Category: Transportation
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Uh, Oh, Virginians Are Driving More. A Lot More.
Now that we’ve learned that Millennials have the same driving habits as previous generations — as soon as they can afford to, they buy their own cars and drive them just as much (see previous post) — we can dispense with the delusion that their enlightened consumer preferences will induce them to abandon the practice…
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So Much for Millennials Saving the Planet
Are Millennials really different from older generations when it comes to transportation preferences? Is the younger generation, supposedly enlightened about the need to combat global warming, truly embracing bicycles and buses and the sharing economy over owning and driving their own automobiles? Here in Virginia, billions of dollars of mass transit and other infrastructure spending…
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Fantasy Thinking about Passenger Rail
I like riding passenger trains. My wife and I rode the rails from Richmond to Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago to avoid the knuckle-clenching grind of Interstate 95 and the expense of parking in the District. The seats in our Amtrak car were comfortable, and Wi-Fi allowed us to check email and surf the…
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Floods, Roads and Risk Management
In a blog post yesterday (“Risk and the Fisc”), I cited an Old Dominion University study that guesstimated that Katrina-scale hurricane could cause $40 billion in damages and lost economic activity in Hampton Roads. The cost to the Commonwealth of coping with such a disaster, said Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne, “keeps me up at…
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NoVa Transit Projects Got Highest Congestion Scores This Round
Yes, it’s true that most of Northern Virginia’s regional transportation funds were dedicated to mass transit projects in the last round of funding, says Deputy Secretary of Transportation Nick Donohue. But six of the seven projects that did receive funding scored highest in congestion mitigation under the state’s Smart Scale scoring system. The only project…
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Is Smart Scale Working Like It’s Supposed to?
Republican legislators in Northern Virginia (the few that are left) are wondering what happened to Virginia’s Smart Scale mechanism for allocating transportation dollars. Smart Scale was established during the McAuliffe administration to score proposed transportation projects on key metrics such as congestion relief, economic development, safety, land use, and the environment. But somehow 84% of…
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Mass Transit and Unfunded Pension Liabilities
It has long been known that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which operates the Washington region’s commuter rail and bus systems, has unfunded retirement-benefit costs approaching $3 billion (on top of its multibillion-dollar unfunded maintenance backlog). While the Commonwealth of Virginia is not legally obligated to made good Virginia’s share WMATA’s shortfalls, as a…
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Distracted Driving the New Drunk Driving
It is intuitively obvious to anyone who drives that other people using cell phones (not us, of course) are a menace to the public. We’ve seen them yakking away with the phone to their ear or, worse, actually texting with eyes on the phone. Indeed, a new study by Zendrive, a driving behavior analytics company,…
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Bacon Bits: I-81 Taxes, VCCS Shrinkage, Solar
The Numbers on Interstate 81: Tax First, Explain Later When you approve a major tax increase with amendments proposed just a few days before the General Assembly’s reconvened session, as happened last week, discussion is limited and there is almost no hard data on the financial impact available to the public. You tax first and…
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The Woonerfs Are Coming!
Enter a new term into the vocabulary of Virginia land use: woonerf. Woonerfs, according to this brief treatment by real estate information firm CoStar, is a word of Dutch origin meaning livable landscape. Increasingly, developers in the United States — and the Washington region in particular — are adopting the Dutch/Flemish technique of creating public…
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After I-81 Tax Compromise, Time to Talk VMT Tax
The Commonwealth of Virginia has done some smart things in recent years regarding transportation policy. It has established the Smart Scale system for objectively ranking transportation projects. And it has reformed its Public Private Partnership process for attracting private-sector investment without giving away the store. But the assortment of taxes used to fund the state’s…
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How to Fund I-81 Improvements: Six Principles to Consider
Governor Ralph Northam is pitching another plan to raise money for improvements to the Interstate 81 corridor: (1) Increase the statewide diesel tax to pay for transportation projects across the state, and (2) impose a regular gas and diesel tax along the I-81 corridor to raise revenue directly for I-81. The combined measures would raise…
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Next Up: Carbon Tax, Cap and Trade On Your SUV
They are coming next for your SUV. While the Air Pollution Control Board still has steps to take, it is safe to consider Virginia’s membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative a done deal. That will quickly hit you in your electric bill, as Virginia’s two major electricity generators will have to pay a tax…
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New Momentum for Mileage-Based User Fees
From a purely economic perspective, the ideal system for funding road and highway improvements would be a Mileage Based User Fee (MBUF) in which motorists would pay in direct proportion to which they use the public road network. Charging for road usage would incentivize Virginians to drive less, thus reducing both congestion and carbon emissions.…
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Charlottesville’s Parking Gamble
The People’s Republic of Charlottesville is undertaking an interesting experiment — the city has approved development of the Center of Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE), a Silicon Valley-inspired office space, that provides only 74 parking spaces downtown for as many as 600 workers. Worried that the project will aggravate the parking shortage around the Downtown Mall, some…