog post on “New Geography,” Joel Kotkin unloads with both barrels on Richard Florida and the ailing cities that paid him big consulting fees to help reinvent themselves — for the most part unsuccessfully — as “hip and cool” places appealing to the creative class. Kotkin’s riff was inspired, apparently, by a recent…
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Virginia May Help Offshore Wind Power Up
By Peter Galuszka About 22 miles off Virginia Beach, at points too far to see with human eyes, Virginia’s first real effort to harness the wind for electricity is about to take shape. Richmond-based Dominion Virginia Power will begin work this year on erecting two wind turbines, each capable of producing 6 megawatts of electricity…
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Living the High-Line Life
Converting an eyesore into a celebrated park, New York City’s High Line showed how smart urbanism can create wealth.