Barton Hinkle with the Richmond Times-Dispatch is one of the few newspaper pundits in Virginia to take the trouble to probe beneath the he-said-she-said coverage of the taxes-and-transportation debate. He actually — gasp! — does his own research. And sometimes he offers insights that are new even to an old journalistic hand who, like myself, has been covering land use and transportation issues for years.
Witness Hinkle’s column today. He makes a number of valid points but one stands out: Over the past two decades, he observes, the number of lane-miles of road and highway overseen by the Virginia Department of Transportation has increased nine percent. By contrast, the number of lane-miles increased only 2.4 percent nationally over the same period.
That creates a problem. As Hinkle notes, “VDOT faces a mathematical dilemma imposed by the nature of its business: Current budget growth accelerates future budget growth. That’s because VDOT has to spend money on maintenance as well as construction. A dollar spent on construction this year creates demand maintenance dollars in future roads.”
Thus, the relentless climb in maintenance funding is due to more than the faster-than-inflation increase in construction costs — it’s due to the steady expansion of Virginia’s road and highway network.
There’s one aspect to VDOT’s dilemma that bears illuminating. Much of that nine percent increase in lane-miles is, for all intents, useless to the vast majority of citizens. Those lane-miles reside primarily in cul de sac subdivisions, which means they are utilized by only a handful of subdvision residents and the occasional visiting UPS truck. (To see what I mean, study the photo above from Overland Park, Kansas.) I don’t know the figure for increase in lane-miles for critical connector and arterial roads, but I’m certain it’s far lower than nine percent — it’s probably closer to the national average of 2.4 percent.
This gets us to a foundational problem for Virginia’s transportation system: a cul de sac/collector/arterial pattern of road development in which half (or more) of the lane-miles are way underutilized and the other half is overloaded and congested. You don’t see the same mismatch in urban centers where the grid-street system predominates. Urban centers do have quiet side streets with little traffic, but a higher percentage of urban lane-miles is devoted to moving people at faster speeds.
Moral of the story: It’s not how many lane-miles you build, it’s where you build them and how you connect them.
(Photo credit: George Butler Associates, Inc.)
