This year and in coming years, Virginia plans to put more money into high-impact, cost-effective transportation projects and less into the pet projects of powerful politicians. Virginia Secretary of Transportation Aubrey Layne last week detailed a plan to fix the state’s system of transportation spending, which has been plagued by too few dollars and too much politics, he said.
- Under the old paradigm, Virginia’s governor heavily influenced transportation spending, and that meant new priorities as often as every four years. In addition, decision-makers readily invested huge sums in high-traffic areas to the detriment of rural areas. Officials sometimes added to the Six-Year Improvement Program as political favors, even if there wasn’t any money to build.
- A new package of reforms under Gov. Terry McAuliffe will score proposed transportation projects on merit. The closer a proposal comes to delivering five public benefits — such as economic development, accessibility to jobs or congestion relief — the higher its score and likelihood to receive money. That’s the new and only rationale behind how Virginia will invest in systems to move people and goods in the future, Layne said.
- If it works, rural and semi-rural places such as the Roanoke and New River valleys will compete on a more level playing field for construction dollars against the urban cores of Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads. In addition, the state is giving itself an annual budget with which to both maintain the transportation network, with routine work like repaving, and to reconstruct roads and bridges when they get old.
- For further coordination, planners must refer constantly to the state’s long-term transportation plan, VTrans2040, to achieve targets decades out. It could be years before it’s clear whether the new program has succeeded. The state won’t complete the first annual cycle until summer 2016 and the transition will take several years. But officials in both local and state government sound hopeful.
- Under the new strategy, local governments, regional groups such as the Roanoke Valley Transportation Planning Organization, and public transit agencies will propose projects during an annual fall intake period, which state workers will score during the winter. As before, the Commonwealth Transportation Board will decide by early summer what gets funded. But the CTB will now rely on the scores to allocate the billions of available dollars each year — or explain publicly why it didn’t.
- Transparency is built in. The public will get to see project proposals, scores and the winners list — as well as the explanations if the CTB, which is made up of 14 citizens and three of the state’s top transportation officials, favors a lower-scoring project over a higher-scoring one. VTrans2040 is also a public document. CTB members from that district will pick one or more winners.
Separately, project proponents can enter a statewide competition for a helping of a statewide pot of construction dollars. The whole CTB will pick the winners from among those initiatives.
- Here’s another example: If the Roanoke Valley proposed to widen its stretch of I-81 to three lanes in each direction — something discussed for years — it could request a share of Salem VDOT’s pot of money or dollars from the statewide pot of money, or both. In that vein, it would compete with other projects of statewide importance. But decision-makers couldn’t discount the proposal on account of its location in Southwest Virginia. Only the proposal’s cost-benefit score would matter, in theory.
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