The Kaine administration has a credibility problem in Northern Virginia when it comes to matters of transportation. The Department of Rail and Public Transportation has proposed diverting a big chunk of an anticipated $195 million in revenues from HOT lanes along Interstate 95/395 to the Virginia Railway Express. That would mean fewer Bus Rapid Transit buses serving the Interstate — and Northern Virginia politicians are not happy about it. “It’s bait and switch,” says Alexandria Mayor William D. Euille.
As Eric Weiss explains the problem in the Washington Post, Washington area leaders went along with the plan to turn the carpool lanes on Interstates 95 and 395 into express toll lanes on the understanding that $195 million would be devoted to mass transit, including 184 clean-fuel buses that would ferry commuters into the District or the Pentagon. But DRPT had a different idea: In addition to $40 million for VRE, the state now wants to spend $76.6 million on park-and-ride lots and other facilities south of the converted HOT lanes.
Northern Virginians lost no time in painting “Richmond” as the villain. “This is diverting resources needed here to another part of the state,” said Gerald E. Connolly, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. “These are our resources.”
“This is classic,” Weiss quotes Fairfax resident Bob Perotti as saying. Have you noticed that Richmond has the best roads in the state and Northern Virginia has the worst traffic?”
Mr. Perotti might be interested to know that Spotsylvania County, where some of the improvements would go, anchors the south end of the I-95 HOT lane corridor and is at least two counties removed from the “Richmond” metropolitan area, and also that the VRE heads north from its point of origin, not south. He also might be interested to know that Pierce Homer, the secretary of transportation who defended the DRPT study, cut his political teeth in Prince William County before joining the Warner administration and staying on with the Kaine team.
Regardless, the perception of facts has greater political import than the facts themselves. And the perception is that the politicians and planners “in Richmond” — regardless of who appointed them, whom they represent, or where in the state they might have come from — cannot be trusted. Once again, Northern Virginians see “Richmond” grabbing their money and spending it for the benefit of someone else.
In this instance, the perception really isn’t fair. The Kaniacs contend that the new plan still would add five new Rapid Bus Transit stations and 76 buses. Their analysis suggests, however, that they could divert more drivers off the Interstate by investing the balance in VRE and the park ‘n’ ride lots. By expanding the frame of reference from I-95 proper to the I-95 corridor more broadly conceived, they get a different result.
An I-95 Corridor Authority. The issue here is one of trust. Fairly or unfairly, Northern Virginians don’t trust anyone from “Richmond.” That itself is a political reality that must be addressed. How do we change that suspicion?
The political dynamic would be very different, I believe, if Virginia embraced the idea of planning transportation around “congestion corridors.” Interstate 95/395, stretching from Spotsylvania to the 14th Street Bridge, would logically fall into a single corridor. But the corridor should be defined more broadly than the Interstate alone. It should include U.S. Route 1, which runs parallel for most of the distance, as well as the VRE. The goal should be to improve mobility and access for the entire corridor, not just a single component of it.
The corridor would need an operating entity — the “I-95 Corridor Authority” — that would administer the congestion toll revenues and plan how best to spend them. Currently, the politically correct solution is to plow all the revenues into Bus Rapid Transit or VRE. Those may be the best solutions — but, then, maybe they aren’t. No one has seriously examined other options for improving corridor mobility, such as: (1) ramp metering to reduce congestion at interchanges, (2) improved incident response teams to get wrecks off the road, (3) traffic light synchronization along U.S. 1, or (4) more sensors and monitors to measure, and respond to, traffic flow. (If these options have been considered, they have never made it into newspaper accounts.)
If I might speak even more boldly, I might suggest that a corridor authority should have input into land use planning along the corridor. City councils and boards of supervisors tend to consider the impact of their decisions only upon their own localities. Someone needs to analyze impacts that spill over municipal borders. It is not yet clear how well the Virginia Department of Transportation can fulfill that function — there’s that bugaboo of trust. As long as the authorities are transparent and accountable, citizens and politicians may trust a regional authority to better represent their interests than “Richmond” does.
(Hat tip: Jim Wamsley.)
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