Quote of the day (transit - Virginia)

For a few years I've been reading the Richmond Times-Dispatch, part of my obsession with reading newspapers, and because I think if you're involved in urban revitalization, it's useful to have deeper knowledge of other cities along the "coast" such as Richmond, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, which have different issues, but things to learn from.

A. Barton Hinkle is an op-ed columnist for the RTD. He writes a fair bit about transportation. One of the things he clued me into awhile ago, and is mentioned in the column that I will be quoting from, "Road Rage: Keep These Points in Mind As Transpo Debate Proceeds," is that new construction of highways create a "mathematical dilemma" for state departments of transportation-highways:

Current budget growth accelerates future budget growth. That's because VDOT has to spend money on maintenance as well as construction. A dollar spent on construction this year creates demand for maintenance dollars in future years. The faster VDOT spends money on road-building now, the faster it will have to spend on maintenance later.

He also writes:

THE SITUATION is not unique to Virginia; 21st-Century Highways, a book by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy and the Heritage Foundation, cites a 1996 study commissioned by the Federal Highway Administration. It found similar diminishing returns on investment: "The federal highway program produced extremely high benefits in its early days, as new direct routes were created and the network became more complete, but . . . the value of these benefits declined as the interstate system neared completion."

But that isn't the "quote of the day," either, although it deserves to be. Here it is, his final paragraph:

For reasons outlined above, the state almost certainly cannot fix congestion by building more roads no matter how much it spends; doing so is like giving a fat man a bigger belt. Easing congestion requires changing (a) land-use patterns and (b) driving habits. More about those down the road.

Index Keywords: transit