During his 2001 campaign, [Governor Mark] Warner repeatedly argued that the state budget is structurally imbalanced, but he failed to explain the imbalance in detail. Virginians were left to wonder what, if anything, Warner proposed to do to cure the problem. Since taking office, Warner's only notions to address the budget imbalance have been increases in taxes and fees (e.g., income and sales tax hikes and a new landfill fee). In persuading the General Assembly to enact the regional sales tax referendum legislation, he may have contributed to the worsening of the Commonwealth's most troubling structural budget imbalance.
That imbalance is caused by Virginia's misguided approach to transportation, an approach that has produced an ever-widening gap between the demand for new roads and available revenues to fund them. Instead of proposing a shift in transportation policy to prevent that funding gap from widening further, Warner supported the regional sales tax referendum legislation that will lock the Commonwealth's two most populous regions and the Commonwealth itself into the same failed approach for another 35-50 years.

In 1986, Governor Gerald Baliles persuaded a special legislative session of the General Assembly to enact one of the largest tax increases in Virginia history to fund construction of new transportation projects that Baliles claimed would meet Virginia's needs into the 21st century(i). The Baliles tax increase, which involved raising the statewide sales and use tax rate, came just six years after another tax had been enacted for the same purpose. In 1980, at the urging of Governor John Dalton, the General Assembly enacted an increase in the gasoline tax to provide construction funding for transportation projects (ii). Dalton also claimed that approval of his plan would provide a long-term solution to the Commonwealth's transportation needs. A dramatic decline in funds available for project construction prompted both the 1980 and the 1986 tax increases. Dalton and Baliles chose to address that funding problem by raising new tax revenues for the Transportation Trust Fund rather than by reshaping state transportation policy to produce a more efficient system.

Neither of these tax increases succeeded as promised. The principal reason was that the construction of new highways in Virginia's most heavily populated regions funded by these tax increases induced substantial sprawl, resulting in longer trips, greater dependence on automobiles for mobility, and even greater maintenance costs because of the overall increase in lanes miles.

So long as this failed transportation policy is pursued, the trend will continue. As taxes increase and new highways are constructed in heavily populated regions, the funding problem will not only continue, but worsen.

The current transportation policy is based on several faulty premises. The first is that every new wave of highway construction will provide long-term relief from congestion. In fact, most new urban highway construction induces even more traffic than it relieves (iii). Any relief is likely to be short-lived. That is why transportation officials seem to be pleading for even more construction funding soon after each new tax is imposed (iv).

Another faulty premise is that mass transit and highway projects should be funded simultaneously to produce "balanced transportation (v). Mass transit is cost effective only where congestion exists. To the extent new highways actually relieve congestion, they make it less likely that mass transit will be successful.v When congestion reappears after completion of new highways, it is a type of congestion seldom susceptible to mass transit solutions.

A third flawed premise is that the taxpayers can afford to pursue the goal of assuring every person in a heavily populated region unencumbered, round-the-clock and all-points mobility by automobile. The result of trying to achieve this goal has always been frustration because providing such mobility for hundreds of thousands of automobiles is physically and financially impossible. There will never be enough space and funding for all the crisscrossing roads needed to accomplish that objective. Contrast Los Angeles and Atlanta, where the automobile is dominant and freeways have been the favored solution, with New York City, where pricing and other alternatives to freeways have produced greater mobility.

Virginia's transportation policy has been contributing to urban sprawl for decades (vi).As sprawl expands, transit alternatives become more costly and less feasible. Fixed rail and bus options are not attractive transportation solutions to the mobility needs of most suburban dwellers because the settlement pattern is far too dispersed to be served effectively by either.

In Virginia's heavily populated regions, the commuting pattern no longer resembles the spokes of a wheel (i.e., suburb-to-central-city), but is dispersed and increasingly suburb-to-suburb (vii). As sprawl expands, dependence on automobiles has grown dramatically. New vehicle registration and the length of daily trips are rising four-to-five times faster than the population (viii).The Commonwealth cannot afford to continue funding a program of highway construction that generates such an expanding gap.

i -Acts of Assembly 1986 (Special Session), cc. 11, 12 and 13; Gov. Gerald Baliles, "Special Session Addresses Future," Richmond News Leader (Sept. 15, 1986).
ii - Acts of Assembly 1980, c. 227.
iii - Lewis M. Fulton, et al., "A Statistical Analysis of Induced Travel Effects in the Mid-Atlantic Region," J. Transp. Statistics (Apr. 2000). See also Kevin Heanue, "Highway Capacity and Induced Travel: Issues, Evidence and Implications," prepared for the Transportation Research Bd. Ann. Mtg. (Jan. 1997); Alan Sipress, "More Lanes Better? Not Necessarily: Traffic Increases, Studies Find," Washington Post (Jan. 13, 2000); Katherine Shaver, "Road Projects Wouldn't End N. Va.'s Misery," Washington Post (Sept. 19, 2002).
iv - Bill Byrd, "Baliles seeking new exit from road problems," Virginian-Pilot (Jan. 15, 1989).
v - Report of the Year 2020 Panel to the Chesapeake Executive Council, Population Growth and Development in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed to the Year 2020 (Dec. 1988) at 18-19.
vi - Id. at 18-33.
vii - Robert Cervero, Suburban Gridlock (New Brunswick, N.J.: St. U. of N.J., 1986) at 9-10.
viii - Commission on Transportation Policy, Interim Report (1999) at 36; Editorial "$7 Billion Road Vote Faces Political Potholes," Virginian-Pilot (May 19, 2002).