Posts about Bob Chase

Highway-building won't save the planet

NVTA has been pushing for an Outer Beltway through the rural piedmont for decades, and apparently believes we should widen every other highway ad infinitum. Landowners at the edges of the developed region fund NVTA, and the edge highways they constantly lobby for will open up opportunities to create large subdivisions of single-family homes (exactly the types of housing in the locations the region doesn't need right now).

That certainly won't decrease congestion in the medium or long term, though. It will probably increase it, because thousands more commuters will then joint the predominantly east-west commuter routes to jobs.

Even if it does reduce congestion for a short while, that doesn't save the planet one bit. A review by Portland State University found congestion reduction programs often don't reduce emissions. While cars do pollute less when not in traffic, any congestion reduction also entices people to drive more, adding new emissions as well.

Transportation made up 36% of Fairfax's energy use in 2006. The national report "Growing Cooler," by Smart Growth America and the Center for Clean Air Policy, and "Cool Communities" by the Coalition for Smarter Growth in the DC region, demonstrate convincingly that smart growth and transit-oriented development are the best tools to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector. The compact development of smart growth also contributes to better building energy efficiency as well.

NVTA alert warps reality

NVTA's "Save the Planet. Expand the Highway Network" alert cites Fairfax County's Private Sector Energy Task Force, which, it claims, concluded:

Due to the need for transit to use highways and the need for most trips in the County to continue to use individual vehicles, a highway program to eliminate or at least drastically reduce congestion, provides the county with the largest opportunity for transportation energy reduction in the short and medium-term.

The NVTA alert also notes that "The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors recently endorsed unanimously its Private Sector Energy Task Force's recommendations." That certainly implies the board endorsed the above statement.

Besides the fact that the recommendation is dead wrong, NVTA is misleading on several fronts. This isn't really a recommendation of the task force at all, the county board certainly did not endorse this statement, and the report doesn't really only recommend highways as the solution to all problems.

The statement that the county should fix congestion with indiscriminate road-building appears nowhere in the task force's presentation to the Board of Supervisors or its formal recommendations. It does appear in a long document of "supporting material" which makes a very large number of different and sometimes conflicting suggestions.

Fairfax supervisors don't agree with highway agenda; neither did the task force

At Fairfax County's annual Revitalization Conference on October 22, Fairfax Chairman Sharon Bulova offered a very different vision than the one NVTA claims to ascribe to her. Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth attended, and reports that Chairman Bulova opened the conference with a strong statement that the county must focus addressing traffic congestion through land use policy, in particular by revitalizing and redeveloping its old commercial corridors.

The task force's membership happens to include people like Lon Anderson from AAA Mid-Atlantic, and Leo Schefer of the Washington Airports Task Force, who has long lobbied for the Outer Beltway. It's little surprise that a long list of supporting information from a task force containing professional road lobbyists and longtime road boosters includes a few road lobbyist statements. It also contains a great many recommendations that contradict the wider-roads-everywhere agenda.

Even in the congestion section, the supporting information document's long list of suggestions includes making it easier for people within 1 mile of rail stations to reach transit, and using road elements like roundabouts to improve flow without widening roads. The document advocates for tax credits and parking incentives for fuel-efficient vehicles, and encouraging more children to bicycle to school.

It's actually more telling that the task force demurred from endorsing the bad idea of focusing on expanding capacity to reduce energy use. Instead, there's a very vague recommendation asking the board to "review the transportation report" and possibly convey some findings to the Council of Governments.

Besides, the task force wasn't supposed to be about country transportation policy. A Fairfax County official said the goal was to find ways the private sector could help improve energy efficiency within the private sphere. It wasn't a transportation panel and its charge was never to try to set the county's priorities on transportation.

But for the people in Northern Virginia who single-mindedly pursue the Outer Beltway year in and year out, any task force seems to be an opportunity to push their same ideas. The Board of Supervisors should be cautious about these task forces or permanent panels, like the task force's suggestion to create a Public-Private Energy Alliance, if some members constantly try to hijack such forums to serve their own transportation and development ends.

Maryland officials explained that an outer Beltway isn't a priority and conflicts with smart growth and environmental principles. But they were the only ones saying that in the original article. They got scant attention. The broadcast audio paraphrased a few objections, but in nearly every case followed up with a sentence beginning with "But," implying that the arguments against the Outer Beltway deserve only rebuttal, not serious consideration.

The idea that arguments against the Outer Beltway are inconsequential is dangerously wrong. An Outer Beltway would primarily serve the large landowners in rural Virginia who want to fill their property with more cookie-cutter subdivisions. It actually won't help current commuters. VDOT's own 2004 study showed that 92% of drivers in the I-270 and Dulles corridors travel to and from the core, or along the current Beltway. An outer crossing wouldn't serve them.

Even for those who could use an Outer Beltway, a free or subsidized road would just induce its own demand, spurring new development in current farmland and filling up the road with new drivers stuck in new congestion. A toll road would have to charge a lot of money to pay back its costs. AAA would subsequently whine, as they are doing with the ICC, that it's too expensive and not enough people are using it.

The region needs better transit solutions between Bethesda and Tysons and the Metro lines in each corridor, not the failed Outer Beltway ideas of 50 years ago. The region has turned down these highways, over and over, because they simply won't solve our transportation troubles.

AAA is not a neutral source

It's not surprising that Bob Chase and AAA are still pushing an Outer Beltway as a transportation panacea, but it is disappointing when reporters fall for their pitch. Sadly, too many transportation reporters view AAA as some kind of neutral party.

AAA's helpful press releases on gas price trends and holiday weekend traffic let reporters fill column space without doing a lot of work. There's nothing wrong with those stories, but many reporters then fail to question when the organization's press releases attack officials on policy grounds, like AAA's broadsides against Mayor Gray's traffic safety camera initiative, or Governor Martin O'Malley saying that an Outer Beltway is not the priority for Maryland.

Bob Chase has a high-powered, expensive PR firm, Dewey Square, pitching far and wide his aggressive push for more and more highway lanes at the region's edge. Nonprofit advocates voicing alternative views, like the Coalition for Smarter Growth and Sierra Club, have to make do with much thinner resources. Good reporters put pitches from PR firms in their appropriate context and realize that they represent the interests of well-funded groups, not necessarily truth.

Unfortunately, we've seen several cases of journalists falling short on balanced coverage of late. WAMU stepped over the line recently with a brief morning story that only quoted AAA, and no pedestrian safety advocates, on traffic cameras. Reporter Armando Trull adapted an AP story which unquestioningly repeated the slant from The Washington Times.

AP reporters don't sign their articles, so we don't know who broadcast this biased story out on the wires without thinking. Besides WAMU, Fox5's Will Thomas also rewrote the traffic camera story, and the Washington Business Journal aggregated it, both without questioning its one-sided premise.

There's nothing wrong with opinion journalism—our articles are all opinions—but people know it. The Washington Times is mostly opinion, too, and so is anything from AAA, but many reporters and others mistake both. Running editorials on the Outer Beltway is one thing, but news reporters can and should stop regurgitating AAA's line on policy questions, and should look more critically at other outlets' stories when they don't.

WAMU worked to fix its mistake

After getting an earful from myself and a number of environmental and smart growth advocates on Friday, WAMU agreed with the criticism. Metro Connection Editor Tara Boyle told me on the record, "In looking at story a second time, we think the critique that we needed a bit more balance is real, and there is merit to these critiques."

The reporter, Martin Di Caro, spoke to Stewart Schwartz of CSG and myself, and added a section to both the audio and text versions with quotes from both of us. Di Caro has written many other, good-quality transportation stories in his 2 months at WAMU thus far, and I look forward to many more from him.

During our discussion, Di Caro mentioned that he's currently working at WAMU thanks to a grant. Their former transportation reporter, David Schultz, was also only at WAMU for a short time. It's terrific that WAMU is getting money to cover transportation issues, but it would be far better if they could rustle up more consistent funding to keep a single reporter more permanently. Transportation is not a trivial subject, and it's very helpful to have reporters able to develop some expertise in the beat. When a reporter is new, they're more likely to fall victim to AAA-itis or the related affliction, PR-rep-itis.

Meanwhile, WAMU deserves praise for looking at the story, recognizing that it was one-sided, and taking steps to do better with coverage now and in the future.

The connectivity standards reformed a key mistake in suburban development: building neighborhoods composed primarily of cul-de-sacs. In many neighborhoods, there's just one way in and out for any homeowner, to one or maybe two major arterial roads.

While this gives many homeowners the ability to live on a quiet street, it creates problems for everyone. With few entry and exit points, all the traffic gets focused on single intersections at the arterials, causing significant congestion. Kids can't walk or bike to school or even friends' houses when the only route involves going out to the busiest part of the neighborhood and along a wide road designed for high-speed traffic.

And it costs taxpayers. These neighborhoods are very expansive to plow for snow and time-consuming to navigate for ambulances and fire trucks. Subdivisions in Virginia had to wait days or weeks for plowing during the major snows last year because of the way the plows had to constantly backtrack, and people couldn't get out of their neighborhoods without any alternate routes.

Older suburban areas still primarily comprise single-family houses while providing a grid that spreads traffic around and offers many safe routes for non-motorized users. Areas like Columbia, Greenbelt and Reston win constant plaudits for designing suburban areas that lack these shortcomings, with paths to walk and bike that also build community.

The connectivity rules revolved around a simple premise: Once a developer builds a subdivision, VDOT (except in a few counties) then takes over responsibility for maintaining and plowing the roads. Therefore, they should be able to require certain standards to avoid developers pushing all the costs off onto the taxpayer. The General Assembly in 2007 authorized a change, and Virginia briefly jumped far ahead of most states with this progressive policy.

Last week, however, the Commonwealth Transportation Board, a policymaking body appointed by the Governor, voted to drop the old standards, especially the "Connectivity Index" which created a score based on the degree to which a street network was connected or isolated.

Instead, they set some rules for the number of connections out of a subdivision and onto main streets. A development of 200 homes needs 2 connections, though 1 can be a "stub end" road which connects to an as-yet-undeveloped area. Each additional 200 homes will only require one additional connection. It's better than nothing, but still means a new 200-house development can have just 1 way in and out.

Also, a subdivision can add a "collector road" which gives double credit if that road is part of a county transportation plan. So a developer could build 400 houses, all on cul-de-sacs off one major road through the center, and connect that road only at 2 points to major arterials. A typical suburban house can generate about 10 car trips per day, so there will be 4,000 turning movements onto and off of those 2 arterials every day. It's a recipe for major traffic that will harm every other resident who uses those roads.

While Virginia is weakening rules to create better road networks in new suburbs, it's neglecting established areas in favor of greenfield development and traffic-inducing megaprojects. Governor McDonnell and Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton have made it clear they don't want to contribute to the Silver Line Phase II, even if the federal government, Fairfax, and Loudon all put in more money.

Meanwhile, but McDonnell and Connaughton are eagerly borrowing money to build large freeways like the damaging bypass around Charlottesville or to push an Outer Beltway. Much of the region's future growth will happen in Tysons Corner, but it's not getting transportation improvements it needs. And transit along the Route 1/Richmond Highway corridor is nowhere on the agenda.

Virginia could get far more bang for its precious transportation buck by focusing on local street connections, and most of all repairing crumbling roads and bridges. Instead, the McDonnell administration seems bent on repeating the mistakes of the 1950s: building unsustainable transportation networks at the periphery while letting a more central economic engine sputter. Then, it was center cities across America; now, it's Arlington, Alexandria and Tysons Corner which state officials are looking past instead of toward.

Tonight is an important meeting where Virginia residents can speak up about priorities. VDOT is having a public meeting to hear input on its 6-year priorities tonight, at the VDOT Northern Virginia District Office, 4975 Alliance Drive in Fairfax. Sadly, VDOT doesn't seem to think it's a priority to locate a meeting near Metro. An open house format starts at 6, and presentations by local officials at 6:30 followed by public testimony.

Bob Chase's Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, a group funded by greenfield developers in Virginia to lobby for roads that would feed suburban development on their land, has been pushing its members to attend and push for an Outer Beltway. Chase even argued, with an apparent straight face, that new highway lanes were more important than repairing crumbling bridges during a round of news stories last week concerning the dire condition of the nation's infrastructure.

It's important to get more residents who support good road connectivity, local street improvements, repairing crumbling infrastructure, pedestrian and bicycle projects, and local transit improvements to counter the sprawl lobbyists. If you can't attend, you can also send in written testimony at this Coalition for Smarter Growth page.

Roads are a very flexible form of transportation, but are inefficient in their use of space. Each car takes up a lot of room. The New York Subway's 22 tracks carry as many people as at least 167 lanes of car tunnels would.

If people drove evenly throughout the day, the road network would work optimally, but they don't. Buses and trains work better for moving people in a shorter time period to a small number of locations, because they cost more to run but can fit more people in a smaller space.

There are ways to make the road more efficient. More people could occupy each car. That's the logic behind the HOV rules and slugging on I-395 and other roads. Thanks to slugging and high bus volume, 95/395 is one of the most efficient roadways for its size in the nation (but will actually get less efficient with HOT lanes).

Instead of pushing more carpooling, VDOT actually waived the HOV restrictions on its freeways on Tuesday. That doesn't make a lot of sense. It's like they just threw their hands up and said, "Wow, earthquake! Let's just ignore everything we do to make our roads work better!"

If we knew ahead of time that we'd have to evacuate DC in a hurry one day, but didn't know when, we might actually plan for stricter HOV restrictions than usual. Take a few main arteries and make them exclusively HOV-3 or HOV-4 for the evacuation. Ask workers and residents to find "evacuation buddies" who work in the same office or live in the same inner neighborhood. These people would share the car when evacuation time came.

Once those carpools get to suburban residential areas, people will have to get home, but depending on the type of disaster, just getting everyone out might be most critical. The drivers can give rides that one time to their passengers, or they can wait in places like libraries for family members to pick them up.

Buses could also use the HOV roads, allowing them to travel much faster back to commuter lots and make a return trip to pick up even more people.

Not surprisingly, advocates for more roads and sprawl, like the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, immediately jumped on the issue to call for new Potomac River bridges as part of their long attempts to build an Outer Beltway. Such bridges wouldn't actually alleviate existing traffic congestion, but would instead just drive more sprawl development and make the evacuation challenge that much harder.

During the earthquake, Ezra Klein cleverly tweeted, "This earthquake has clear policy implications that back up my previously held political opinions." That's certainly true for NVTA.

I actually learned something from the earthquake that doesn't back up previously-held opinions: we can't count on Metrorail for an emergency. Especially with today's safety concerns, Metro is going to err on the side of limiting its operations in unusual circumstances. That's probably the right move if it's not a matter of life and death. But it means we need to think about evacuations another way.

We also need to think about when evacuations are necessary. Often they're not. One of the best things the federal government can do is not to send everyone home at the exact same time. Instead, the response from OPM seems to be to pull the "everyone go home" handle at any sign of trouble. We know that this causes gridlock.

DDOT Director Terry Bellamy said at a press briefing, "You can never build your way out of an event. I know there was a lot of talk about building more bridges across to Virginia, buidling more bridges into Maryland, but you never know where the event is going to occur," the WBJ reported.

Transportation Planning Board coordinator Ron Kirby told the Post, "Not only can [sending everyone home at once] not be done, we should not try it. ... If you give [people] very good timely information, they are going to make their own decisions in ways, in general, that are going to be better for them and better for the system as a whole."

Kirby also faults Metro for not communicating more; he might not have been on Twitter, because they actually did an excellent job of communicating there. They also sent multiple press releases out over their press list throughout the afternoon and evening. If you were at a train station or on a bus, was communication good or bad there?

The best way of all to get home after a major event like an earthquake? Walk or bike, if you can.

If someone has been building these elements of infrastructure for 30 years, we could call them an "expert" on building that stuff. But should they alone decide what kind of towns we should build?

People are overwhelmingly saying, wait a minute, this isn't what we want. Housing prices in walkable areas like Logan Circle, Ballston, or Silver Spring are high and still rising because a lot of people want to live there but there isn't enough supply. We have lots of single-family, detached, suburban homes but not enough apartments and townhouses a short walk from shops, parks, and transit.

People are sending clear signals through their housing choices that they want walkable urbanism. Yet most (but not all) professionals working in the field are locked in to the ways they've been trained and the way they do things. That's where we get the crazy traffic engineer adherence to "standards" even when they make little sense, as this Strong Towns video so effectively parodied.

There's an important role for experts in identifying specific steps to implement a policy. Parochial political concerns become dangerous when making small-scale choices that can enrich indviduals, where the danger of corruption becomes strong. But when it comes to deciding the big picture, overarching directions, we need officials who listen to residents, not just make decisions based on how they've always done things.

The Washingtonian analogues of those experts are the ones Bob Chase and Rich Parsons consulted on their study that aimed to tell leaders what the regional transportation priorities should be (and coincidentally mirrored those priorities they were already pushing for). I spoke with Chase and Parsons last week, and they were adamant that they were just trying to find out the views of experts, devoid of politics.

They said they wanted "a pretty balanced, professional objective study about what works and what's not working well," to "take the local jurisdiction and state perspective out of it." In selecting their anonymous experts, they said they were "looking for people who take the politics out of it, and "intentionally selected people very senior, with 20 years of experience."

That doesn't change the fact that the questions guided people toward megaprojects, and that there's plenty of evidence the list had an exurban bias. Besides having a small number of people from DC, Chase and Parsons refused to tell me which counties the "experts" lived in.

But even had their sample been broader, there's a problem with saying that senior engineers should set transportation priorities. I'd definitely prefer an engineer with 20 years of experience to design a new road or transit line over someone who lacks a professional degree. I'd also prefer to have them tell me how much it will cost and what hydrological problems might arise.

I'd even welcome their input on where to put a line, but we shouldn't be setting priorities just on that basis. A transportation engineer is not responsible for thinking about the merits of different growth patterns, or their effect on people's health and happiness, or on the environmental costs.

Remember, Jane Jacobs got regular people to step up to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway when the "experts" were saying it was necessary. All of the conventional wisdom in the urban planning field at the time held that the road was the only way to make New York work in the modern age.

Should decisionmakers disregard input from the 23-year-old college grad who has a job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers but doesn't want to live in Fairfax County because there aren't walkable places with an urban vibe? What about the 75-year-old in Aspen Hill who's finding it harder to drive, hates that she has to travel 30 minutes to the Pike just to get to most kinds of retail, and wishes she could live in Bethesda but prohibited by expensive housing?

The Board of Trade has been pushing WMATA and local jurisdictions to excise elected officials from any decisionmaking authority on the WMATA Board. Sure, it's the experts and not the elected officials who should decide which contractor is best suited to replacing the broken track circuits. But I want officials who listen to riders to decide whether to cut weekend service. By a strictly performance-based metric, that service is relatively poor at cost recovery, but its benefits to the region go far beyond WMATA itself.

Now, with their survey of anonymous "experts," Chase and Parsons are going to be pressuring groups like the Transportation Planning Board to abdicate their traditional role in setting priorities and instead choose the megaprojects their "experts" picked, which happen to be the same ones they were already pushing for.

They'll say, as they told me, that local officials are too preoccupied with the immediate interests of their local jurisdiction to think "regionally." Instead, decisions about how to spend billions in transportation dollars over decades should go to the professionals, who won't think about the big picture of regional growth but rather just move as many cars or trains as fast as possible as far as possible.

The TPB and other officials should reject this idea. The input of professionals is useful, but far more so when those professionals can attach their names to their recommendations and everyone can weigh them knowing the biases and interests each person brings with them. The input of other people is important too, and our elected representatives, even if imperfect, are the ones best situated to make those choices.

The 2030 Group's high-powered PR firm, Dewey Square, touted the report yesterday in a press release that this would be "a first-ever comprehensive study of the most critical transportation priorities." But the survey does not actually study the transportation priorities. Instead, it only takes a poll of some anonymous people and then advocates for setting priorities on that basis.

In other news, a groundbreaking poll of "transportation experts" I just polled via Gmail Chat overwhelmingly agreed that a different set of priorities is more appropriate.

Chase and Parsons call for "performance-based measures" for transportation projects over "parochialism and politics." Absolutely. But as we've seen with the debates in Congress, the devil is in choosing the right measures.

Developers who own land far from people's jobs have been long promoting a "congestion" metric, which measures only the speed of automotive traffic, not the length of people's commutes. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has been working on more comprehensive "livability" standards which look at the actual quality of life that results from transportation investment, not just the net increase in paved miles.

Far better studies of regional priorities include those from the Council of Governments, whose scenario studies looked not only at vehicle speeds but overall land use and found that the biggest gains in improving commutes came from responsible land use, like developing underutilized Metro stations, addressing the east-west job divide in the region, and revitalizing existing, aging commercial corridors.

The COG Region Forward report, which all 22 area jurisdictions endorsed, shows that addressing land use and the imbalance between jobs and housing, along with supportive transit and transit-oriented development, are the top priorities. COG's scenario studies demonstrated that better land use planning offers the biggest bang for the buck in reducing the amount we have to drive.

These initiatives, as it happens, also involved many people who haven't already placed themselves at one extreme end of the spectrum on our region's transportation debate.

It's laughably easy to find ridiculous methodological holes in the survey. For example, only 9% of the experts are from DC despite there being a far greater share of commuting activity to, from, and within DC.

The anonymous so-called-experts first list of priorities put transit first. But then, Chase and Parsons asked them to pick "the single most important" project. That wording inherently steers people's thinking to "megaprojects," single large facilities like roads or whole new transit lines instead of the real places that can have the most bang for the buck, like local streetcar lines, roundabouts to smooth traffic, infill rail stations, bus priority, ped/bike investments and more.

But there should be no need to even enumerate the transparent lengths to which the authors go to steer conclusions toward their own preconceived ends. Regional leaders should laugh at this report simply because it pawns off an survey of 45 anonymous people handpicked by Chase and Parsons as the "First Ever Comprehensive Regional Transportation Study."

One useful nugget in the report is a list of current regional priorities, as some of the respondents saw it. For those of us who have monitored transportation planning in the region, these are indeed the projects state and local officials mention most often.

1. Corridor Cities Transitway
   
2. Purple Line
   
3. BRT or express bus network
   
4. I-270 HOT lanes
   
5. I-495 HOT lanes
   
6. MARC service expansion
   
7. Metro core capacity expansion
   
8. Metro system maintenance
   
9. DC streetcars
   
10. Silver Line

This list is Maryland-heavy, and Chase and Parsons note that more of their Maryland participants could identify clear priorities. (DC also has clear priorities, but they had relatively few DC participants, pushing its projects low on the overall list).

Chase and Parsons say this means the region lacks a clear set of priorities, and therefore everyone should adopt their priorities. But elected officials and staffs spend considerable time every year developing detailed priority lists to go into the region's Constrained Long-Range Plan. Virginia created the Transaction 2030 plan a few years ago and is working on an update, Transaction 2040.

That report lists far more than 3 or 4 megaprojects, because a few huge projects don't do much to really address transportation. Northern Virginia is a big place, and really improving mobility involves many smaller projects, addressing individual road bottlenecks, adding options like transit, carpooling, walking and bicycling, and maintaining our existing roads and transit so maintenance breakdowns don't happen and cause delays.

Virginia's priorities also feel more muddled today because local governments and current Secretary of Transportation don't agree on what the priorities should be. They should continue to debate the issues and work toward consensus. Chase, Parsons and their deep-pocketed funders, who would personally benefit from more sprawling development in outer areas, are just frustrated that this process of discussion isn't coalescing around the agenda they happen to have.

Fairfax Supervisor Cathy Hudgins, the current WMATA Board chair, came to Richmond to testify against the bill. She said that Northern Virginia governments are willing to give the state government some involvement in WMATA governance, but not at the expense of diminishing their own role. She asked the legislature to let the current process of discussion and negotiation within the WMATA Board and NVTC continue to a resolution.

None of the senators brought up the fact that Governor McDonnell has still sent no letter to Congress about the $150 million capital appropriation for needed repairs that's on the chopping block, but that's a great argument against writing it into law that he must get power over WMATA.

Chairman Charles Colgan (D-Manassas) was the only Democrat to support the bill; four of the five Republicans, none from Northern Virginia, also voted for it, and two were not present.

NVTC can still give a seat to Drake if they choose; the benefit of having NVTC decide to do it instead of the legislature mandating it is that NVTC could reverse course if the governor decides to cut back on the already-meager state financial support.

The Senate panel also killed the two "anti-livability" bills, which would essentially override regional transportation planning and enshrine six-Beltways booster Bob Chase's own transportation priorities into law.

They would have required VDOT to rank projects (HB1998) and prioritize funding (HB1999) based on just two factors: what moves traffic faster, and what aids evacuation in case of a disaster.

The evacuation argument is a common canard used to push road-building, but the fact is that no realistic amount of roads will let everyone in the DC region drive at the same time. As Senator Mary Margaret Whipple (D-Arlington) pointed out, DC's own disaster plans recognize that, and don't call for mass evacuation.

Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria representatives lobbied against HB1999, arguing that these transportation priorities should instead come from the existing processes through regional bodies that already make these decisions. The panel agreed on a party-line vote despite pressure from groups like the Price William Chamber of Commerce and the Apartment and Office Building Association.

Responding to questions from Senator Edward Houck (D-Spotsylvania), Finance Committee staff judged that HB1998 would have cost up to $5 million, and so no senator even made a motion to pass that bill.

News out of the legislature wasn't as good for bicycling, as the House rejected a number of bicycle bills including one to give Charlottesville permission to put contraflow bicycle lanes on one-way streets where the traffic and police departments feel it's appropriate.

The bill to require passing cyclists with three feet of space also died, as did a number of bills to limit cell phone use while driving.

He hasn't been lobbying his own party to keep the $150 million federal match, which if cut would also mean losing the $50 million from each of Virginia, Maryland, and DC. Or maybe McDonnell would just as soon redirect that money to roads?

Update: Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton told TBD yesterday that they would be sending a letter to Republican leaders "asking them to reconsider proposed cuts to Metro's capital improvement plan."

Update 2: TBD followed up, and McDonnell's office said they still haven't sent any letter, and that he's "concerned about the unsustainable rate of spending in Washington DC."

He sold his transportation plan as "the best opportunity to build roads," and has devoted only 11.5% of billions in borrowing to transit projects, which are mostly projects already underway anyway, like the Silver Line. He declined to even promise that Virginia would keep up its end of the federal-state capital funding agreement, keeping its $50 million coming as long as the feds deliver on their 150.

The Senate should think very hard before giving more power over Metro to officials in and from Richmond who have continually shown little to no interest in Metro.

Also, where's Frank? Rep. Frank Wolf's district contains much of the Silver Line in western Fairfax and Loudoun counties. He seem to have a lot of energy to ask for audits of the project's progress, but also declined to sign on to Gerry Connolly's amendment, even though he supported the funding in 1999.

Republican Tom Davis, Gerry Connolly's predecessor, was a primary driving force behind creating this deal in the first place. He was a much more moderate Republican than the House leadership today, but McDonnell is portraying himself as something other than an ideologue as well. Why are McDonnell and Wolf staying silent as the House GOP threatens to cripple Metro?

The Senate Finance Committee just "passed by for the day" HB2000, as well as HB1999, the terrible Bob Chase-backed bill to mandate that all transportation funding put highway widenings above all. However, if you live in Virginia, the Senators need your urging to defeat both bills. Email them now to ask them to defeat both HB2000 and HB1999.

The House did pass the bill letting bike and motorcycle riders go through stoplights if they've waited 2 minutes or 2 light cycles, and another clarifying that injuring someone after driving through a stop or yield sign or traffic light counts as reckless driving is still alive.

Two bad transportation bills suffered some likely-fatal wounds. HB2016, to consolidate three Northern Virginia transportation agencies and which was strongly opposed by most Northern Virginia representatives in both parties, was referred to the Joint Transportation Accountability Commission where it's expected to die. That's because one problem with consolidating these agencies is that each has taken on debt for various projects under various terms, and consolidating could create substantial legal headaches.

HB1999, perhaps the worst of all, would require that transportation spending follow the anti-livability "congestion" standard. The Transportation Committee referred it to Appropriations with no endorsement, which is tantamount to disapproving and makes it unlikely Appropriations will pass it. Its companion, HB1998, is the one that did pass in committee earlier in the week. 1998 forces VDOT to create lists of projects based on auto-centric "congestion" priorities, while 1999 forces spending to follow those lists.

The biggest fight will come over Governor McDonnell's "borrow money for roads" transportation plan. Smart growth and environmental groups came out against the plan, but powerful business groups are pushing it.

Under the old formulas, if a city wanted to build a rail line to an empty warehouse district, they wouldn't get funding, because nobody lives there and therefore the rail line wouldn't move anyone. But, of course, the whole point was to attract people to that district who would then ride the line.

This bill would mandate the road analogue of the old-style formula. It requires that VDOT exclusively prioritize "(i) the total amount of reduction in traffic congestion regionally and, separately, (ii) the amount of reduction in traffic congestion expected to be achieved per dollar cost of the project."

Say there's a congested roadway and two potential transportation projects. One would simply widen that roadway, temporarily reducing traffic but also spurring substantial new auto-dependent office parks 30-50 miles from many of the existing residents in the area, which will fill up the new lanes and make traffic even worse than it is. Another would do less for the roadway itself, but would make it possible to add jobs near the residents to drive economic growth without adding traffic. The second option is actually better for congestion in the long run, but this law would require VDOT prioritize the first.

As Dan pointed out this morning, parts of our region which have attracted fewer jobs have somewhat less stifling traffic than the areas with more jobs. Adding infrastructure to an area draws growth and investment. If this bill passes, Virginia would have to continue neglecting areas where better transportation would drive needed job growth, and instead would have to keep pumping dollars into more and more freeways for those areas where people live far from jobs, thus have to drive long distances, thus creating congestion.

Last night's snow also showed how living long distances from work can create serious problems for commuting during major snows. Some people faced up to 5-hour or even 8-hour commutes home. Virginia shouldn't be creating legal requirements to develop in patterns that will only set the stage for more of these horrific experiences.

Rather than throwing more money to exacerbate existing problems, Virginia should invest in growing cities and towns with jobs and housing close together. The COG Region Forward project aims to steer development around such "activity centers." Bob Chase and other outer-Beltway boosters are trying to head off this approach before it starts by taking the planning authority away from COG and regional governments and locking in old-fashioned planning mechanisms.

Unfortunately, several Northern Virginia representatives including some Democrats supported the bill in the committee. All of the committee's Republicans voted for it, including five from Northern Virginia: Joe May of Leesburg, Tom Rust of Herndon, Tim Hugo of Centreville, Edward Scott of Culpeper, and Barbara Comstock of McLean.

Four Democrats voted for the bill: Hampton's Jeion Ward, Newport News's Mamye BaCote, Charlottesville's David Toscano, and Richmond's Dolores McQuinn. Eileen Filler-Corn of Springfield wasn't present for the vote but voted for it in the subcommittee. The only no votes came from Arlington's delegates Adam Ebbin and Bob Brink, and Richmond's Betsy Carr, all Democrats.

Unfortunately, there was no debate on the bill in the committee. House committee chairs have been rushing bills through full committees with absolutely no debate after they receive approval from only a small subcommittee. The Virginia legislature already has a too-compressed schedule; skipping debate pushes the legislature to make more rush decisions on important issues.

Please contact your delegates and senators to ask them to reject this bill and its companion, HB1999, which hasn't come up for a vote yet in the Transportation Committee, as well as HB2016. Here's more about those bills. Or, if you are in Ebbin or Brink's districts, thank them for their efforts.