Private industry is showing interest in financing and building a new U.S. 460, Peter Bacque with the Richmond Times-Dispatch is reporting. Tidewater Skanska, a subsidiary of Swedish construction giant Skanska AB, has committed to making a proposal to improve the 55-mile highway between U.S. 58 in Suffolk and Interstate 295 near Petersburg. The Virginia Department of Transportation, which is orchestrating the project, is hoping for at least two competing proposals.
With no public money available, improvements would have to be financed through tolls. The problem is that the market seems unlikely to support the $9.70 per vehicle it would cost to travel the full length of the road. Needless to say, residents of hamlets like Zuni and Wakefield who use 460 as a local thoroughfare will be none too happy with paying tolls every time they pull onto the road.
To offset sky-high tolls, Bacque says, VDOT is encouraging innovative financing schemes such as supporting “economic development opportunities.”
Bacque did not enumerate those opportunities in his article, but they could well be tied to major port expansions slated for Hampton Roads. Moffat & Nichol, an engineering consulting firm, prepared a study for the Virginia Port Authority last year advocating development of a major intermodal park off U.S. 460 as a way to handle an anticipated 900,000 additional containers annually expected to move through the ports. Those containers would require between 20 million and 60 million square feet of additional distribution space, employ 9,000 people directly and generate $788 million in wages from direct and indirect jobs.
I’m normally a big fan of toll-driven projects on the principle that users should pay for transportation improvements. And I’m all in favor of a project that would enable the expansion of Virginia’s ports and improve employment prospects for the rural Southside counties along U.S. 460. But I’m also wary of the potential for an upgraded U.S. 460 to act as a wick for the expansion of more hop-scotch, disconnected, low-density development out of Hampton Roads — a pattern of development that would negate many of the benefits of the economic development.
If the Kaine administration wants to align transportation and land use planning, a good place to start would be with projects, like this one, that emanate from the administration itself. Any evaluation of the competing proposals needs to consider the impact not just on traffic counts and toll financing but local human settlement patterns.