Prompted by Amy Gardner and Rosalind Helderman’s article on transportation and the governor’s race in the Post today, I’m left wondering when the grownups will show up to deal with this state’s transportation problems. We’re facing an enormous fiscal disaster regarding transportation. We’re less than ten years away from infrastructure that starts to become useless, from the end of any new road construction in Virginia. The whole Byrd concept of state-funded transportation is about to come to a screeching halt. I drove from New Market to Albany (and back) on I-81 this weekend, and about the most alarming sight that I saw the whole way was immediately after crossing back into Virginia, seeing a sign that said “Next rest stop: 122 miles.” We might as well put up a big “Tourists can go to hell” sign.
The sole solution to this is a tax hike. No amount of “cutting the fat” out of VDOT will do the trick. That can come in whatever form you like. We can turn the roads over to private enterprise, so that it’ll cost us five bucks to drive to the grocery store. We can let localities enact local transit taxes to fund their own improvements. We can enact a rational gasoline tax. (To quote the president of the Chamber of Commerce on gas taxes, “just damn do it.”) We can enact a regressive tax on everybody. You can do it however you want, but there’s no getting around that roads cost a lot of money and that money is going to come out of taxpayers’ pockets.
In the governor’s race, we have Creigh Deeds saying that he’ll solve the problem, but he’s got no funding plan and says he doesn’t intend to come up with one. Hardly encouraging. And we have Bob McDonnell, who proposes just taking the money from schools and putting a toll on the interstates at Virginia’s border, two ideas that are staggering in their ignorance and foolishness. Deeds can’t get elected if he says he’ll do the only viable thing and increase taxes, and McDonnell clearly has no real intention of solving the problem (or, worse, he actually believes he can pay for roads by defunding schools). Deeds wins on points, but that says absolutely nothing good about the electorate or Virginia’s political climate.
Gov. Gerry Bailies was the last guy to fix transportation—or, at least, stick a shim in it. Some enterprising reporter ought to sit down with him and get him to explain how he pulled it off, and how he proposes that it be done this time around.
Or don’t fix transportation. I don’t care. I really only drive to and from town, and that brief stretch of two-lane road will hold up for years to come. (After driving to Virginia Beach last month, I intend to go to great lengths to avoid driving to Hampton Roads foreverish.) Every year that things get worse is another year that the ranks of eastern Virginia supporters of a tax increase will swell. I’m not sure that helps Democrats, but it sure does make anti-tax Republicans look foolish.
As a Deeds supporter, I’m not at all troubled by his refusal to be specific about transportation funding. I have a hunch that his plan is, in a nutshell — when the economy picks up, tax revenues will rise, and we’ll be ok.
How does McDonnell’s plan “defund” schools?
McDonnell’s plan is more than just those two things. He has spoken on a number of occasions of his support for the PPTA. And my understanding of his speeches on this is that he intends to use PPTA for more road maintenance and construction. It will just be in private hands and tolled. That is currently how the Capital Beltway is being expanded in Virginia; those extra lanes are HOT. I-95 will soon be enjoying the same, when the same company extends transforms the existing HOV lanes into HOT lanes that will extend to a little past Fredericksburg. They will even build new bus terminals that just directly connect to the HOT lanes (oh boy!). And both will employ congestion pricing to ensure the lanes remain free flowing (well at least until you need to cross the Potomac anyway).
So, I think he does have a real plan. He is just not talking about it because it is not popular. Indiana, Texas and Chicago and many other places have jumped on this bandwagon. This makes it so easy for politicians. They don’t need to raise taxes or tolls and they get a short term revenue boost and maybe even profit-sharing. They create a strict rules based process that includes a few public info session dressed up as “public input.” The process lacks a lot of transparency until the deal is basically already done. And that’s when the “public input” occurs. At which point, citizens are saddled with a lease longer than their lifespans. It’s a plan and it would probably work.
But then localities weren’t rushing to raise taxes when given the option in the original hb3202. And I can’t imagine a hike in the gas tax would be popular either. Also, for NoVA anyway, more transportation dollars alone will not solve our transportation problems.
As a long-range driver, I would have to say that (from my own experiences) the roads in VA are in much, much better condition than many other states.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, but it’s possible there might not be money to fund NEW projects, while not doing non-essential “repairs.” What exactly was wrong with the vast majority of 29 that just got ripped up and re-paved?
How much did that run? Was that money well-spent? Maybe it was just me, but I never noticed ANY problems in those areas prior to the re-pave. Maybe I’m totally screwy, but it seems like that money could have been wiser spent.
Americans have a Constitutional Right to cheap gasoline. Misters Bush and Cheney understood this simple Truth, and sought to secure the world’s second largest oil field in our name, using the tools we gave them. The estimated surcharge to the taxpayer is $2 Trillion…but hey, cheap oil ain’t cheap!
Until aspiring highway engineer and Virginia state Senator Mark Obenshain can fully dig out the waste, fraud and abuse at VDOT, and return fiscal balance, I suggest that all good Virginians simply outfit themselves with a 5,500 lbs. chassis, heavy suspension vehicle,own the potholes, and prevail against other agressive gridlocked drivers.
And let me remind weak-kneed Liberals like Jim Webb, and Creigh Deeds that while they see our prison population as a glass-half-full, Bob McDonnell sees our prisoner population as the salvation of our rest areas. “Captive Labor, a Virginia Tradition for 365 years!”
This is an excellent rant. Tax increases are indeed the only way to go on roads, overall, and a fuel tax is far and away the most rational means of generating road-building revenue.
The reader who places all faith in public-private financing and HOT lanes should consider that such devices present solutions only to certain types of traffic problems. It may well be that the Beltway will be much more drivable once there’s congestion pricing on a portion of it – but those benefits will accrue only to those who can afford to buy them. In other words, tolled roadways are a blatantly regressive solution. We’ll have moved dramatically away from the notion of transportation infrastructure as a public good. Which, perhaps, is necessary – but we should be plain about it at the outset.
Meanwhile more rural roadways, bridges, etc. will never be sustained through tolling, and the statewide political will to sustain them will be, if anything, damaged by switching to a toll model on the prominent high-volume commuter routes in NoVa and HR.
Virginia’s looming roads crisis is a symptom of a broader problem. I think maybe it’s generational. For at least two decades now the general populace in this country has stubbornly believed in a free lunch. Maybe longer – see e.g. California’s Prop 13. And the elected leadership, state and especially federal, has only encouraged that belief. The chickens are going to come home to roost one way or another.