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WASHINGTON -- Americans are becoming
so disturbed by grueling commutes and traffic tie-ups that
transportation -- a perennial also-ran in elections -- is
on a fast rise.
In 2000, there were 23 state and local
referendums on road and transit issues. In 2001, there were
11. This year the total is 37, according Betsy Jackson of
the Washington-based Center for Transportation Excellence.
Most of the measures call for tax increases -- especially
tough sells in a recession year. The most frequent choices
are sales taxes, followed by property taxes.
But the pressure for transportation
improvements has emboldened proponents to at least make a
try for public support.
The stakes are immense. Take two of
the nation's most gridlocked regions -- Northern Virginia
suburbs of Washington, D.C. and the three-county region of
King, Snohomish and Pierce making up metropolitan Seattle.
Each could face gruesome futures if vehicles miles driven,
a common barometer of traffic volume, continue to escalate.
Washington Beltway and arterial road stoppages are among the
nation's worst. The 65 hours a year that an average Seattle
area motorist now spends stuck in traffic could balloon to
130 hours by 2020.
But there's a thorny problem: smart
and well-meaning people differ radically on whether the measures
will end up helping or hurting more.
Boosters of the new measures include leading local politicians,
many major corporations, and, predictably, the development,
home-building, real estate and asphalt industries. All insist
it's high time to enlarge the most congested roads, relieve
bottlenecks, fix up dangerous highways and bridges.
The boosters are more open to public
transportation than in times past. There'd be $860 million
for transit projects including rail and passenger ferries,
for example, in the projected $7.7 billion proceeds from Washington
State's proposed 9-cent-a-gallon gas tax hike.
In Northern Virginia, a full 40 percent of $2.75 billion worth
of bonds, financed by a penny addition to the local sales
tax, would go transit -- commuter rail, trolleys, and extending
the Washington Metro system to Dulles International Airport.
"It's a funding stream for transit
the likes of which we've never seen," Katherine Hanley,
chair of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, told the
Washington Post.
It's also something of a political
miracle Northern Virginians are even allowed to vote on taxing
themselves -- it took a big battle in the state legislature
to win that permission.
But the obstacles to the big transportation
measures don't just come from conservative, anti-tax camps.
Many environmental group leaders, people normally strong for
public transit, are also opposed.
Don't be fooled by the 15 percent
of the big Washington State measure for transit, argues the
environmental group, 1000 Friends of Washington. The measure's
really "the biggest freeway program in the history of
the state," deliberately "neglects safety and maintenance
in favor of highway expansion," and would fund sprawl-generating
roads in rural areas.
The 1000 Friends urges pouring much more money into transit
and focusing road funds on fixing highway choke points and
design flaws -- not expansion.
The same argument's raging in Northern
Virginia. Backers say the sales tax boost is critical to relieving
bottlenecks and relieving gargantuan traffic snarls.
No, it's really "a sprawl tax,"
charge environmental opponents including Stewart Schwartz
of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. They say the program
doesn't focus on the worst bottlenecks, such as Beltway intersections
and bridges entering into the District of Columbia. Rather,
they argue, is funds new and expanded roads through rural
Loudoun and Prince William Counties, opening big country corridors
to development -- thereby enriching the real estate and home
building firms that have contributed $800,000 of the $1.5
million gathered to push the referendum.
The anti-argument in Northern Virginia is being bolstered
by figures culled from the widely-used Texas Transportation
Institute's road use and building studies. They show the total
miles in road lanes in the Washington area grew 16 percent
between 1990 and 2000 -- a shade more than the region's 15
percent population gain. But vehicle miles traveled, as sprawl
scattered homes, workplaces, shopping and entertainment sites,
shot up 27 percent.
Conclusion: lack of roads isn't the
problem, people driving longer distances is. So smart policy,
say the environmentalists, would be to look where heaviest
job growth is projected -- in the Northern Virginia case,
within 10 miles of the District -- and invest there, not on
the rural fringe.
On the same principle, one could see a new, "smarter"
generation of transportation investment measures emerging
across the country in the next years: more on highway safety
improvements, relieving bottlenecks, more on transit, less
on new roads or radical highway widening.
Then there'd have to be legal changes -- regulations rewritten
to make development tougher to accomplish on outer-ring greenfields,
but easier to push forward in center city and inner-ring suburbs.
Bottom line: A more rational and less
contentious transportation future won't be easy. But not impossible.
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