It’s not often that you see someone seriously arguing for mass transit in the Richmond area, but Ford Weber, director of the Virginia Local Initiatives Support Corporation, makes the case on the Richmond Times-Dispatch op-ed page today.
The Richmond metropolitan planning organization is conducting a major study evaluating the region’s mass transit needs over the next 25 years. Trouble is, writes Weber, that study is basing its conclusions on Virginia Employment Commission’s projections of future population and employment growth. “The VEC projections … call for unending suburban sprawl over the next 25 years.”
The VEC numbers do not take into account significant shifts in development patterns, especially the increasing popularity of New Urbanism projects in the region, rising fuel prices or demographic changes. “Nor,” Weber writes, “do the VEC’s projections reflect mass transit’s ability to proactively shape growth by channeling high-density development into targeted transit corridors.”
Ironically, it appears that the decision to use VEC numbers will create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact that scattered, disconnected low-density development makes mass transit uneconomical will bias the study to conclude that the region cannot afford the mass transit option. Such a conclusion will undermine political support for funding mass transit. The lack of a politically viable mass transit option will relieve municipalities from the necessity of planning for nodes of denser development capable of supporting light rail and buses. Thus, sprawl will continue and the VEC will be proved right.
What a mess. As readers of this blog know, I don’t believe in dumping money blindly into mass transit projects. Indeed, I think that mass transit should be required to pay its own way, just as roads should. In “Midlothian Leviathan,” I’ve shown conceptually how this can be done by redeveloping land around the train stations and capturing some of the increased property value to pay for the up-front capital costs.
Still, it would be a shame to kill off the mass transit option simply through unintentional biases in the selection of data used in the study. Ruling out a major transportation alternative on the basis of a flawed methodology would be a grievous mistake.