In early September, we profiled the efforts of Spotsylvania County build its way out of its transportation woes — voters last year approved a $144 million bond referendum. (See “Spotsy Turvy,” Sept. 8, 2006.) In theory, jurisdictions that take on prime responsibility for building and maintaining their own roads will make a greater effort to support transportation-efficient human settlement patterns. Trouble was, I observed back then, there wasn’t much evidence of such development in Spotsylvania.
Now we’ve gone back for a closer look. There still isn’t much transportation-efficient development, but that’s mainly because previous zoning decisions created a pipeline of unfortunate development. Land use planning was so basic that Spotsylvania County didn’t even have a land-use map to show what kind of development was supposed to go where. As Bob Burke reports today in our update, “Spotsy on the Spot” (I’ll take the blame for the bad puns in the headlines):
Without a land-use map, “what do you measure a rezoning against?” asks Ric Goss, the county’s planning director, who arrived in May 2003 after the current comprehensive plan was already written. “If you don’t have a land-use plan that tells you where you want to go, how do you make these decisions?”
The good news for Spotsylvania residents is that the current Board of Supervisors is getting serious about changing the dysfunctional development patterns. In addition to creating a new map, supervisors are considering the traffic impact of rezoning requests, concentrating development around transportation corridors, encouraging mixed use, promoting transit-oriented development and permitting higher densities. All moves in the right direction.
Given the backlog of bad development, however, traffic is likely to get worse before it gets better — even with that $144 million to spend on roads. Let’s hope that voters don’t draw the wrong conclusions and blame land use reforms which haven’t even been implemented yet.