According to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority website, the Metro generated $617 million in revenue in fiscal 2006, spent $1,049 million and required an operating subsidy of $432 million. Those raw numbers understate the real cost of operating the system, however. If Metro is allowing the system to depreciate, it is generating bigger losses…

The Daily Press is reporting that a rift is developing between local and state officials on how to develop Fort Monroe. The state has a big say-so because half the property reverts to the state when the U.S. Army shuts down its operations there in 2011. The controversy arises from disagreements in the Memorandum of…

Virginia has the 41st lowest tax burden in the country, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit fiscal policy research group. The Foundation ranked the 50 states plus Washington, D.C., on the state/local tax burden as a percentage of pe capita income. Virginia’s average tax load of $4,056 amounted to 9.5 percent of income. (See…

One of the major players behind the scenes of the Rail-to-Dulles controversy is the Lerner family, a leading landowner and developer in Tysons Corner. (See “Follow the Money.”) Alex MacGillis and Dana Hedgpeth with the Washington Post profile the reclusive family in considerable detail. The lead-in focuses on the Lerners’ role in development of the…

“Seventy-five Years” is the first of three columns exploring the thinking behind the House of Delegates’ transportation agenda. The House plan to restucture the institutional arrangements that Harry F. Byrd put into place in 1932 is one of the most sweeping reform proposals of my 30 years of reporting on Virginia government. Incredibly, the Mainstream…

The Oct. 9, 2006, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion is now available online. Click here to visit the home page. Click here to get your very own free subscription and never miss an issue! The headliners include: Seventy-Five YearsVirginia’s system for building and maintaining roads has changed little in three quarters of a century. Some people…

An interesting debate is unfolding in Albemarle County, where Supervisor David Slutzky has proposed a Transfer of Development Rights program to protect most of the countryside from development and steer growth into a concentrated urban district equal to about one percent of the county’s land. At a news conference earlier this week, Slutzky was accompanied…

There are road bikes and mountain bikes, and bikes for kids. Now bicycle manufacturers are catering to a burgeoning new market: bikes for commuters. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, nearly every major bicycle manufacturer has rolled out a new or revised commuter model for 2007. They may look like 1940s Schwinns, but materials like…

Moody’s/Economy.com has just published a forecast of single-family housing prices in the nation’s 150 largest metropolitan areas, “The Single-Family Housing Market Monitor.” The news is not good — especially for the Washington metropolitan area. (I cannot link to the report directly. But go here and then click on “View a sample copy.”) According to a…

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine sounded the right note on “global competitiveness” in an address to the 58th Virginia Conference on World Trade in Roanoke yesterday. “We ought to decide that we want to be winners and do what it takes to be winners,” Kaine said, as reported by Rex Bowman with the Times-Dispatch. “Attitude toward…

The citizens of Stockholm, Sweden, have voted in a referendum to approve “congestion pricing” as a permanent solution to reduce traffic congestion in their densely populated city. The vote follows an experiment in which motorists were charged a toll that varied by time of day when they passed any one of 23 tolling points around…

While I’m plugging worthy causes, let me just pass on this note: The Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership is now accepting applications for its 2007 program season. I’ve known many grads of the program, and they’ve all gotten a lot out of the experience. If you’re among the one percent of the population that’s passionate…

In case you missed it, Bwana over at Renaissance Ruminations has launched his “Fall 2006 Virginia Blogosphere Book Fair.” It’s fun — go visit. See what other bloggers are reading. I was astounded to see that the person whose reading list most closely replicates my own is Lowell Feld at Raising Kaine. Of all people!…

What is going on inside the Governor’s Office? Unremarked by the MSM, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has done a 180-degree flip flop on legislative and political strategy. We’re talking Hungry Jack pancakes here! First, a quick walk down memory lane: On Aug. 31, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine gave a blog-conference interview, stating that he hoped…

Jim Wamsley raises an important point with respect to the application of Henry George in his comment on “Shades of Henry George” posted yesterday. Wamsley suggests the application of “concentric areas.” In the context of Regional Metrics we call these “Radius Bands.” This tactic for application of Henry George would work well for small, isolated…