Category: CSG in the News

Va. Lawmakers Differ on Future of I-66 Tolls

Posted on by Veronica Miniello

RICHMOND, Va. — With several bills on the table that would block tolls for solo drivers on Interstate 66 inside the Capital Beltway, Virginia Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne made his case to some skeptical lawmakers Wednesday morning, just before the 2016 General Assembly session began.

“I know there was a lot of rhetoric during the election, and if I contributed to that, I am here to apologize, I know it got very heated in that regard, but the average toll is $6,” Layne says.

Layne says the expanded hours for HOV rules in conjunction with allowing solo drivers a way to use the road during restricted periods for the first time add capacity to the roadway.

But opponents of the HOV changes and toll plans, such as Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, dispute that.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. Sorry. That type of doublespeak is not going to work. Again, you can’t just toll an existing facility and take the revenue,” Petersen said in an interview in his Richmond office Wednesday.

“When I was a little boy, we put a man on the moon. We can figure out how to put six lanes through Arlington County,” Petersen says. “I’ve heard the obstacles … we can figure it out.”

Those obstacles include lots of homes and huge retaining walls along I-66 that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to address.

Under the plan that is moving forward, tolls on I-66 inside the Beltway would only be charged to solo drivers during rush hour. The HOV restrictions would be extended to apply from 5:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. eastbound and from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. westbound.

Eventually by the early 2020s, HOV rules for the entire region are scheduled to change to apply only to vehicles with three or more people, rather than the current two or more requirement on I-66.

The money would fund projects selected by the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, which is made up of Northern Virginia local and state lawmakers and appointees. Within the next 10 years, some of the money would likely be diverted to fund a new eastbound lane between the Dulles Connector Road and Ballston.

“I think people appreciate the dynamic tolling or congestion-mitigation pricing, and what you’re doing, it’s used around the country, it’s innovative, the concern again is there’s no expansion now,” Del. Tim Hugo, R-Centreville, told Layne at a meeting of the Joint Commission on Transportation Accountability Wednesday.

Hugo says the capacity expansion he is looking for is new lanes for drivers.

Petersen and Sen. Jennifer Wexton, D-Leesburg, have proposed a bill that would ban any tolling on I-66 inside the Beltway unless additional lanes are added.

“If they do decide to go to tolls inside the Beltway, they need to at a minimum add at least an additional lane going either direction inside the Beltway,” Petersen says.

Del. Jim LeMunyon, R-Oak Hill, has proposed a similar bill in the House.

“The concerns are still there. The issue is that the administration just is not as ambitious in fixing the problems on 66 inside the Beltway as they are outside the Beltway, and it’s not that they can’t do it, it’s that for some reason they won’t do it,” he tells WTOP.

“If you think it costs too much, or it’s too complicated, or whatever the concerns are, we need to know them in specific terms,” he says.

“When you look at all they’re doing outside the Beltway, this group looks like a good problem-solving group — not to say that everybody’s happy with the plan for outside the Beltway — they can handle big complex things if they want to, and the point I made is inside the Beltway it’s not because they can’t, but because they won’t,” he adds.

But there are supporters of the plan to extend HOV hours and add tolls for solo drivers who see this as the best option to finally do something for I-66.

Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, argues that Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s administration’s plan provides commuters with more options.

“They’re trying to save taxpayers money, for one thing, money that we don’t have. It’s about a billion dollars possibly to widen all the way in, and then where do the cars go when we get into Washington, D.C.? You’re not going to widen Constitution [Avenue] past the Washington Monument and the White House,” he says.

“You have limited road space, and it manages it better and moves more people,” he adds.

The plan would not impact Metro service, but would add more commuter buses to get people through the corridor.

Schwartz warns that opponents of the plan who simply want to widen the road will only make traffic worse in the long term.

“They’re trying to undo what we think is the best solution for I-66 … it moves more people — as many as 40,000 more people — faster and more reliably on I-66. It will help everyone. It will end HOV cheating,” he says.

“If you build it, they will come. New roads will fill up in a metro area in as little as five years … so why would you spend a billion dollars, only to have the traffic return.”

Photo courtesy of Mike Murillo. Click here to read the original story.

Numbers Don’t Always Give Us the Bottom Line for Transportation Plans

Posted on by Veronica Miniello

Dear Dr. Gridlock:

This area will be in gridlock until we use satellite computer technology to analyze, prioritize, subsidize and design our transportation infrastructure. I say this after attending over 100 hours of citizen input sessions on everything from interchanges to tow trucks.

I have worked in road construction on and off for over 40 years. I am also a driver on these same roads. We need a better way to keep people moving.

Gary Nicely,

Sterling, Va.

 The writer wants us to put our money into rational choices, grounded in data. In today’s world, there are more opportunities to do that, but there also are plenty of very rational people who think data-crunching has its limits.

I’m not about to argue for whimsy when investing billions of tax dollars in transportation programs. (Though I am getting a little impatient waiting for my jet pack.)

In fact, I’ve seen the value of aerial photography in tracking congestion hot spots, of computer modeling in anticipating the traffic patterns at new interchanges and of GPS data in creating a world of real-time traffic maps, highway information signs and navigational aids.

I’ve been on the road with a Maryland State Highway Administration crew in a teched-up truck, crammed with cameras and sensors, that gives engineers a data assist in managing infrastructure decisions.

During the fall holiday season, I saw how travelers benefited from traffic data that can predict when and where bottlenecks will develop. That same data can be used to build cases for long-term improvements in the travel system.

Among the region’s governments, Virginia has gone the furthest to tie decisions about the transportation network to measures of greatest need and greatest impact. In response to a law passed by the General Assembly in 2014, Virginia’s transportation officials have been developing a scoring system to evaluate which projects are most worthy of public investment.

Makes sense, right? Scoring takes the politics out of the decision-making.

Well, not so fast. Turns out there’s plenty of room to debate which criteria should get the most weight in a scoring system.

In built-up Northern Virginia, the formula puts a huge emphasis on congestion relief, but there was considerable debate over just how huge that emphasis should be.

With congestion relief counting for 45 percent of a project’s total score, your transportation network could tilt toward big highway programs. The public could wind up pouring money into projects that reproduce some of the same old problems that developed with the 20th-century transportation network.

During one of my online chats, smart-growth advocate Stewart Schwartz described the concern about highway expansion programs: “We know that ‘if you build it, they will come.’ It’s well documented that new highway lanes in metro areas can fill up in as little as five years due to ‘induced traffic.’ ” (If you give drivers more lane space, it won’t be long before they fill it up. Then what?)

“Those pushing ‘congestion reduction’ are just looking to expand highway lanes and are only looking at the short term,” Schwartz said. “They are failing to look at the bigger picture of how land use, technology, and transit, walking and biking can reduce the amount of driving for the short, medium and long term.”

But in the long term, as the far-sighted economist John Maynard Keynes observed, “we are all dead.” Today’s commuters — today’s taxpayers — crave those short-term solutions. Short term as in “Now!” And the vast majority of those commuters/taxpayers are drivers.

Many want scoring systems tilted toward doing the greatest good for the greatest number, and they’re the greatest number.

They’re part of the travel constituency that Bob Chase of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance is hearing when he argues for a new Potomac River crossing, the rapid widening of Interstate 66 inside the Capital Beltway and other high-impact road projects.

No matter how rapidly a project can be built, it’s supposed to last a long time, and that gets us to another challenge for data-driven decision-making.

No matter how good the number-crunching today, the planners are making educated guesses about how the results will apply decades from now, as their projects mature. Many times, changing realities intrude on the trend lines the planners developed.

The economy gets better or worse, areas develop in unanticipated ways, businesses and government offices relocate, commuting habits change, or technology opens up new travel options. Plus, an optimism bias can affect the humans who use the travel data to anticipate the popularity of their projects.

If all these complications leave you confused and frustrated about our ability to design the future, you’ve got the right idea.

Till we’re all dead, you can trust that Nicely’s conclusion will remain relevant: “We need a better way to keep people moving.”

Photo courtesy of Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP. Click here to read the original story.

Coalition for Smarter Growth President “tired of the Arlington bashing,” says proponents of widening I-66 “apparently don’t believe in the science of induced traffic”

Posted on by acustis

Check out the video of Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, speaking in Alexandria at the December 9 meeting of the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB), and the partial transcript below. Schwartz does a great job, in a short amount of time, of explaining why we need smart growth solutions in the I-66 corridor, and throughout Northern Virginia, NOT more roads and more roads-inducing sprawl development.

The CTB meeting at which Stewart Schwartz spoke covered a number of transportation-related topics, including this mouthful: “Authorization to Impose Tolls on I-66 Inside the Beltway, Advancement/Allocation of Toll Facilities Revolving Account Funds, and Approval of a Memorandum of Agreement with the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission Relating to the Transform66: Inside the Beltway Project.” What on earth is that? Well, if you followed the closing weeks of the 2016 Virginia General Assembly elections, or if you simply turned on your TV in those closing weeks, you’re almost certainly aware that the issue of I-66 tolling came up, over and over again, in the most demagogic and misleading fashion. I’d note that, in the end, despite Republicans spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on these ads, none of the candidates they attacked (Jennifer Boysko, Kathleen Murphy, etc.) lost. In fact, it’s arguable that the ads backfired, if anything, as candidates like Kathy Smith won by far larger margins than had been expected. So, not sure about the political potency of this line of attack, but it certainly didn’t work in 2015.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the McAuliffe administration is generally on the right course with regard to addressing traffic congestion on I-66 inside and outside the Beltway. As the Coalition for Smarter Growth and many others understand, the LAST thing we should want is pouring more pavement, for a wide variety of reasons, including: a) increasing road capacity simply encourages more sprawl and more traffic (“induced demand”); b) locking in, and even adding to, fossil-fuel-powered transportation infrastructure is the 180-degree wrong way to go, at a time when we need to be rapidly phasing out greenhouse gas emissions if we want to avoid frying our planet; c) building new roads is a ridiculously expensive proposition, and for no good reason (see points “a”and “b”), other than to line the pocket of the road-building folks.

As for the McAuliffe administration’s plan for the I-66 corridor, what it does is basically harness Free Market Economics 101 to address/ameliorate a problem in a cost-effective, market-oriented fashion. Why Republicans of all people would oppose this is kind of mind boggling, until you consider that they also have flip-flopped and now oppose other conservative ideas, such as the “individual mandate,” “cap-and-trade,” etc.

The bottom line, with regard to widening I-66 inside the Beltway, is that Arlington County is absolutely correct: this should be a last-ditch option, after all other options have been tried and ONLY if those other options fail. Frankly, widening I-66 is just as misguided and short-sighted as building new fossil-fuel-fired infrastructure, before we’ve maxed out on energy efficiency. Not smart at all.

With that, here are Stewart Schwartz’s comments at the Dec. 9 meeting of the CTB. Enjoy.

Regarding the previous speakers, they apparently don’t believe in the science of induced traffic, that it is a very real problem. They apparently think we can widen Constitution Avenue in DC. There is no place for these cars to go. If you build it, they WILL come on a wider road. That’s why your combined transportation demand management, transit, HOV solution is the best solution for that corridor.

And I get a little tired of the Arlington bashing. Arlington has probably done more to relieve traffic congestion in Northern Virginia than any other jurisdiction…Their transit-oriented development has sited millions of square feet of development, tens of thousands of housing units, in locations where their vehicle trips and vehicle miles traveled are lower than anywhere else in Northern Virginia. And they have, in the process, maximized transit, walking and biking. That IS a regional transit-oriented development…not what I’m hearing, which is a 1950s, can-we-please-build-rings-of-outer-beltways-and-widen-every-road.

We have to change our land use to do so in a more sustainable way…We DO care about the regional economy, we DO care about being competitive. That means we should maximize great placemaking and transit-oriented development to attract these companies, to retain the Millenials and the next-generation creative employees. And we should do our transportation smart, in a demand-management way like we’re talking about…

Virginia Wants To Talk To Maryland About A New Potomac River Bridge — Again

Posted on by Will Reckley

Virginia’s influential Commonwealth Transportation Board wants to open discussions with officials in D.C. and Maryland about improving congested Potomac River crossings, with priority given to expanding the capacity of the American Legion Memorial Bridge and Metro’s Rosslyn tunnel, which is the bottleneck for the Silver, Blue, and Orange lines.

The long-running idea of building a new bridge west of the American Legion — which carries I-495 over the river — also was included in the board’s resolution, although Maryland repeatedly has refused to go along with it. Opponents of adding a bridge west of the American Legion derisively say it would be part of an “outer Beltway.”

“We have had indications from Maryland that they are not opposed to discussion,” said Gary Garczynski, the Northern Virginia representative on the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB), which voted Wednesday in favor of opening discussions again.

“There should be dialogue about any one of those crossings or all of them, because in total they would certainly effectuate a much more connected region,” he said.

Studies by the Virginia Department of Transportation have identified the American Legion Bridge as the most important choke point for car commuters. A study of 11 Potomac crossings released in July recommended extending Virginia’s HOT lanes on I-495 across the bridge north to the I-270 spur.

More than 300,000 commuters per day use the bridge, the study said. More than 44,000 people travel through the Rosslyn tunnel on Metrorail into Virginia.

Opponents of an “outer Beltway” say there is relatively light demand for a new bridge upriver.

“There are certain lobbyists who continue to push this. There are certain parts of the business community that keep putting pressure on Gov. McAuliffe and Gov. Hogan. They are totally off base,” said Stewart Schwartz, the executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, a long-time foe of building a new bridge between the American Legion and Point of Rocks bridges over the Potomac.

“There is no funding available for upriver bridges and no demand based on VDOT’s own study. So to us it is a waste of time,” he added.

A spokesman for the Maryland Department of Transportation said the agency would continue to talk to Virginia officials about its concerns with a new crossing.

Also on Wednesday, the CTB formally approved VDOT’s plans to toll I-66 inside the Beltway staring in 2017, accepting a deal with the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission to allow local representatives to decide where to spend toll revenues to improve mobility in the I-66 corridor.

Read at WAMU >>

I-66 tolling plan wins Commonwealth Transportation Board approval

Posted on by Will Reckley

The Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB) on Dec. 9 approved the McAuliffe administration’s proposal to allow single-occupant vehicles to use Interstate 66 inside the Beltway during rush hour, so long as they’re willing to pay for the privilege.

State Secretary of Transportation Aubrey Layne, who chairs the board, called the unanimous vote a victory for both commuters who use I-66 and those who travel on surrounding roadways.

“The data is showing that all people will benefit, all people’s lives will be enhanced,” Layne said at the CTB meeting, held in Alexandria.

But critics kept up their drumbeat that unless I-66 eastbound is widened – sooner rather than later – the latest proposal is merely a stopgap that avoids the bigger questions.

“The issue isn’t tolling or transit, but how soon widening can be achieved,” said Bob Chase of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance. “This proposal kicks the well-documented need for widening down the road.”

Under the proposal OK’d by the state transportation panel, driving on I-66 eastbound during the morning rush and westbound during the evening rush will still be free, so long as there are two or more passengers in the vehicle (a number that eventually will rise to three). Those with one occupant, currently banned during rush hour, will be able to use the road in return for paying tolls whose amounts remain uncertain.

Some of the funds raised through the tolling will go to the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, which will parcel them out for improvements along the corridor.

The proposal has drawn pushback from advocates and lawmakers in the outer suburbs, who say their residents shouldn’t be forced to pay to use the road. But Layne countered that using excess capacity on I-66 will both raise funds and take drivers off surrounding arteries.

Saying that he understood the frustration of the plan’s opponents, and has taken some of their concerns into account, Layne said the Commonwealth Transportation Board and Virginia Department of Transportation do not have magic wands to solve all problems.

“Our role is to deal with the resources we have, and continue moving forward,” he said. “Our charge is to use [resources] as efficiently and as wisely as we can.”

Under the proposal, consideration of widening I-66’s eastbound side from the Dulles Toll Road to Ballston will not be considered until the 2020s, and only will go forward if certain thresholds are met.

Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth said those promoting widening as a panacea are stuck in a 1950s mindset.

“We should do our transportation-management smart,” Schwartz said. He noted that even if that portion of I-66 is widened, “there is no place for the cars to go” because Potomac River bridges and roadways in the District of Columbia can’t be widened to accommodate the increased traffic flow.

State officials say that once the project is up and running in 2017 – the last year of McAuliffe’s term – they will monitor what transpires and make adjustments as needed.

That’s a good idea, said Joung Lee of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. He told CTB members that, based on past experience across the country, they should anticipate teething pains.

“You’re not going to find that sweet spot right away,” Lee said. “It will take some tweaks and some experimentation.”

Read at Inside NOVA >>

Profiting from transit systems?

Posted on by Will Reckley

Employers explore a new route in recruiting millennial workers

A good transit system can do more than move people around, says David Green, CEO of the Richmond-based GRTC Transit System. It can also attract people that companies want to hire.

Richmond is next up in Virginia to find out how far a transit network can go in spurring economic growth. Under GRTC’s leadership, the city is close to breaking ground on a $54 million, 7.6-mile bus rapid-transit line (BRT) that will run from Henrico County in the west, down the city’s Broad Street corridor to Rocketts Landing, a mixed-use development on the James River east of downtown.

The plan is to begin construction next spring on the project, called the GRTC Pulse, and start operation in October 2017. The Pulse will have dedicated lanes and 14 stations, along with synchronized traffic signaling. During peak demand, buses will run every 10 minutes. Green and others want to extend the system eventually nine miles west out to the rapidly growing Short Pump area in western Henrico.

The project has been approved in principle by Richmond City Council and is backed by Mayor Dwight Jones, but it is not a done deal yet. A group representing 11 neighborhoods called the RVA Coalition for Smart Transit is seeking to delay the plan for a year. City council must approve an operating agreement governing The Pulse in coming weeks for construction to begin.

“This is what businesses are going to be looking for,” Green predicts. There’s a generation influence going on, with millennials in particular attracted to mixed-use, transit-oriented places, he says. Employers are noticing. “If you don’t have these things, if we can’t provide it here in Richmond, we’re going to lose all this talent,” he says.

The Marriott move
Arne Sorenson, the CEO of Marriott International Inc., cited those kinds of pressures back in February when he announced the hotel company is looking for a new headquarters location. About 2,000 employees work at its current headquarters in Bethesda, Md. “I think, as with many other things, our younger folks are more inclined to be Metro-accessible and more urban,” he told The Washington Post. Those comments have set off competition for the headquarters among Washington-region localities.

Sorenson was acknowledging a trend well underway in many urban markets as suburban office parks empty out in favor of major transit corridors. But his comments “sent shock waves around the country” because it showed even giant companies were feeling competitive pressures to get and keep the best workers, says John Martin, CEO of Southeastern Institute of Research, a Richmond-based firm with a background in community planning and transportation. “We’ve reached a tipping point in moving to a multimodal society.”

Martin says millennials, in particular, prefer the work, play, live environment that transit systems can support. “Technology has hyper-wired them together,” he says. Community is important, and they “are much more interested in being in activity centers. We’ve found they really can’t have an experience unless they’re sharing it.”

So the quality of the community makes a difference. “We’re seeing sort of emerging millennial hotspots, where some cities are getting a decided advantage,” Martin says. “Companies are saying, ‘Gosh I want to be in those places.’ It’s incumbent upon Virginia’s economic development community … you’ve got to invest in place.”

Developments in technology and in the function of transit systems are part of this change, Martin says. Fare cards are common instead of cash, for example, and there are apps that can tell riders when the next bus or train will arrive. Some transit systems have free WiFi. Traffic lights can be synchronized to let buses move through intersections with fewer delays. Plus, teleworking is more common, as is the rise of a “freelance economy” in which workers are less tied to one employer. “So people are really going to pick a place” based on the quality of life and not necessarily on how close it is to their job, he says.

Martin was to be part of a Dec. 1 event being held in Henrico, called “Transit Means Business,” which had support from transit interests and groups like the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce. A similar event was held in Northern Virginia in May. The Henrico event also was to include a panel moderated by Selena Cuffee-Glenn, Richmond’s chief administrative officer. Scheduled panel members included Ted Ukrop, who opened the Quirk Hotel on Broad Street in September, and an executive from Stone Brewing Co., which is opening a new location near the James. Among others who spoke at the event was Aubrey Layne, the state’s secretary of transportation, and Laura Lafayette, CEO of the Richmond Association of Realtors.

Good timing
Richmond got lucky when it came to funding the BRT project. About $25 million of its funding came from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s TIGER program (which stands for transportation investment generating economic recovery). The state’s Department of Rail and Public Transportation is providing about $17 million; Richmond is contributing $7.6 million; and Henrico will pay $400,000.

Green says “the planets lined up” for the project because a long study on how to do a BRT system in Richmond had just been  completed when the TIGER grant option came along. “We were ecstatic when they announced the opening for applications,” he says. Gov. Terry McAuliffe threw his support behind the project as well.

The Broad Street corridor was chosen for the Pulse system because it has the “highest existing and projected population and employment densities and the most transit supportive land use in the Richmond region,” according to RVA Rapid Transit, an organization that would like one day to see four BRT lines reaching into surrounding counties and intersecting in downtown Richmond. Within a half-mile of the planned BRT line, there are 33,000 people and 77,000 jobs with the potential for more, the group says.

In Virginia, new rapid transit systems have favored rail, which is far more expensive than BRT. The biggest is the D.C. region’s Metrorail system, which last year opened new stations in Tysons Corner and is continuing extension of the new Silver Line to Washington Dulles International Airport. In Norfolk, a light rail project, The 0, opened in August 2011 on a $318 million 7.4-mile corridor. It may be extended to Virginia Beach.

While transit has the power to drive economic growth, it’s still possible for smaller communities who can’t support that kind of investment to create places that will attract people and employers, says Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition for Smarter Growth. Thriving downtowns can have the same kind of success. “It may not be the big employers who come, but it’s still happening with smaller companies, and it doesn’t necessarily require transit,” he says.

But, for bigger regions, “if they’re going to remain competitive, using good transit and transit-oriented development is the key,” Schwartz says.

The Pulse is a major step for the Richmond region and a new test of the appeal transit systems can have, if done well. “Richmond’s never seen anything like this before,” Green says. “We need to make sure we do it right.” As far as expanding into the counties and creating a true regional BRT network, Green thinks the project will sell itself. “Once they experience it, the counties are going to want to expand.”

Read at Virginia Business >> 

Maryland Remains Serious About Maglev, Despite Skeptics

Posted on by Will Reckley

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s dream of building a magnetic levitation train — known as maglev — has taken two key steps, placing Maryland among a small number of states slowly moving toward establishing the first high-speed rail systems in the U.S., a half century after Japan operated its first bullet train.

On Nov. 7, Maryland received a $28 million federal grant to study the engineering and planning of a 40-mile line connecting Baltimore and Washington, a critical part of the federal environmental approval process. And on Nov. 17 the state’s public service commission transferred a passenger railroad franchise to The Northeast Maglev, the private sector firm contributing $7 million to the engineering study.

“This is big news,” said Maryland Secretary of Transportation Pete Rahn. “This goes beyond the feasibility study and goes into its planning and engineering. This is a big step. This is a requirement necessary for a project to actually occur.”

Trying maglev again

Indeed, Maryland is further along than the last time the state considered maglev at the beginning of the last decade. The project failed to secure public support or the necessary funding, and a 2004 state statute blocked further work.

More recently, Pennsylvania gave up on its maglev studies, returning the grant money to the Federal Railroad Administration three years ago. That opened up an opportunity for Maryland to apply for the funds.

Why will this time be different? Sec. Rahn points to the private sector taking the lead with support from Japan.

“If you look around the country, there have been an awful lot of proposed maglev projects that just have fizzled as they moved down the path,” Rahn said. “What is interesting in this case is the pledge of funding coming from Japan.”

The Japan Bank of International Cooperation has pledged — pending the outcome of the federal environmental reviews of the project — a loan to cover half the estimated cost of about $10 billion. The Northeast Maglev (TNM) also has reached a deal with the Central Japan Railway Company to use its super conducting maglev technology, which moves trains well over 300 miles per hour. Central Japan Railway’s maglev is the fastest train in the world.

“We already have an agreement with the [railroad] that they would transfer that technology to us,” said Wayne Rogers, the chief executive of TNM. “We’ve looked over the entire world, and the Japanese technology is the newest, the best, the fastest, and the safest technology for high speed rail transportation.”

Rogers expects the engineering and planning studies to take about three years.

“We are very far along in what is a marathon and not a sprint. We have yet to finish the environmental impact statement work and yet to get all the state and local approvals, and the federal government approvals we need for the safety of the project,” he said.

High-speed rail in the United States

If Maryland and its private sector partners are able to see a Baltimore-to-D.C. maglev line through to completion, they would be among a small but growing number of states progressing on a long-stalled project: high-speed rail in the United States.

As mentioned, Japan has been running bullet trains for 50 years and is building out its maglev line that will eventually connect Tokyo and Nagoya.

China has 10,000 miles of high-speed rail, and started running a maglev in Shanghai in April 2004 at speeds of 267 miles per hour. Its inaugural ride was on New Year’s Eve in 2002, less than two years from the contract signing.

Several other nations — Korea, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and England — have been running trains over 200 miles per hour for years. (The international measurement for high-speed rail generally is considered cruising speeds of at least 150 miles per hour).

In the U.S., Amtrak’s Acela in the Northeast Corridor is the closest thing to high-speed rail, but it barely qualifies. It reaches 150 miles per hour for a few minutes on a single 30-mile stretch of rail in Rhode Island. Between D.C. and New York, Acela’s average speed is about 80 miles per hour, and plans to straighten the right-of-way to improve Acela’s efficiency would take years and many billions of dollars.

“We don’t have a big history of that here in the United States,” said Rob Puentes, a transportation policy expert at the Brookings Institution.

“We are just barely now starting to experiment with high speed rail investments. There are really good projects underway in California, in Texas, and in Florida.”

Construction of the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line started in January. But its budget reportedly will exceed the planned $68 billion because of tunneling issues along earthquake fault lines.

Building maglev — where trains float above a magnetic guideway — would also present physical challenges.

“We know that it certainly works in other parts of the world,” said Puentes, referring to the Japanese and Chinese systems. “The challenge is how do you do it here in the United States? Particularly, how would you do it in a congested corridor between Washington and Baltimore? The challenge with maglev is it has to be straight and it has to be flat, and that usually means tunneling.”

“It is going to happen.”

Former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, who made funding high-speed rail a priority during President Obama’s first term, said maglev’s expense of initial construction has been the biggest obstacle in the U.S.

“But when the Japanese came into the United States and made a huge investment it became clear that now it was incumbent upon maglev advocates to find money to match that,” said LaHood in an interview with WAMU 88.5.

“I think maglev is the next generation of transportation,” LaHood said. “When you have the Japanese willing to invest $5 billion you have to take that seriously because they have the expertise.”

More broadly, LaHood expects high-speed rail (the usual steel-on-steel technology) to take off in the coming decade. At the Obama administration’s urging, Congress appropriated close to $11 billion for the projects.

“For the naysayers and the detractors that want to continue to talk about traditional means of transportation, they are living in the past. They need to look to the future,” LaHood said.

“It is going to happen in California. It is going to happen along the Northeast Corridor with maglev. It is happening in Texas between Dallas and Houston. There are a number of projects that will put the United States on the map.”

The Brookings Institution’s Puentes said the U.S. does not lack opportunities for such projects. High-speed rail makes sense when it connects two major economic hubs that are too far apart for driving but too close for flying.

“High-speed rail is getting caught up in the larger infrastructure challenges we’re having in this country,” he said. “A lot of cities and states would love to have this done.”

But Puentes expects the straightening out of the Acela tracks could be the closest the Northeast Corridor comes to getting high-speed rail for the foreseeable future. A Baltimore-to-Washington maglev line could take ten years to finish, and extending the maglev up to New York could take decades longer.

In the meantime, critics contend Maryland has other, more important transit priorities.

“Certainly there are huge transit needs,” said Stewart Schwartz, the executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, a public transit and environmental advocacy group.

Schwartz calls the maglev project a “distraction.”

“Maryland has done a significant study of MARC commuter rail needs. People would love to have all-day, two-way service between Baltimore and Washington and what better thing to jump start the continued revitalization of Baltimore,” he said.

Read at WAMU >>

The problem with Ted Lerner’s lifetime achievement award

Posted on by Will Reckley

Washington has no greater homegrown real estate executive than Ted Lerner. From World War II to today Lerner redefined the places where locals work, shop and live, whether it was Wheaton Plaza, White Flint or Dulles Town Center. He turned a sleepy crosssroads in then-rural Fairfax County into the regional retail destination Tysons Corner Center, returned Major League Baseball to local ownership in the nation’s capital and amassed an estimated $6 billion along the way.

He did not, however, do everything that was said of him last week when he received a lifetime achievement award from the Urban Land Institute.

Lerner accepts few of the awards he is offered and makes few public appearances. He said in a brief interview before dinner at the gala dinner Thursday at the National Building Museum that he agreed to only after being convinced by his 13 grandchildren.

“They are the reason I’m here,” he said. In his acceptance speech, Lerner said he was proud to have developed 20 million square feet of real estate while remaining relatively anonymous.

“I guess I have a different approach to real estate than Donald Trump,” he said.

At the gala Lerner’s partners in business and at ULI pulled out all the stops for the 90-year-old magnate. Wolf Blitzer of CNN, a family friend, introduced him. Lerner Enterprises filled nine tables up front and countless partners and associates bought advertisements in the awards brochure congratulating him.

A nearly 9-minute video extolling his life’s accomplishments played featuring warm compliments from Wizards owner Ted Leonsis, former George Washington University president Stephen Trachtenberg, former baseball commissioner Bud Selig and current commissioner Rob Manfre.

Real estate magnate and Nationals owner Ted Lerner received a lifetime achievement award from the real estate group ULI. (Urban Land Institute)

Some of the testimonials take liberties with the facts. For instance, columnist George F. Will gestures to Nationals Park in the background behind and congratulates Lerner for having built it. Actually the D.C. government oversaw construction of Nationals Park and paid for nearly all of it as well, at a cost of $670 million to D.C. taxpayers.

Will also praises Lerner for having opened the Nationals Baseball Academy, in Southeast D.C. The Nationals and its charitable arm paid for $3 million of that project, about 20 percent of the cost (and about what they pay pitcher Max Scherzer for a third of a season). D.C. taxpayers put in $10.2 million and Major League Baseball paid $1 million.

There’s no crime in employing a touch of hyberbole when lauding such an accomplished entrepreneur. But there is a question why ULI so celebrated a man whose building practices are now being critiqued by many of its members.

Though it is a real estate association, ULI often acts as a think tank for those interested in revitalizing cities. It has grown in membership and influence as people and companies have flocked back to urban areas in recent years. It is dedicated to “the responsible use of land and in creating and sustaining thriving communities worldwide.”

Lerner is rightly credited with doing more to create Tysons Corner than anyone but the modern Tysons — one of the most congested, sprawling suburban areas anywhere in America — isn’t the sort of thing ULI members generally celebrate. Indeed, much of the work in Tysons today has to do with undoing the single use suburban malls and office parks that made Lerner and his table mate Thursday, zoning king Til Hazel, so wealthy.

ULI specializes in considering how to remake places with Tysons-like problems into flourishing urban areas. It frequently publishes work and holds forums on how to retrofit places like Tysons (“Not Your Parents’ Suburbs”) and Landover Mall, which Lerner built but had to demolish after it failed, into other things.

Unlike many ULI members who extol the virtues of public transit, Lerner has sometimes held a different view. When Metro agreed to build a Silver Line station on his doorstep in Tysons, he sued Virginia over how much he would be paid for the staging area (a jury sided with the commonwealth). When a Nationals playoff game ran late into the evening, his team refused to pick up the $30,000 tab to run extra cars.

Lerner plays hardball in more ways than one, and in real estate that sometimes means lawsuits. Lerner sued the District over ballpark construction, asking $100,000 a day in damages because he said work was still not done two months after it opened. He sued Fairfax County five years ago over development rights in Reston. When Lord & Taylor officials asked that he not tear down White Flint Mall in violation of his contract with them, he did it anyway. A jury awarded the department store $31 million in damages. (This was after Ted’s brother Lawrence sued him over the mall as well.)

Some ULI members have quietly questioned whether this constitutes award-winning behavior. In an e-mail Lisa Rother, executive director of ULI Washington, explained why Lerner was chosen:

ULI Washington is honored to present its Lifetime Achievement Award to Ted Lerner because of the tremendous impact he and his family have had on this region.  As a visionary real estate developer, generous philanthropist, MLB team owner, and a pillar of the community, Mr. Lerner has positively changed the face of the region over his decades of commitment to making the area the best that it can be.  His integrity, high standards and commitment to excellence are evident in everything he has done.  Residents proudly wear the Curly W to show their pride in the Washington Nationals.  They shop, live and work in the buildings and communities that Ted Lerner envisioned and built  and benefit from his generous philanthropy in universities and other civic amenities.

It’s easy to say simply that things were different when Lerner was making his name. Shopping malls at the time were where people wanted to shop and office parks were where they wanted to work. People preferred driving so of course they needed more roads.

Lerner is surely not to blame for all the region’s ills. But that type of development is one of the reasons that Washingtonians now endure some of the worst traffic and most polluted air in the country.

Stewart Schwartz, executive director director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, a transit advocacy group, said he appreciated the way Lerner had come around later in his career toward more environmentally sustainable practices.

“In the first decades that Mr. Lerner was developing the region, few understood the negative impacts of separated uses and completely auto dependent development,” Schwartz said. “We certainly face traffic and environmental challenges today due to the way the region grew.”

In Schwartz’s view, it may be difficult to condemn Tysons and shopping malls while celebrating Ted Lerner. But not impossible.

“Mr. Lerner has had a huge influence on regional development and we are pleased to see the commitment he has made to the new generation of transit-oriented development in Tysons, White Flint and the Nationals Stadium,” Schwartz added. “In this next generation for his firm, it will be critical that they include a focus on walkable urban design and creating great places as experienced by the pedestrian.”

Read at The Washington Post >>

Tuesday’s Elections Prove There’s No Such Thing as “Purple Virginia”

Posted on by Will Reckley

Northern Virginia is going a different way from the rest of the state, particularly on density and transportation.

The results of Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, leaving the commonwealth with a term-limited Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled legislature, are surely fodder for hacks who want to pump up the notions of bipartisanship and political enemies working together. Surely, Governor Terry McAuliffe will have to find some way to negotiate his desires for a Medicaid expansion and limits on gun ownership with a General Assembly run by GOP members from the southern and western parts of the state.

“That makes collaboration and good-faith negotiation—oriented toward crafting sound policy, rather than partisan gain—even more vital to lawmakers’ ability to represent Virginians’ interests in the coming legislative session,” reads a morning-after editorial in the Virginian-Pilot in Virginia Beach.

But stripping away the fact that scuffling with a Republican legislature might distract McAuliffe from his top priority for 2016—delivering Virginia’s electoral votes to his friend Hillary Rodham Clinton—Tuesday’s results were actually pretty good for progressive interests in the DC suburbs. Two retiring members of the Arlington County Board were replaced by Democrats, leaving independent John Vihstadt as the body’s singular minority; Loudoun County voters elected a Democratic county chairwoman and two Democrats to a board that was previously all-Republican; and voters in a suburban state Senate district rejected a candidate who made his campaign about opposing proposed tolls on Interstate 66.

Even if McAuliffe’s hopes for expanding low-income healthcare access and imposing some level of gun control are dashed next year by rural conservatives, Northern Virginia separated itself further from the rest of the commonwealth, particularly with respect to density and transportation.

“I think that indeed you are seeing sustained support for smart growth,” says Stewart Schwartz, the executive director of the Coalition for Smarther Growth, which advocates for greater implementation of transit and dense, urban development.

Arlington’s newest board members, Christian Dorsey and Katie Kristol, both ran on pro-transit platforms, perhaps giving the county a chance to pull away from the brink of becoming a soulless suburb. The Fairfax County Board’s incumbents mostly swept on Tuesday, leaving in power a group that has favored increased infrastructure spending in the county’s commercial corridors, especially on Metro and, most recently, Capital Bikeshare, which is coming to Reston.

Even Alexandria’s mayoral race might not be so bad for pro-growth idealists. Alison Silberberg, who favors “thoughtful, appropriate” projects—a blow to the developers seeking to rebuild the city’s waterfront as well as advocates of multi-modal transport—beat four-term incumbent Bill Euille’s write-in campaign. But Alexandria’s other incumbent council members were re-elected, and Silberberg’s biggest selling point was the rather broad promise of improving the city government’s community engagement. “That appears to be an endorsement in the direction Alexandria was going, balancing growth and historic preservation,” Schwartz says.

But the most encouraging result for the smart-growth set in Fairfax County might be in the state Senate race in which Jeremy McPike beat Manassas Mayor Hal Parrish. The Republican Parrish bombarded airwaves with ads stating his rigid opposition to a McAuliffe proposal to implement tolls I-66 during rush hours to relieve congestion on the typically clogged highway. While McPike also said he opposed the toll plan, Parrish’s message didn’t stick with voters; other local Democratic legislators who were hit with similar anti-toll attacks also won.

“Trying to do complicated transportation policy in an election year isn’t easy,” Schwartz says. “When you look at the options for 66 inside the Beltway, [the Virginia Department of Transportation] has come up with the best option for that corridor. It’s not an option to widen that corridor from Ballston in.”

The VDOT plan currently proposes collecting tolls from vehicles with fewer than three occupants traveling in peak directions during rush hours, with some of the revenue being used to pay for Metro and other alternative modes of transportation. Schwartz says simply widening the highway would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, result in the destruciton of numerous communities bordering the road, and funnel even more traffic onto DC roads that cannot handle the additional volume. While the toll proposal will almost certainly be tweaked many times, Schwartz says implementing it inside the Beltway could set a strong example for the outer suburbs, where officials favor building additional highway lanes, which are expensive and almost always result in more congestion by encouraging more cars to get on the road, a phenomenon transportation planners call “induced demand.”

But the outer suburbs might be taking steps that would surprise inner-Beltway eggheads. Two of the Democrats elected last night in Loudoun County are black, including County Chairwoman-elect Phyllis Randall; previously, the county’s current leadership is made up entirely of white Republicans. In Sterling, Koran Saines, a human-resources manager with Aramark, knocked off long-time incumbent Eugene Delgaudio, who is known best for his often toxic right-wing agitprop. Saines ran on expanding public transportation and building more transit-oriented real-estate developments; Delgaudio once called the Silver Line “a crazy circumstance in which the general public is going to get raped or not get raped.”

“I think what you have here is as much a reflection of changing demographics as anything else,” Schwartz says. “It reflects the diversity that is Loudoun today.”

To be sure, Democratic wins in Northern Virginia do not guarantee tolls on I-66, a wholesale expansion of express bus lines and Capital Bikeshare stations, or a solid timeline for Metro’s extenstion to Dulles. Many facets of those issues will continue to be negotiated in Richmond, which remains under the control of exurban and rural delegates far from Washington and who openly loathe McAuliffe and Clinton. But the results suggest that Northern Virginia continues to tilt toward greater adoption of alternative modes of transportation like rail and cycling, denser commercial and residential development particularly near transit hubs, and the will to pay for it.

The great northern Virginia toll controversy, explained

Posted on by Will Reckley

Hal Parrish, the Republican state Senate candidate for Virginia’s 29th District (which includes Manassas and some of Prince William County), is making a very inflammatory claim here: that Virginia’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, and Parrish’s Democratic opponent Jeremy McPike would impose a new $17-a-day toll on a portion of I-66, which runs from northern Virginia (including Prince William, Manassas, Fairfax, and Arlington) to Washington, DC.

For someone commuting from Manassas to DC for work 250 days out of the year, that’d mean $4,250 more in tolls annually. Even though the 29th District leans left — President Obama won it by 28 points in 2012, and McAuliffe won it by 18 in 2013 — that sounds like a massive enough toll hike to make even many Democrats tempted to vote GOP. And the election’s tomorrow.

Here’s the thing, though: The claim is not true.

What McAuliffe is proposing is an optional fee for single drivers who want to use a stretch of I-66 during peak hours — something they’re currently barred from doing. No one’s tolls would increase unless they chose to take advantage of that service.

What McAuliffe is actually proposing

Currently, between the Capital Beltway and DC, I-66 bars single-occupancy vehiclesduring peak hours: between 6:30 and 9 am on the way to DC, and from 4 to 6:30 pm on the way from DC. There are some exceptions — notably for traffic going to Dulles International Airport, and for hybrid or electric vehicles registered before 2011 — but in general, if you’re commuting on that part of I-66, you need to be carpooling.

The Virginia Department of Transportation is proposing a number of changes to this. The basics, per a presentation the department released in September, are:

  • Stop banning single-occupancy vehicles, and instead allow them to pay a toll to use I-66 during peak times.
  • Have that toll vary with traffic so as to minimize congestion.
  • Expand the affected hours to 5:30 to 9:30 am and 3 to 7 pm.

The plan initially called for transforming I-66 from HOV-2 — that is, vehicles with two or more people can ride free — to HOV-3, where only cars with three or more people can ride free during peak hours. It would’ve also imposed a mild toll on cars going against traffic during rush hour that currently don’t pay to use I-66. Both of those changes have since been abandoned.

The DOT estimates that, assuming I-66 stays HOV-2, morning tolls would peak at $9 and evening tolls would peak at $8. That’s where the $17-a-day figure comes from. But that’s pretty misleading. Those are the absolute peak figures, for someone who manages to hit the worst traffic going both to and from work on a given day. That’s not especially likely, and some days tolls would never go that high. Also, for what it’s worth, the tolls would be lower if I-66 became HOV-3, as originally planned.

But the most important caveat is that we’re talking about fees for single-occupancy vehicles on I-66, whereas such vehicles are currently illegal during peak hours. There’s no constituency that’s currently using I-66 toll-free that’s going to be forced to start paying for it. Everyone currently using I-66 with high-occupancy vehicles will keep doing that for free. But people currently commuting via other routes will now have the option to pay to use I-66 if that would be faster for them.

Transportation wonks like the idea

This might all seem arcane, but transit advocates are generally fans of the proposal. Greater Greater Washington’s Richard Price and Canaan Merchant note that the plan’s congestion pricing could make traffic flow more easily during peak times. The I-66 plan also includes more bus service for northern Virginia — and if traffic is flowing well, that makes bus service faster and more reliable. GGW’s David Cranor notes that the toll revenue would go not only to improved bus service but to pedestrian and biking improvements as well.

The Coalition for Smarter Growth has endorsed the proposal as well. The group notes that the tolls are pretty competitive with pricing for the Metro. Taking the Metro from the Vienna station to Metro Center, including parking, costs $10.30, compared with a $9 peak fare for taking I-66 from Vienna to DC. Similar toll lanes on I-95 and I-495, two other major DC-area interstates, have seen maximum tolls of $20.90 and $15.05, respectively. Next to that, the $8 to $9 one-way toll in the I-66 proposal looks quite reasonable.

CSG and GGW’s Price and Merchant also note that the proposal would head off proposals to widen I-66, which have surfaced over the years. Widening, transit activists argue, would only encourage more cars to get on the road, would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and would disrupt numerous homes and quite possibly the commuter bike trail in northern Virginia.

Why the issue matters

The toll attacks have a lot of money behind them. House Republicans have spent $850,000 on attack ads involving the toll proposal, which is a huge amount for state legislative races. Parrish, the state Senate candidate, has raised $1.4 million alone, and is spending on attack ads on the issue even though McPike, his Democratic opponent, opposes the tolling plan. Democrats have spent even more cash pushing back in these races, especially if you include the millions that Everytown for Gun Safety — the Michael Bloomberg–backed pro-gun control group — has poured into the state, including funding the anti-Parrish ad above. As a Washington Post headline put it last week, the election increasingly boils down to “tolls v. guns.”

While Republicans will almost certainly maintain control of the state house, the fate of the state Senate hangs in the balance. Control of the chamber has flipped twice in the past two years, with a special election tipping the balance to Democrats in late January 2014 and a Democratic senator’s resignation in June tipping it to the Republicans. The GOP still has a majority, but with a razor-thin 21-19 margin, and the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor means that Democrats only need to make it 20-20 to take control again. McAuliffe has said that a Democratic Senate could be enough for him to finally push through Medicaid expansion in the state. That’s doubtful given GOP control of the House, but it certainly would help his policy agenda on the margins.

Side note: Off-year elections are bullshit

Any post about Virginia’s 2015 elections wouldn’t be complete without noting that they shouldn’t exist at all.

Virginia is one of five states to hold gubernatorial elections on odd years. But it also holds legislative elections on odd years when the governor is not up for reelection. It’s like a midterm election to a midterm election. And the consequence is that basically no one votes in these things. In 2012, when there was a presidential election, turnout was a whopping 71.78 percent. In 2014, when there was a US Senate race and US House elections, it was 41.6 percent. In 2013, when there was a governor’s race, turnout was 43 percent, or around midterm levels. But in 2011, the last year when these kind of weird state-level midterms happened, turnout was only 28.61 percent.

In an ideal world, midterms wouldn’t exist at all, and the larger, more diverse electorate that turns out during presidential elections would get to vote for every office. But the least Virginia could do would be to move Senate elections so they’re aligned with gubernatorial elections and extend House terms to four years so they sync up as well. As it stands, a pathetically small chunk of the voting population is deciding these races.

Read on Vox >>