Category: Transportation
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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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The House Proposes Overhaul in Allocation of Transportation Dollars
by James A. Bacon In September House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, gave a major policy speech to the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce declaring that money alone cannot solve Virginia’s transportation problems. He called for a “new way” to think about those problems that relies heavily upon new technology and prioritization of projects by…
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More Good Questions about Self-Driving Cars
by James A. Bacon Nat Bottingheimer, a former executive with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), has been asking the same kinds of questions that I have about the impact of self-driving cars (SDCs) on transportation policy and human settlement patterns. Writing in Greater Greater Washington, he urges transportation planners to begin thinking about…
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Matatus for America
by James A. Bacon What would happen if government didn’t subsidize publicly owned mass transit systems in the United States? How would millions of car-less Americans ever get around? It may be instructive to look at the example of Nairobi, Kenya, a city of three million that hasn’t gotten around to establishing a municipal transit…
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Feds to Mandate Smart Car Technology
by James A. Bacon The Obama administration has signaled its intention to require automobile manufacturers to install technology in cars that would allow them to communicate position, direction and speed to one another. The sensors would alert drivers to impending collisions and, in some systems, would automatically brake to avoid an accident. I’m not a…
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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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A Free-Lunch No-Brainer: Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance
by James A. Bacon Pay-As-You-Drive (PAYD) automobile insurance bases premiums on the number of miles the customer drives. It stands to reason: the less you drive, the less likely you are to be involved in a traffic accident. As it also happens, the less you drive, the less you contribute to traffic congestion. Thus, it…
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How to Stretch Those Transportation Tax Dollars
by James A. Bacon The Commonwealth of Virginia has expended way more effort in recent years figuring out how to raise taxes for transportation than it has ensuring that those tax dollars are well spent. That’s not for a lack of opportunities. In its new publication, “The Innovative DOT: a handbook of policy and practice,” Smart…
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Lerner Aims to Complete Tysons Office Tower… Only Two Years Late
by James A. Bacon Well, well, well, what do you know? The commercial building boom in Tysons triggered by the imminent completion of Phase One of the Rail-to-Dulles project doesn’t seem to be running on schedule. A Washington Post article today highlights Lerner Enterprise’s lengthy delay in building an 18-story, 476,000-square-foot office building near one of…
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MBUFs and Value Capture asTransportation Financing Tools
by James A. Bacon A common challenge for every state is finding the funds to expand the transportation system to serve a growing population and economy. Virginia endured a grueling debate last year over former Governor Bob McDonnell’s proposal to shift much of the burden to the state sales tax. Other states have made a…
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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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Big Brother? I Think He’s On My Contact List.
by James A. Bacon Not long ago there was a fair amount of buzz over the idea of a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) tax as a way to finance the maintenance and construction of roads and highways in the United States. That buzz, it seems, has largely died down. Technologically speaking, it would be a…
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Will Self-Driving Cars Promote Smart Growth?
I always imagined that thinkers in the Smart Growth camp would be unnerved by the prospect of roads filled with self-driving cars (SDCs). If commuters could punch a destination into their mapping app, lean back, read email, surf the web or even doze off during the drive to work, SDCs could revive the long-distance commute…
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Four Hard-Nosed Reasons to Invest in Bike Lanes
About a year ago, I hosted a couple of brain-storming sessions to develop talking points for building a bicycle infrastructure in the Richmond region. The goal was to make a hard-nosed business case that investing in bikes would boost economic growth and bolster public health. (See “Making the Public Health Case for Bicycles” and “Bicycles and…