The state Senate has approved a budget that strips out a major taxes-for-transportation provision that had bogged down talks with the House of Delegates. The chances are vastly improved that the Senate and House can agree upon a budget for fiscal 2007-2008 without triggering a government shutdown. Assuming that compromise is now attainable, what’s next for transportation?
My sense is that the terms of debate have decisively shifted. The logic of the situation dictates that legislators’ focus will move from “how do we pay for more roads and rail?” to “how do we encourage motorists to drive less?”
The Senate leadership, backed by the Warner and Kaine administrations, narrowly defined traffic congestion as a matter of insufficient transportation capacity. The solution: Raise revenues to increase capacity. The ultimate expression of this thinking was the VTrans2025 report published by the Warner administration, which asserted that the state faced a funding shortfall of $108 billion over the next 20 years — an average of $5.4 billion a year. That document was predicated upon the assumption that the state would match increases in travel demand with construction of new capacity, either roads or rail. But Senate proposals to increase taxes by roughly $1 billion a year would have fallen far short. According to the Senate’s own calculus, the sum was a mere fraction of what was needed.
The irrefutable conclusion is that Virginia’s transportation policy — the policy that has guided the state for a half century or more — is broken. Sustaining the current policy framework requires massive sums of money that the political system is not willing to disgorge. There is no escaping the necessity to re-think transportation from top to bottom.
The first assumption that must be abandoned is what Ed Risse refers to as the “Private Vehicle Mobility Myth,” the notion that individuals have a right to drive wherever they want, whenever they want, in their own private cars, without suffering the inconveniences of congestion. In Virginia, that myth has run off the road and slammed into the brick wall of tax resistance.
The second assumption that must be abandoned is the idea that a transportation policy geared toward cheap fuel is practical, or even desirable, in an era of moderately priced fuel, never mind in an era of expensive fuel. Long commutes are one thing when gasoline sells at $1 per gallon and quite another when it sells for $3 gallon. As drivers change their behavior, transportation policy must adapt.
Instead of feeding the driving “habit” — the average Vehicle Miles Driven per licensed driver has increased 70 percent over the past 25 years — by continuously adding to capacity, it is clearer than ever that the Commonwealth must devise policies that enable people to drive less. In other words, it’s time to beginning managing transportation demand. And that means, above all else, changing the scattered, disconnected, low-density pattern of development that has prevailed in Virginia since the 1950s, and gotten increasingly worse with each passing decade.
If the Senate and the Kaine administration want to devise a “stable, long-term solution” to Virginia’s transportation woes, then land use reform is where they must start. The laws enacted in 2006 represent a positive step forward but only a tentative one. Much more needs to be done.