Posts about Virginia

Among the assets cited by residents were:

• The diverse population of Seven Corners, including diversity of cultures, ages, and incomes
• Plenty of affordable housing
• The history of the area, including events from the Civil War and the first shopping center in Northern Virginia
• The proximity to Washington, DC
• A variety of shopping and dining options
• Stable, established neighborhoods nearby

Challenges that need to be addressed:

• Route 50 and Route 7 are major barriers and make it extremely difficult to walk through the area
• Too much litter and too many illegal signs
• There is no chamber of commerce or other organization of business owners
• The schools are overcrowded and need renovation
• The larger Seven Corners area is divided among different jurisdictions—Arlington and the City of Falls Church, as well as Fairfax County

Just about everybody cited the traffic congestion as a huge challenge. The ideas that emerged for addressing it included improving the synchronization of traffic lights, totally redesigning the Route 50/Route 7 intersection, and providing an express bus to DC.

Other ideas mentioned for improving Seven Corners, some of them long-term:

• Improve the streetscapes
• Provide more community gathering places, such as parks, outdoor cafes, and farmers' markets
• Create a public/private partnership to spur revitalization
• Add an escalator to connect the two levels of the Seven Corners Shopping Center
• Provide streetcars to connect Seven Corners to the East Falls Church Metro station and other centers, such as Tysons and Alexandria
• Get rid of the large parking lots and create a central plaza
• Attract more young professionals, while also retaining a diverse mix of cultures, ages, and incomes
• Add amenities, such as bike trails, parks, soccer fields, a movie theater, more trees, open space, and public art
• Build mixed-use developments combining housing and retail

Binh Nguyen, president of the Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce for the Greater Washington, DC area, said many of the Eden Center business owners had been thinking of leaving the area due to the declining economy and civil rights issues—even though some 70,000 people come to that shopping center every weekend.

But the possibility of revitalizing Seven Corners is a hopeful sign. "We want to be a part of this great community," he said, adding that Vietnamese businesses are interested in contributing to the development of a new community center.

Alejandria Caballero of the Fairfax County Department of Neighborhood and Community Services reported on the concerns of some of the apartment residents. They want more parks, more police patrols to make the streets safer for evening walks, more family-friendly restaurants, and a more accessible health clinic. They said the Willston Multicultural Center needs to be renovated and the pedestrian bridge over Route 50 needs to be cleaned up.

The biggest problem is traffic congestion, said Iqbal Khaiy, who also mentioned the lack of walkability, the overcrowded schools, and the need to create "a sense of place." She said it's important to "retain the character and diversity of Seven Corners and give it a facelift."

Jeff Longo said that even though he lives and works in Seven Corners, he can't walk to work because it's impossible to cross the street. The benefits of the area include convenience, diversity, variety of restaurants, and proximity to Arlington and DC, but there is "too much concrete and not enough green."

Debbie Smith called for "smart development that doesn't strain natural resources." And several people mentioned the need to retain the unique character of Seven Corners and not copy Ballston or Tysons Corner.

The OCR will prepare a summary of the comments to share at the next workshop, which will be held June 18, 7 pm at the same location, 6245 Leesburg Pike.

Meanwhile, a major clean-up effort to get rid of the litter and illegal signs, is tentatively scheduled for June 23.

Cross-posted at Annandale VA.

Global Solutions President and CEO Dr. Maya Rockeymore, speaking at a panel after the screening, responded to the stark numbers presented in the film. In Baltimore, residents of the Inner Harbor have a life expectancy of 62 years while residents of North Baltimore have a life expectancy of 82 years. "Context controls choice," she said. People need access to parks, transit, safe walking and bicycle routes, and full-service grocery stores to even have the choice to be healthy.

Low-income communities and communities of color have higher rates of obesity and chronic disease. The physical neighborhood of the Inner Harbor contributes to the health disparity in life expectancy. While designed as a walkable community, the neighborhood suffers from vacant houses, streets in need of maintenance and lack of destinations to meet basic needs such as a grocery store. When the physical environment deteriorates, safety becomes an additional issue in neighborhoods.

In the United States, 66% of adults are overweight or obese and nearly 20% of children are obese. Being overweight or obese increases the risk of chronic diseases such as hypertension, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, and asthma in both adults and children.

Pamela Creekmur, the Acting Health Officer and Director of the Prince George's County Health Department, explained that Prince George's obesity and physical inactivity rates are higher than other jurisdictions in the greater Washington region. Though Prince George's faces a bigger challenge, all the region's communities have seen a rise in obesity rates, which range between 18 to 34 percent for adults throughout the region.

Part of the cause of this obesity epidemic is physical inactivity. There has been a 300 percent increase in driving to work since 1960. As the documentary explains, in 1969 almost 50 percent of kids walked or biked to school while today only 13 percent of kids do the same.

The lack of exercise by children extends beyond just commuting to and from school. The documentary shows a mom who takes her children to a parking lot because it is the only open space they have to play. This environment isn't hospitable to the kind of physical activity a good park encourages.

Whether it's questions of commuting or questions of parks, transportation and planning professionals make decisions that affect travel and open spaces every day. These decisions need to be viewed as public health decisions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency charged with health promotion and disease prevention, agrees. It has recognized that transportation policy, street-scale improvements, and access to places suitable for physical activity matter to our health. Among the CDC's recommendations is to participate in Safe Routes to School initiatives and adopt Complete Streets policies.

The Guide to Community Prevention Services, written by an independent group of public health and prevention professionals appointed by the CDC director, outlines several more environmental and policy approaches to provide opportunities for people to be physically active. These include the connectivity of sidewalks and streets, providing places for physical activity such as trails, and street-scale improvement such as street lighting and traffic calming. Such urban design features have been shown to improve some aspect of physical activity by 35 percent, not to mention the accompanying benefits of reduced crime and stress.

Of course, these improvements do not come overnight. After the screening, an elected official and audience members noted that such changes are not easy. After all, parks do not generate tax dollars.

But that does not mean that our environments must stagnate while our health deteriorates. Local communities can bring about change even when the federal government or state government seems stuck. Port Towns Youth Council President Erick Vargas talked about how his group took matters into their own hands by doing an audit of the streets and reporting the problems.

Prince George's County is taking action through a partnership of towns within the county. The Port Towns Community Health Partnership has a policy development team focused specifically on the built environment and nutrition policy to improve options for active living and healthy eating.

The group, which includes the towns of Bladensburg, Colmar Manor, Cottage City, and Edmonston, included a community health and wellness section in the Port Towns sector plan with the goals of providing safe places to walk and exercise and access to nutritious foods. The group is following through on sector plan recommendations to formalize a wellness opportunity zone as part of the zoning code. This would include changes in the built environment, access to healthier foods, and improved environmental stewardship.

Across the Potomac, the Fairfax County Health Department established the Partnership for a Healthier Fairfax, a group of community members and organizations concerned with public health. The Partnership created an environment and infrastructure strategic issues team as one of five teams who will make recommendations for improving health in Fairfax County. The first focus is a on local policy. The team is doing a scan of policies, including transportation and land use, that could be modified to promote a healthier and safer physical environment.

In the Washington region, better transportation and planning decisions can improve our health by increasing our access to efficient transit and space to run, bike, and play. We also create a healthier context for our environment—and as Dr. Rockeymore said, context controls choice. Throughout the region, local groups are working to give more of their neighbors the choice to live healthier lives.

VDOT showed 4 "packages" of changes at 2 public meetings, along with stats for how each would likely affect travel times, traffic volumes, and more.

Package 1, which would make the existing lanes of I-66 into HOT lanes, free for vehicles with 3 or more people and tolled for 1 and 2, brings almost as much benefit as Package 2, which would add a 3rd lane on top of that. But package 1 costs about $350-650 million less.

Allen Muchnick of the Arlington Coalition for Sensible Transportation was one of the stakeholders in Tuesday's meeting, and got to see the draft final report. It lists the following metrics for packages 1 and 2, plus another option called a "sensitivity test," which tried only applying tolls during the peak period where I-66 is HOV-only today.

Here are the key metrics. The "Pkg 1 + ST" column reflects this new option from the sensitivity test.

Metric	Pkg 1	Pkg 1 + ST	Pkg 2
Daily Person Miles Traveled	+40,490 (0.8%)	+318,388 (5.4%)	+267,509 (4.6%)
Person Throughput Measure	+5,632 (1.2%)	+27,669 (6.1%)	+24,098 (5.3%)
Peak Period Congested VMT	+10,726 (2.8%)	+11,230 (2.9%)	-65,164 (-16.9%)
Transit Ridership	+1,423 (1.1%)	+2,568 (1.9%)	+2,124 (1.6%)
Added Capital Cost	$33M	$33M	$345-695M
Added Operating Cost	$23M	$23M	$25M

This new option, tolling at peak times, appears to move more people by both car and transit than the widening, yet saves hundreds of millions of dollars. Even without this option, it's likely that widening the road at such cost, and with all the disruption it will cause, is not worth gaining only a few percentage points of extra movement.

The metric of "peak period congested VMT" measures the wrong thing. This is the amount of vehicle miles traveled that happen in an uncongested road. But congetion, per se, is not the problem; a short drive in traffic is better than a long drive without it. The goal is to move people, or more accurately, get people where they need to be.

There were plenty of flaws with this study from the start. This assumes, as the "baseline," that Virginia has implemented every change in the regional Constrained Long-Range Plan (CLRP). That includes adding the 3 "spot improvements," which would already widen I-66 in several places; and changing I-66 to HOV-3 and assuming that nobody cheats the HOV restrictions.

The CLRP also includes some projects which will help in the I-66 corridor but have no funding today, like lengthening all Metro trains to 8 cars and adding new bus service in the area. Hopefully these will happen, but there's no guarantee.

A better study would have used today as the baseline, and looked at the CLRP changes like the "spot improvements" as some of the options. After all, if another change helps more, it's far from too late to build that instead. We would also then be able to better see the effects of this phantom bus service, though I'm told the full report does provide more detail on the effects of these proposals.

BeyondDC reminded me yesterday about a flowchart I made back in 2009. I've updated it slightly:

Is the urge to widen I-66 coming from engineers who can't shake the paving habit, or political pressure from above? If a transportation agency is unwilling to actually recommend anything other than widening, regardless of what a study shows, then that study really is the sham as people accused, and I feared, at the time, and VDOT might as well change its name to Virginia Department Of Paving Your Community.

Rob Pitingolo has done a lot of research on which places have more or fewer people with college degrees. DC has the fourth most college degrees per square mile of any city in the nation, but that doesn't apply everywhere in the region or everywhere in DC.

Rob created these maps that show the locations of people with and without college degrees aged 25 and over.

There seems to be a fair amount of mixing in Virginia, but in DC and Maryland, the divide is starker. East of the Anacostia, blue dots are very few; west of Rock Creek and in the central city, they overwhelm the pink dots.

A lot of news stories talk about the DC region in terms of the division between black and white. The city's history of racial segregation has left a legacy of educational and socioeconomic inequality. As a result, many commentators use race as a simplistic shorthand for conflicts that are really about college educated versus not, or wealthy versus poor, or young versus old.

Race is immutable, but other characteristics are not. If our divisions are really about black versus white, they're not going to change unless some people move out of the city, and that's not what we want to happen. But education levels can change, and it's good for everyone if we can help all people in our region access better education.

The high tolls are a direct result of the state's failure to invest its own money in this critical transportation project, placing the burden fully and unfairly on northern Virginians. Instead of making the case to the Loudoun Board of Supervisors for the importance of moving forward, McDonnell's administration is making it easier for them to vote no, endangering the whole project.

The Governor just threatened again, via a budget amendment, to withhold the state's meager $150 million contribution to Phase 2 if his new appointees to MWAA were not seated immediately instead of on July 1st. Fortunately, the Virginia House of Delegates voted yesterday to kill the amendment, stopping this latest threat.

One of the main points of disagreement between the McDonnell administration and MWAA has been Project Labor Agreements (PLAs). These have been successful on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and Dulles Rail Phase 1 projects.

PLAs are not just about regulating union labor and wage rates for workers. They also require unions to help secure an adequate supply of skilled trades for these massive projects, and to ensure effective coordination among the dozens of trades and subcontractors, both union and non-union, for smoothly functioning, safe, and timely construction. The preference for PLAs in the bidding process seems a reasonable solution. We should move forward with these provisions.

The governor says he is greatly concerned that Virginia doesn't have a majority of seats on the MWAA governing board, which controls Dulles and Reagan National Airports, as well as the Dulles Toll Road and the Silver Line project. But this regional agency has effectively served our region for a long time, completing major and complex expansions of both airports.

It is true, however, MWAA could be much more transparent and accountable, as the IG report notes. The Coalition for Smarter Growth was among the first to raise this issue in 2006 when the Kaine administration proposed handing control of the project over to MWAA. Pressure from the governor, our federal and state legislators, and local elected officials has resulted in key reforms at MWAA. These reforms should continue, but so should the Silver Line.

The attacks on MWAA may have more to do with securing state control of future toll road revenues, for use on road projects like the Northern Virginia Outer Beltway and other rural highways, than about fixing the governance of MWAA.

We can't know that for sure, but it's very plausible given the administration's power grab at the Virginia Port Authority. After reorganizing the port authority's board to ensure control from Richmond, the administration pressed new board members to approve diverting $250 million to Route 460, a rural highway between Hampton Roads and Petersburg that Hampton Roads leaders say is not their top priority. A similar effort by the governor to secure a controlling majority on MWAA in order to do the same thing would not work to the best long-term interests of Northern Virginians.

McDonnell says that he could not even contemplate funding another $300 million for Dulles rail without raiding other projects throughout the state. But is he setting the right priorities? What money might actually be available?

The governor is proposing to spend over $750 million on the Route 460 project. Another $244 million is being earmarked to the controversial Charlottesville western bypass, a road that appears to be ineffective and a waste of money. Millions are going to the Coalfields Expressway to support mountaintop removal in an area with little traffic.

Even accounting for these projects, there may be another $400 million available in the $1.5 billion Public-Private Transportation Act fund. Setting different priorities would free up hundreds of millions more.

It's hard to respond to the governor's argument that Northern Virginia is getting its fair share of the state's funding without seeing the full picture. A clearer accounting of complicated funding flows would be helpful for both the public and legislators. Certainly, making significant investments in addressing the transportation needs of Northern Virginia should be a priority given the importance of the region to the state's economy.

Perhaps symbolic of the administration's priorities, Virginia Deputy Secretary of Transportation David Tyerar made two recent trips from Richmond to Leesburg to appear before the Loudoun Board of Supervisors. He didn't go to make the case for Dulles Rail. Rather, he spoke to promote the Outer Beltway.

The governor and secretary revived planning for the Outer Beltway, added it as a new Corridor of Statewide Significance, and are exploring the route for yet another public-private partnership. Yet this highway would do little to help massively congested corridors like I-66, Route 50, and Route 7. The contrast between the obstacles put before Dulles Rail by the McDonnell administration and their full-court press for the Outer Beltway couldn't be starker.

If the Silver Line's phase 2 fails, it will be on Governor McDonnell's watch. He should lead the way to compromises that will allow the project to move forward, and focus more of the state's transportation resources on this economically critical project.

In late 2010, New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie rejected $6 billion in funds from Federal and other non-state sources to build a new commuter rail tunnel under the Hudson River into Manhattan. The project would have provided tens of thousands of jobs now and in the future, created over $100 million of business activity per year, increased the value of homes nearby, created huge amounts of tax revenues for the State of New Jersey, and eased the commute for hundreds of thousands people who have to get in to Manhattan from Northern Jersey every day.

And the independent Government Accountability Office confirmed these lost benefits just last month in a well-researched and detailed report.

Despite those cold, hard facts and the fact that New Jersey would have been on the hook for only about 14 percent of the project's total cost, the New Jersey Governor killed the project. The Governor veiled his anti-transit actions in the ideology of austerity—itself a harmful ideology in a time of recession when government's focus should have been directed toward increasing employment instead of cutting deficits.

A closer look at the facts reveals that Governor Christie falsely inflated the short-term economic cost of the project in his mission to kill a well-funded, well-planned, and hugely beneficial public transit project. Now that his assertions about funding have been largely debunked, we can see what anti-transit forces have attempted to hide: an ideological opposition to transit itself.

Simply put, there is a vocal movement that rejects the notion that public transit has or should have a place in our development, let alone a place of priority. And some politicians are responding to that movement.

Now, anti-transit forces in Virginia are also pursuing a similar veiled anti-transit ideology as they attempt to kill phase 2 of the Metro Rail extension to Dulles Airport.

The project is the largest expansion of Metro rail lines in the D.C. Metropolitan Area since Metro was built in the 1970s. Like the Hudson River tunnel in New Jersey, the Silver Line would move thousands of people a day by rail through one of the most congested areas in the United States. It would (and has already) created jobs and other economic benefits. The project is being managed by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and is currently in Phase I, which extends the rail from East Falls Church through Tysons Corner.

Phase I has been an unqualified success. It is scheduled to be completed on time and it is on budget. The project also has an exemplary safety record—incredibly important for a project being performed as commuters zoom around nearby and underneath. Because the first phase was so successful, the Airports Authority decided to largely replicate the model it is used on Phase I to implement Phase II of the rail extension. It voted to approve a bidding process and Governor McDonnell gave his blessing to that process.

Then anti-transit forces stepped in and Governor McDonnell changed his mind, threatening to withhold funding unless the Airports Authority changed the requirement that the biggest contractors on Phase II use the same union hiring halls that were used to staff Phase I—i.e., the same workforce that is successfully completing Phase I.

To avoid a fight, the Airports Authority was flexible and it changed the bidding to accommodate Governor McDonnell's request, implementing a system that would give bidders using the same hiring halls from Phase I extra points in the competition for the contract but not requiring their use.

Apparently this hasn't appeased Governor McDonnell's anti-transit donors because the Governor is now threatening to kill the project unless the preference system is dropped entirely.

Anti-transit forces in Virginia have now created a full-blown crisis on account of their ideological opposition to using union labor on any project—another dangerous ideological position designed to destroy key progressive constituencies. Headlines now scream that Phase II of the project is "in doubt."

Transit advocates should be wary of the stated ideological reasons given for killing these projects because they veil another ideology that fundamentally opposes the expansion of public transit.

The Virginia and New Jersey cases—not to mention House Republican's continuing efforts to kill high-speed rail in the U.S. Congress—provide evidence of such an ideological anti-transit war. Instead of seeking practical solutions to improve public transit in neglected or over-trafficked areas, anti-transit politicians have sought to kill rail projects on other questionable grounds. And they have done so even where those projects have minimal costs and maximum benefits for the regions in which they operate.

Anti-transit ideologues veil their opposition to transit projects with other ideological memes that incite their base—in Virginia it's union boogey men, in New Jersey it's misstatements about "debt" and "overspending." These ideological memes are as dangerous to progressive values as the anti-transit ideologies they mask.

But make no mistake, if the anti-transit ideologues had any predisposition to implement real transit solutions, they would cast aside those ideological battles in favor of the compromises and heavy subsidies they have been offered to move the transit projects forward.

Their absolute refusal to do so in favor of other pet ideological battles—"hostage-taking" as Pearlstein calls it—indicates a broader ideological opposition to the transit projects themselves. If robust public transit is to become a priority in this region (and everywhere), transit advocates and their allies must expose and defeat these ideologies.

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.