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Transportation Reform in Virginia
Transportation and Land Use Reform in Virginia
Virginia is being rapidly transformed. Our abundant natural resources, beautiful landscapes, bountiful farmland, vibrant communities, and wealth of historic and cultural resources provide an outstanding quality of life that has helped to drive the tremendous growth that is reshaping the Commonwealth.
While growth provides numerous benefits, the heavy costs of sprawling development patterns and an asphalt-centered transportation program are catching up with us. These costs are increasingly borne by citizens, who face rising and volatile fuel prices, tax funds to subsidize services to sprawling development, lost time for work and family due to rising traffic delays, and increased health risks and expenses from environmental damage and pollution.
Numbers Don’t Lie
For decades, state and local policies have promoted sprawl and favored building more and bigger highways. This has helped to spur:
- Increased land conversion (Virginia lost almost 350,000 acres—about 180 acres a day—to development between 1992 and 1997);
- More driving (80 billion miles in 2005, up 33% from 1990); and
- Greater fuel consumption (over 5 billion gallons in 2005).
Transportation is the single largest use of energy in Virginia, accounting for 43% of all energy consumed. It also accounts for over two-fifths of Virginia’s carbon dioxide emissions, a greenhouse gas, and is the fastest growing source of carbon - rising 31% between 1990 and 2004.
Sprawling Growth, a Warming Planet
The most urgent consequence of current growth patterns is the threat of climate change due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Virginia is particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts including increased drought, flooding, harm to the Chesapeake Bay, loss of wetlands and beaches and the extinction of entire species.
Sprawl not only exacerbates global warming by increasing driving, it destroys the very resources that would help ameliorate the impacts of a warming planet - forests, which retain carbon, and wetlands, which absorb flood waters.
A Plan for Action
The good news is that because the problems are interrelated, solutions often address multiple goals. Innovative, practical steps are needed that fundamentally change our development, transportation, and energy policies and patterns, including:
- Revitalize existing communities and promote better planned, more compact neighborhoods and town centers;
- Provide incentives for greener building to make new and existing structures healthier, cleaner and more energy efficient;
- Promote more affordable housing;
- Protect rural and natural areas, and promote agricultural vitality;
- Provide greater transportation choices, including increasing funding for transit, rail and other alternatives to driving, as well as for local street networks;
- Maximize the efficiency and safety of existing roads by placing greater emphasis on maintenance and on improved access management; and
- Provide incentives for more efficient, cleaner vehicles and cleaner fuels.
A Call for Action
We cannot afford “business as usual.”
Although SELC has helped achieve meaningful reforms in recent years, such as requiring traffic impact studies of major land use proposals and increased funding for transit and rail, much more needs to be done to address the magnitude of the problems we face.
SELC is working with state and local governments to push for stronger policies that will address the challenge of growth while sustaining and enhancing our economy, communities, health and environment. Trip Pollard, director of SELC’s Land and Community Program, serves on Governor Kaine’s Climate Change Commission where he is a strong voice for reforming transportation and land use policies. Trip is based in Richmond, where his direct contact with top-level officials strengthens our effective advocacy for a better Virginia.