Category: Transportation
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A Distracting Doctrine
Instead of fixating on the United Nation’s Agenda 21 as a threat to American liberties, conservatives should articulate fiscally responsible, market-driven policies to address the very real challenges facing local governments in the United States.
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The Acid Test for Richmond BRT: Will Property Owners Tax Themselves?
by James A. Bacon Momentum is building in the Richmond region to build a 7.4-mile Bus Rapid Transit system along the Broad Street corridor. Transit lovers tout the many blessings that a BRT system would bring, and they discuss the projected costs, but there are two things you never hear them talk about: Risk and…
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A Less Destructive Form of Sprawl
by James A. Bacon A development group is asking for approval to build up to 2,900 homes and 1.8 million square feet of commercial space off Interstate 95 in Stafford County. The proposed “George Washington Village” calls for a 1,100-acre town-center development with a mix of single-family detached houses, town houses and apartments to be…
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Car Sharing Cuts into Automobile Ownership
by James A. Bacon The spread of car sharing could erode automobile sales and automobile ownership in the years ahead, according to a new study by AlixPartners, a business advisory firm. The study, which surveyed 1,000 licensed drivers in 10 developed car-sharing markets and 1,000 drivers nationally as a control group, found that car sharing…
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Self-Driving Cars to Government: Eat My Dust!
by James A. Bacon It’s amazing how Self-Driving Cars (SDCs) have burst into the consciousness of thinkers about transportation and urban development in the past month or two. Even more remarkable, the thinking hasn’t yet polarized into Republican/ Democratic, left wing/right wing camps. Eric Jaffe, a contributing writer to the center-left Atlantic Cities blog, has…
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VPI Snags another Connected Cars Contract
Virginia Tech is stepping up its involvement in developing technologies for connected cars. The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute has won another $1 million federal grant to design the communication framework that will allow vehicles to “talk” to their drivers as well as other cars on the roadway. States a Virginia Tech news story: The projects goal:…
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FHWA Deals a Body Blow to Charlottesville Bypass
Big news! The Federal Highway Administration has informed the McAuliffe administration that it will need to conduct an environmental assessment of the Charlottesville Bypass before getting federal authorization for the controversial, $240+ million project. The decision creates an enormous procedural barrier for the project which, combined with a likely vote by the Albemarle County Board…
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The Risks of Building Highways on Spec
by James A. Bacon State governments take on major risks when they fund transportation mega-projects to stimulate economic development — not that they ever acknowledge those risks at the time. The U.S. 460 toll road between Petersburg and Suffolk is a classic case study. Last time I checked in, the Commonwealth of Virginia had committed…
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How to Get Trucks to Pay their Fair Share of Road Maintenance
by James A. Bacon Once we embrace the logic of basing road-maintenance expenditures on Return on Investment analysis, as I discussed yesterday, we should address a related matter: the fact that some vehicles cause far more damage to roads than others. In an equitable and economically efficient world, vehicles would pay for damage in proportion…
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Calculate ROI on Pothole Repairs, Too
by James A. Bacon Del. Christopher Stolle’s transportation-prioritization bill (described here) has passed the House of Delegates and has been referred to the Senate Committee on Transportation. The bill would create a methodology for prioritizing the expenditure of transportation funds, including such factors as congestion mitigation, economic development, accessibility, safety, and environmental quality. Given the fact that…
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Koelemay Takes Helm at OTP3
I’m a little late getting to this news, but better late than never: Tony Kinn, the McDonnell appointee who built the Office of Transportation Public Private Partnerships (OTP3) into a nationally recognized pioneer in public-private partnerships, is out. J. Douglas Koelemay, former vice president for community relations at Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), is in. The…
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Setting Goals, Measuring Results
In its final section on building better transportation systems in an era of fiscal austerity, “The Innovative DOT” manual tackles the issue of how to improve internal DOT processes. The chapter makes a number of useful points but the one that stands out in a Virginia context is this: “Define acceptable and measurable goals, and…
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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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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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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…