If you missed this article at Bacon's Rebellion, I strongly recommend it. The subtitle says it all: "The unraveling of Virginia's transportation funding plans could be a blessing if it prompts lawmakers to wean the Commonwealth from its auto-centric, sprawl-inducing policies."
I couldn't agree more. The fact is, building more roads (or expanding existing ones) in the absence of an integrated "smart growth" approach simply leads to more sprawl and more gridlock, essentially wasting the money that was just spent on the new (or expanded) roads. That's anything but "smart." It's also anything but what Tim Kaine ran on in 2005, when he talked about tying transportation development to land use planning much more tightly than it had been. Whatever happened to that pledge? Good question, but the fight over the proffer system in this year's General Assembly was highly revealing. Essentially, as the Virginia League of Conservation Voters pointed out, "SB 768 would still subsidize sprawl." That's the last thing we need in Virginia, that's for sure.
Anyway, here's the Bacon's Rebellion article's concluding paragraph, which pretty much sums it all up:
In summary, road-building is a worthless endeavor without land-use reform. If policymakers are serious about lessening Virginia's dependence upon automobiles, petroleum and roads, it is critical to move beyond tax-and-spend grandstanding to change the land use patterns that generate so much traffic demand. Otherwise, I fear, the transportation crisis will prove the undoing of Virginia's world-beating, competitive business environment. It's time the taxpayers to stop subsidizing the root causes of our transportation predicament, and insist that Virginia land either be used efficiently or that it be properly paid for.
Read the entire article here Great job by Michael Cecire.
We talk about transit, Metro, and TOD, but really those can only be retrofitted to a degree and won't be a panacea for everyone. For the folks who live way out in the exurbs, none of this is really going to apply - the densities out there are far too low for any of this to be of any real use. What that means in the long run isn't that clear to me.
There would still be some market for exurban homes. People who can telecommute on a regular basis, and retirees come to mind. In theory one could use the exurban home as a weekend home, and have a small condo/apartment in the city, but that only works if you don't have kids, and if you don't stretch yourself financially to the limit to buy the house.
There is indeed a growing body of opinion that calls the suburban model one of the costliest and least intelligent allocations of resources in history. This, of course, is derided as one more liberal elitist piece of trash by the ever-predictable wordsmiths of the Republican party, but it has the uncomfortable ring of truth. This story is going to play out politically in many ways in the near future, ways which may be artfully disguised. I think it may be showing up to some extent already in Prince William in the form of anti-immigrant policies.
I don't really see how we get to some ideal where we all live in pedestrian based communities. First, the state has to give up the Dillon Rule, but that isn't happening under the current GA. Then you have to have politicians willing to make far-sighted, difficult choices, a characteristic not common to them. To my earlier point, politicians need to address the current concerns of their constituents (i.e. traffic solutions now). And you have to have a public willing to adopt this model. Do people really want to give up their 2000+ sq ft home? Are people really familiar with how density development works in places like Japan or Europe? These are a lot of hurdles. On top of that, are the county governments of PW and Loudon okay with losing their residents (and tax base) to density developments closer in?
Unless we can somehow bridge the partisan divide and work together, but this year's legislative session doesn't give me much hope. Whatever is going to be with traffic in this area is going to be. I don't think we have beat LA yet and they still manage to attract growth and expand economic opportunity.
http://users.adelphia.net/~lef...
that discussed it, and is relevant to the situation here in Virginia. They talk about whether Dillon rule is to blame for sprawl or not, and they conclude this:
Many commentators, however, feel that Dillon's Rule is not to blame for sprawl in Virginia. Timothy Lindstrom, staff attorney with the Piedmont Environmental Council, identifies five major factors contributing to lack of effective local planning. First, local officials lack the political will to use the authority that local governments presently hold. Second, Lindstrom asserts that legal defeats in the 1970's have made local governments unreasonably timid. Third, local governments fail to keep track of the cumulative effect of numerous piecemeal planning decisions. Fourth, many municipalities have zoning ordinances which allow far more development than they need or even can imagine. Finally, Lindstrom points to decisions by the Virginia Department of Transportation as a factor that "overpowers" even good local planning.