Speaking Out: Virginia Transportation
Virginia Needs to Act Now on Transportation
By Del. Bob Brink
Arlington Connection
September 14, 2006

On Sept. 27, the House of Delegates and Senate will reconvene in Richmond to take another whack at the issue we’ve been avoiding for the better part of a year: Virginia’s serious — and growing — transportation crisis. We can see the signs of this crisis across the Commonwealth. Here in Northern Virginia, our region and its growing population suffer from the second-longest commuting times in the nation: an average of 33 minutes each way, even longer in outlying suburbs such as Prince William.

No matter where we’re going — to work, to our kids’ soccer games, to pick up dry cleaning — we can never be sure how long the trip will take, and what kinds of delays we’ll encounter along the way. At the same time, our vital transit systems such as Metro and Virginia Railway Express need additional resources to maintain their reliability and capacity.

The Hampton Roads region downstate faces a transportation nightmare of its own. It is bisected by bodies of water that people and products need to go over, or under, to get from one place to another. Its port facilities are a key component of Virginia’s continued economic growth — but only if the cargo going to and from those facilities can move efficiently.

The southern and southwestern parts of the commonwealth have suffered serious economic hits over the past several years, as factories that produced furniture, textiles and other commodities closed their doors, and as tobacco declined as an agricultural mainstay of the region.

Those of us in more prosperous parts of Virginia have a stake in those regions’ economic revival, because otherwise the burden will fall on us to help provide the services their people need to survive. The key to that revival is an adequate transportation system that attracts new businesses and jobs to those corners of the state.

So the transportation challenge we face is two-fold. We need to address the transportation needs of Virginia as a whole, while paying particular attention to the requirements of high-growth areas here and in Hampton Roads. There’s no reason we can’t do both, and there’s no way we can come up with significant long-term transportation improvements without both a regional and statewide approach.

Will we succeed in crafting a solution that is meaningful and comprehensive? It’s tough to say. There are some members of the General Assembly who seem to think that we can wish our transportation problems away without coming up with the money that’s required to pay for the concrete and steel that make up our roads and transit systems.

There are others who would be willing to sacrifice other vital state services — education, health care, public safety — rather than face up to the need for additional resources for transportation. And there are those who would be more than happy to settle for a fig leaf half-measure that would let them go back to their voters and claim they solved our transportation problems.

One thing is certain: the problem isn’t going to get any better if we delay. Kicking the can down the road one more time means more gridlock, more threats to our long-term economic prosperity, more danger to our quality of life. It’s been two decades since Virginia last undertook an across-the-board improvement to the commonwealth’s transportation network. Much has changed since then, and the needs have grown exponentially. The time to act is now.