Smart Scale prioritizes road and highway projects in Virginia by collecting metrics for congestion, safety, the environment, economic development and other indicators. Ideally, the scores ensure that scarce road construction dollars will be allocated on the basis of merit, not political pull.
But Smart Scale isn’t working for the Fredericksburg area, argues a Free Lance-Star editorial. A stretch of Interstate 95 between Fredericksburg and the Springfield interchange in Fairfax County has been identified as the location of two of the worst traffic hotspots in the country. Writes the newspaper:
The Virginia Department of Transportation … needs to prioritize the 44-mile project.
VDOT’s Six Year Improvement Program does include $125 million for the southbound Rappahannock River Crossing project, but the last round of Smart Scale did not recommend funding the corresponding northbound river crossing, much less the two-lane expansion Cole envisions.
Instead, Smart Scale directs millions of limited transportation dollars to less-urgent projects, such as pedestrian trails, bike lanes and commuter parking lots.
For 2018, VDOT has greenlighted seven projects in the Fredericksburg District, which includes turn lanes, intersection reconstruction and improving commuter parking lots totaling more than $10 million. Another $14.4 million project will widen Exit 126 off I–95 and Route 1 at Southpoint Parkway.
There’s nothing wrong with these projects. But when they take priority over keeping traffic flowing on the busiest interstate highway in the nation, there’s something wrong with Smart Scale.
Del. Mark Cole, R-Stafford, has introduced a bill for the 2018 General Assembly session that would add an additional north and southbound lane to Interstate 95 from Massaponax to the Springfield interchange: ““Such project shall be funded from existing appropriations to the Commonwealth Transportation Board and shall not be subject to the [Smart Score] prioritization process.”
The changes of the bill passing are just about nil. Why would any other legislator wish to privilege Cole’s transportation priority over their own? Passing this bill would open the floodgates for other legislators asking for exemptions for their own pet projects, effectively scrapping Smart Score as an objective means for funding road projects.
I will readily concede that the aforementioned stretch of I-95 is a nightmare. While I don’t commute on I-95, I use it with some regularity to visit my mother in Fredericksburg and my son in Fairfax. The logjams are so frequent and so bad that I periodically vow to never travel that way again. However, while adding lanes would alleviate congestion temporarily, there is ample evidence to suggest that improving travel times would induce more people to live in Stafford/Fredericksburg/Spotsylvania and commute to work in Northern Virginia. Without changing land use patterns, spending billions of dollars on congestion relief would achieve only temporary benefits.
Adding two more lanes for such a distance would cost billions of dollars. The Smart Scale methodology forces us to compare high-profile mega-projects like widening I-95 to smaller projects that may create more value for the money invested. The small projects don’t generate nearly as much attention, but there are a lot of them, and they add up. Smart Scale represents a big advance over the way Virginia used to allocate transportation dollars. We need to keep it, and that means saying no to legislators who want to carve out special exemptions.
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