From the Archives: Meadowcreek Parkway and suggestions to improve transportation policy making

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 12, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.


Meadowcreek Parkway and suggestions to improve transportation policy making
April 12, 2010 6:10 PM MST

The Meadowcreek Parkway, which would link Rio Road in Albemarle County to the Route 250 Bypass and McIntire Road in Charlottesville, came a step closer to being built today.

Sean Tubbs of Charlottesville Tomorrow reports:

“The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has released a new draft of a key document required for the approval of an interchange to connect the Meadowcreek Parkway to the U.S. 250 bypass.

“Because several historic and cultural resources will be affected by the interchange’s construction, the project is being reviewed by the FHWA as part a review process known as Section 106.”

The Meadowcreek Parkway was first proposed more than 40 years ago and has been a subject of public controversy in Charlottesville since then. In fact, candidates’ positions on the Meadowcreek Parkway have often been key issues in City Council races over the past four decades.

The long decision making process over the Meadowcreek Parkway may be instructive for how transportation policy in Virginia is devised and implemented.

In an exclusive interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner last Friday, Dr. Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation offered some suggestions for how Virginia can improve its process of transportation policy making:

“First of all,” Utt said, “we’ve argued, both to [Governor Bob] McDonnell and to anybody who would listen over the last several years,” that Virginia should “establish a performance-based measuring system in which congestion mitigation and travel time are the measures by which you choose projects, while at the same time holding harmless the regional distribution.”

That means, Utt explained, that investments “within the Northern Virginia transportation district [for example] would then have to be ranked by their impact on traffic congestion.”

The problem, he noted, is that “right now you don’t have that. A lot of these things are political. Senior Members of Congress get to get interchanges; influential businesses get interchanges. There are no standards by which we can judge one project from the other.”

This has an impact on budgetary as well as policy decisions, Utt concluded:

“We’ve argued that in a time of fiscal stringency, when a lot of worthy projects under any circumstances are being rejected for a lack of money, then it’s all the more important to prioritize projects by some measures that people can understand and agree on. I would say congestion, travel time, and safety would be those three key criteria.”

From the Archives: Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation James Burnley sees U.S. at 'crisis point for infrastructure'

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on June 25, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation James Burnley sees U.S. at 'crisis point for infrastructure'

Currently a partner at the law firm Venable LLP, James H. Burnley IV was not yet 40 years old when he became President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Transportation in 1987, having previously served as deputy secretary in that department as well as in the U.S. Department of Justice as an associate deputy attorney general.

In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner at the Heritage Foundation in Washington on June 25, Burnley did not mince words in his assessment of the current state of transportation in the United States.

Time to Rethink Roles

"We’re at a crisis point on infrastructure for transportation in this country and we need to start over, rethinking the roles” of the state, federal, and local governments in devising and implementing transportation policy, he said.

Noting that the economic situation today is quite different than it was in the late 1980s, Burnley pointed out that “we had deficits” under President Reagan “but nothing on the scale we have today.”

One matter that is significantly different, he said, is that “the highway user fee trust fund idea has broken down completely. In the last few years $34.5 billion have been transferred from general revenues because we can’t pay for the existing highway programs and the transit programs that are funded, in part, from the highway trust fund.”

That’s why, he said, we have to “go back to a clean sheet of paper and rethink the federal role vis-à-vis the states and cities on transportation.”

Critical of Obama
Burnley was also critical of the Obama administration’s approach to these issues.

“I don’t think that the policies that the Obama administration seems to be intent on implementing are taking us in that direction – unfortunately,” he said. “Rather, their policies, under the so-called ‘livability doctrine’ seem to be designed to have the federal government play a much more intrusive, heavy-handed role in state and local transportation decisions. I’m sorry to see that happening.”

One proposal, pushed heavily by the Obama administration, is to build and expand high-speed rail across the United States. Burnley is skeptical.

This is, he said, “an issue that ultimately will be determined by how much we as a country are willing to spend because it will never pay for itself and it requires enormous capital investments by someone.”

There are questions that have to be asked in the debate over high-speed rail, Burnley said. “Is that money available from any source, and, if so, where does it come from? The federal government? State government? Private capital, which I think is not very likely?”

Funding, he said, is “the ultimate determinative factor, which is where is the money going to come from, and is it an investment as a country that we want to make?”

High-Speed or Low-Speed?
One issue that is emerging is that federal stimulus funds claimed to be for high-speed rail are going to projects far removed from that concept.

“Part of the $8 billion in stimulus money that was set aside last year for high speed rail that’s not going to the two greenfield projects in California and in Florida has been spread out by the federal [Department of Transportation] among the states to be spent on existing railroad lines,” Burnley explained, which, outside of the Northeast Corridor – where the lines are owned by Amtrak – are owned by freight railroads.

“What we think about as the high-speed rail program” besides those greenfield projects and Acela -- “we’re talking about increasing speeds by 2, 3, 4 miles an hour, very modest increases.”

As a result, that stimulus “money is, in fact, going as direct subsidies to the freight railroads because those are the lines upon which the passenger trains run outside the Northeast Corridor,” said Burnley. “You can argue the merits of that but, factually, I think, it’s important to note that that’s what’s happened. That’s where those billions of dollars are going.”

In other words, federal money designated for “high-speed rail” is subsiding “slow rail” instead.

From the Archives: Former Virginia Secretary of Transportation Shirley Ybarra discusses rail, roads, and HOT lanes

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on June 25, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Former Virginia Secretary of Transportation Shirley Ybarra discusses rail, roads, and HOT lanes

Now a senior transportation analyst at the Reason Foundation, Shirley J. Ybarra served as Secretary of Transportation for the Commonwealth of Virginia during the administration of Governor James Gilmore. She previously served as deputy secretary under Governor George Allen.

Ybarra attended a luncheon seminar at the Heritage Foundation in Washington on June 25, where the topic was high speed rail. After the presentation ended, she spoke briefly with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner on transportation issues facing Virginia.

The biggest single issue she identified is “congestion, particularly in Northern Virginia,” adding that in “the Virginia Beach area, same issues. It’s road congestion, quite honestly.”

To address the congestion problem, Ybarra said, “we’re seeing some solutions in Northern Virginia, with the Beltway HOT lanes and,” eventually, “the I-95/395 corridor HOT lanes.” She noted that those high-occupancy toll lanes are “not just for cars; that puts bus rapid transit on those HOT lanes also.”

High-Speed Rail in Virginia?
As to whether there is a role for high-speed rail (HSR) in Virginia, Ybarra said probably not.

“I think it’s going to be difficult to find a role for high speed rail,” she said. “A project that was started when I was Secretary was something called ‘the Third Rail’ between Washington and Richmond.

“That was because they were using the freight railroad tracks and they needed sidings and a new bridge down by Fredericksburg and that would allow the passenger trains not to be delayed by the very long freight trains like the ‘Juice Train’ that goes through right at the time it’s needed for the VRE service,” that is, the Virginia Railway Express commuter line. VRE, which runs from Manassas in the west and Fredericksburg in the south to downtown Washington, pays “freight railroads for the use of the tracks,” Ybarra explained, “because it is their track.”

McDonnell Administration Efforts
Assessing the successes and failures of the administration of Governor Bob McDonnell in transportation so far, Ybarra said “they are certainly trying to continue with public-private transportation acts, or what the rest of the world calls, public-private ventures, to bring some of the capacity and the private sector into road building,” as well as in transit.

One obstacle facing the McDonnell administration is that has substantially smaller budget “available than I did so they need to bring in the private sector and I know [the governor is] pushing that.” She noted that public-private ventures in transportation were part of McDonnell’s campaign platform and that suggestions to refine that promise have come out of a recent study commissioned by the administration.

Moreover, Ybarra added, McDonnell will be “putting in a dedicated group of people” to study transportation issues, “which we were unable to do when I was there. We all just did our regular job plus that job” of looking into future solutions for transportation problems.

“I think the dedicated group of people will help” in policymaking efforts, she concluded.