by James A. Bacon
A century ago, developers set up street car lines to provide transportation access for inhabitants of the housing and commercial projects they were building. A new neighborhood wouldn’t sell if people couldn’t reach it. By necessity, transportation and land use planning went hand in hand. But when governments took over transportation responsibilities, developers started building wherever they could find a good plot of land, knowing that someone else would bear pay the cost of providing roads and transit service. The disconnect beween transportation and land use planning has plagued the country ever since.
‘The Innovative DOT,” a handbook of policy options for state transportation departments published by Smart Growth America, focuses on ways to re-establish that transportation-land use connection. The discussion contains a number of suggestions, some of them useful and some distasteful to a smart-growth conservative such as myself.
To my mind, the authors go overboard advocating the building of partnerships, the coordination of government agencies and the enactment of new mandates and requirements — actions which, it seems to me, would accomplish very little except entangle decision-making in even more delay and red tape. Sometimes, more planning is not the answer.
But the SGA handbook does proffer one idea in this chapter that conservatives might be comfortable with: Conduct more scenario planning. The handbook explains:
Traditional long-range transportation planning efforts at the state and regional level typically treat development patterns as a constant, not a variable. Building a plan involves projecting status quo trends and determining future infrastructure needs based on the results.
Scenario planning differs in that it involves modeling and analyzing multiple scenarios for future growth in a region, typically a baseline scenario that reflects current transportation and land use trends and several alternate scenarios designed to illustrate how different building and development patterns might impact those trends. This approach makes the outcomes of various future growth scenarios — such as impacts on infrastructure costs, congestion, VMT, and emissions — transparent to decision makers and stakeholders.
Virginia transportation planning typically has fit the “traditional” model described by SGA, without benefit of “what if” scenarios to explore the impact of different policy approaches. That’s a function of the fact that local governments control land use policy, and the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) passively receives input from local governments into its projections of future land use trends.
One positive change, enacted during the Kaine administration, required VDOT to conduct traffic-impact analyses of projects over a certain size to inform local government zoning decisions. I have seen no analysis on how useful those impact studies have been, but I suspect they would be of limited value precisely because they don’t provide “what if” scenarios for local councils and boards to consider.
Transportation and land-use models are big, cumbersome and expensive — too expensive for all but the largest jurisdictions to develop and maintain on their own. VDOT has the resources to build such a beast and it could spread the cost over all of Virginia’s jurisdictions. It would make sense, I believe, for VDOT to provide transportation-land use modeling capabilities both for internal purposes and to guide local decision making. Building a state-of-the-art system would cost millions but potentially save billions.
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