Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Editorial: Virginia's road to nowhere
The state's failures in transportation policy and funding are evident in gridlock projections for the D.C. suburbs.
From the RoundTable blog
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If Northern Virginia commuters were canaries in coal mines, they'd already have fallen over dead. Their bodies would be slumped over steering wheels along traffic-clogged arteries, giving mute warning to those coming behind: Go back! This isn't working.
But developers, homebuyers and their elected representatives are intentionally blind to the signs.
The region's roads already are overwhelmed by workers driving, mainly solo, to jobs clustered around the nation's capital, then back to suburban homes spread ever farther away. Now pressure is on to intensify the problem: Developers propose building up to 28,000 homes on largely undeveloped land west of Dulles International Airport in Loudoun County.
Virginians in every part of the state have something to learn from the ensuing debate.
If supervisors open up rural west Loudoun County to large-scale development, the Virginia Department of Transportation warns, the resulting traffic would paralyze roads in the rest of the county and in neighboring localities. The road costs to avoid gridlock easily could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars -- in addition to the billions already slated for extending the region's Metrorail to Dulles and widening major highways.
Proponents argue that VDOT's projections ignore the roads that developers have proffered to try to get the local rezoning they need. But the transportation department is looking through a larger lens, at the regional impact. That broader view is the one that local boards throughout the state must begin to take.
Virginia lawmakers now must give the localities tools and incentives to act regionally when making development decisions that will have an impact well beyond a city or county line.
Local governments need more power to consider transportation as a factor in land-use decisions. Gov. Tim Kaine supports that idea. But he spent little political capital on it while he focused this year on getting new, much-needed transportation tax revenues from the General Assembly -- thus far, to no effect.
Lawmakers need to act with greater foresight on both counts when they meet in special session later this year. But they and the voters they represent first must be convinced that Virginia is not going to be OK if it just goes along as it has.
They should look at Loudoun County, where landowners want to sell, developers want to build, potential homeowners want to buy -- and commuters are looking at as many as six hours of gridlock every day.
The canaries are dying.
