Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, has articulated several important themes regarding Virginia’s transportation policy that we rarely see in the op-ed pages of Virginia’s daily newspapers. In a column published Sunday in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Miller made these points:
- “Public frustration with traffic does not mean unconditional support for new transportation revenues. … Support for new transportation funding is contingent upon a substantial change in land-use decision-making so that new growth does not overwhelm the existing roads and highways.”
- “The existing legal and political system separates decisions on land use from the responsibility for the transportation system. … We need to build on the progress of the last session in requiring traffic-impact analyses and encouraging local investment by granting local government clearer direction to limit land uses that overwhelm the transportation system.”
- “The current transportation plan is based on unrealistically low gasoline prices and construction costs. Already, higher gasoline prices mean that we are driving less, that estimated tax receipts from state gasoline taxes are below projections, and that the costs of maintenance and new construction are rising. In effect, we have less money to build more costly projects for driving rates that won’t materialize, as the costs of maintaining our existing networks keep rising. This is not a winning formula.”
- “The current transportation planning system is largely without measures of performance. Even though substantial progress has been made for better accounting of the limited transportation dollars Virginia spends, there is no way to determine the rate of return on that investment.”
I agree almost 100 percent with Chris’ prognosis of what’s wrong, as any regular reader of this blog will know. The main area where we differ is in the faith that we place in local government. I’m very concerned that, in the absence of systemic reform, giving more power to local government to block unwanted housing projects could lead mainly to… less housing. Not a desirable income.
Chris, I think, is willing to take that risk. If developers get head butted a few times for submitting Business As Usual housing projects, maybe they will start focusing their energies on projects in locations that are served by existing infrastructure rather than where they can buy cheap land. Also, he hopes, maybe developers will start getting more creative — designing more transportation-efficient communities and setting up Transportation Demand Management plans that will mitigate the traffic impact.
I hope he’s right.