The Roanoke Times editorial page has consistently supported Business As Usual transportation policies of tax-build, tax-build. I once deemed its writers impervious to logic. But now Dan Radmacher has proven me wrong. Dan hasn’t totally embraced the side of goodness and light, but at least he has glimpsed it. Indeed, he has demonstrated that he understands the arguments we have been making, even if, in the final analysis, he gives other considerations greater weight.
In a column published this morning, “What If We’re Having the Wrong Transportation Debate?,” Dan does a good job of summarizing the thrust of the arguments I’ve been making in Bacon’s Rebellion. He even agrees that my arguments have merit and should be part of the mix of any long-term solution to Virginia’s transportation problems.
Thank you, Dan, you are a gentleman and a scholar.
Here’s where he parts company. “If the state has been building an autocentric infrastructure for the last 50 years,” he asks, “how long will it take to replace and rebuild that infrastructure into something more suited for the expensive-energy world of tomorrow? Finally, what do we do in the meantime?”
Legitimate questions. If other proponents of raising taxes and adding more transportation capacity framed the issue this way, I would have much more respect for their arguments. Here’s how I would respond to Dan’s question.
First, it won’t take 50 years of building functional human settlement patterns to ameliorate traffic congestion. New projects with the right balance of housing/jobs/retail/amenities, set in the right location, and utilizing the right type of urban design, can transform transportation-inefficient neighborhoods into transportation-efficient neighborhoods and take cars off roads as soon as they’re built. So what if it takes 50 years to reap 100 percent of the benefit? In five years, we can reap 10 percent of the benefit — and that’s enough to cut significantly into projected travel demand.
Second, there are strategies that will allow us to cope until the fundamental land use reforms take hold on a widespread scale: using tolls to finance new construction, embracing telework, liberating mass transit from innovation-stifling government monopolies, adopting congestion tolls to encourage people to seek transportation alternatives like carpooling, investing in corridor management and Intelligent Transportation Systems. None of these alternative strategies will take “decades” to put into place or to make a difference.
At some point, Virginia will have to raise its gasoline tax in order to fund the rising cost of road maintenance. But not yet. There is plenty of inefficiency to be wrung out of VDOT’s maintenance spending by implementing asset-based management tools and outsourcing maintenance to the private sector. Only when those efficiencies have been exhausted should we consider raising the gasoline tax.
Thanks for asking.