Kaine Spotting

Last night Tim Kaine and his wife sat in the row behind my wife and me at the Westhampton Theater in Richmond, attending a showing of "The Queen."

The Governor dressed like an ordinary bloke: He wore a tieless, button-down shirt and a leather jacket. That's one of his more appealing traits. He may be the Governor, but a year on the job doesn't seem to have changed him. He hasn't grown impressed with himself -- he does the same things he did as Lt. Governor, mayor and private citizen. Over recent years, I've seen him pop into a wine store in the Fan, walking alone down the sidewalk in downtown Richmond, and chowing down on hamburgers with the wife and kids at the River City Diner in Shockoe Bottom.

The two central characters in "The Queen" are Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Tony Blair, a moderate liberal politician in much the same philosophical mold as Gov. Kaine. When the movie was over and the lights came on, I was tempted to ask the Governor his impression of how Blair was portrayed. But I decided not to: The movie had opened with Princess Diana fleeing the torments of the paparazzi and driving to her death. Even public figures deserve their privacy. Indeed, respecting the rights of people, especially prominent people, to their privacy is a sign of civilized behavior -- a trait that the Queen found to her dismay that the British people no longer possessed.

But Virginians are still civilized and respectful of the rights of others. So, I left the Governor in peace. I guess I'll have to wait until the next blogger conference to ask him what he thought of Tony Blair.

Shucet Itching to Get Back into Transportation

Former VDOT Commissioner has left Dragas Management Corp., a Virginia Beach home-building company, on friendly terms after a year and a half there. An e-mail to friends and associates signed jointly by Shucet and company owner Helen Dragas stated: "Philip finds that his passion for large engineering and construction projects continues to burn. His fire in the belly comes from over 35 years of dedication to an industry that has been a large part of his life. His fire is still burning brightly."

In an interview with the Virginian-Pilot, he said:

...he has had "some very superficial discussions" with other companies but declined to identify them. "I'm pretty set on staying in the private sector," he said. "I do plan, however, to take another shot at making some noise about transportation in Virginia."

Reality Check: Commuting Times Are Getting Shorter

The conventional wisdom holds that traffic congestion is getting worse and worse, that commuting times are getting longer, and that citizens are enduring increasingly unbearable frustration while stuck in traffic. But what if that's not true? What if, while nobody was looking, commuting times actually got shorter? What if the reality on the ground was at total odds with the political rhetoric?

New census data, which the Axis of Taxes (which includes most of the media) conveniently chose to ignore, suggests that there may be a chasm between perception and reality. According to a September statement by the AAA, the Census Bureau has released data indicating that commuting times actually got shorter between 2000 and 2005.

The average daily commute to work has shrunk from 25.5 minutes in 2000 to 25.1 minutes last year, according to data released this week by the Census Bureau.

"We all should hold a celebration,'' said Alan Pisarski, author of Commuting in America. "We're saving 0.4 minutes!''

I don't know if Pisarski, a prominent Northern Virginia transportation consultant was speaking sarcastically or not. But I, for one, find the news quite encouraging.

Of course, national averages can obscure local trends. Commuting times in the Washington metro area, third longest in the country, actually got "slightly longer" between 2000 and 2005, AAA reports without providing details. A U.S. Census press release singles out Prince William County, Va., as a suburban county with one of the longest average commutes, 36.4 minutes -- fifth longest in the nation. (Which may explain the blind frustration motivating the freeze on new home building there.)

Average commuting times for Virginia in 2005 were 25.8 minutes, ninth longest in the nation. How does that compare to 2000? AAA didn't say. But the Bureau of Census, god bless 'em, puts its data online. Go here and see for yourself: That's down from 27.0 minutes in 2000!

A decline of 1.2 minutes in averaging commuting time would be so dramatic and so counterintuitive, that one must consider the possibility that some of the change can be accounted for by the margin of statistical error in Census data or some other change in the way data was collected and compiled. But until such a case can be made, I can only presume that the conventional wisdom just may be wrong.

The commuting data also might explain why, despite the media- and politician-generated hysteria over traffic congestion, most Virginians stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea of higher taxes for transportation.

Third Poll, Same Result: Public Doesn't Want to Raise Taxes for Transportation

After reader Larry Gross referred to the AAA "Pockets of Pain" survey in comments on a couple of previous posts, I decided I ought to take a look. I found a summary of the survey in a press release but could not find the details of the survey itself. But even the pro-tax AAA's spin on the data should deliver a sober warning to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, who has been stumping the state in favor of a tax increase and wants to elevate taxes and transportation to a defining issue in the 2007 General Assembly races.

For all the angst and maelstrom about traffic congestion, the AAA reports, transportation is far from the public's top priority. "When respondents were asked to rank a list of national priorities, transportation did not fare well." In order of importance the respondents produced the following ranking:

(1) Healthcare (26% rated most important)
(2) National Security (25%)
(3) Education (24%)
(4) Social Security (12%)
(5) Energy Independence (9%)
(6) Transportation (3%).

Further, stated the report, the public is far more receptive to the idea of paying tolls, particularly for new projects, than to raising taxes.

When respondents were asked to choose from a number of funding options, the public did not favor using general purpose revenues. In fact, the most frequent choice - 52% - was some form of toll option to help raise money to fund our transportation system. The most popular options are those that add tolls to only new roads and highway lanes (39%).

In focus groups, people made it quite plain why they don't like the idea of higher taxes.

“In previous surveys and focus groups, we’ve seen more reluctance to increasing funding for transportation,” said Robert L. Darbelnet, AAA president and CEO in a speech given at the National Conference of State Legislatures Transportation Leaders meeting in San Antonio, Texas. “Common responses used to be ‘I already pay enough,’ or ‘existing funds aren’t invested efficiently,’ or ‘I don’t trust my state DOT to do the right thing.’...

Those national responses track very closely to polls conducted earlier this year showing that Virginians have very little appetite for raising taxes. (For details, see our October post on the Survey USA poll and our August post on a Richmond Times-Dispatch poll.)

While the business and political elites tend to favor taxes, the public clearly does not. If Gov. Kaine wants to make taxes and transportation the signature issue of the 2007 campaign season, I say, "Bring it on!"

Prince William Lashing out in Blind Frustration

Alec MacGillis with the Washington Post ran a story two days ago on the anti-growth backlash in the Washington region, highlighting recent events in Loudoun County, Prince William County and Montgomery County, Md. Most disturbing from my perspective was a vote by the Prince William board of supervisors to approve a one-year freeze on most subdivisions "to protest the lack of transportation funding from the General Assembly."

The Prince William action strikes me as an act of blind, inchoate frustration. It's not helpful in any way, and it's wrong on so many levels. Let me count the ways:

First: The vote assumes that the primary reason for traffic congestion in Prince William County is a lack of insufficient spending on roads -- as opposed to really bad zoning and land use decisions made by previous boards of supervisors. As we documented in our close-ups of Prince William transportation and land use issues earlier this year, there is a massive overhang of land approved for development. It's only been in recent years, under now-departed board chairman Sean Connaughton, that the board even began thinking about adopting more transportation-efficient patterns of development. Blaming the state absolves Prince William from the responsibility for developing transportation-efficient communities with a balanced mix of homes, jobs, stores and amenities.

Second: Freezing new housing starts will not solve anything. As long as Northern Virginia generates new jobs, people have to live somewhere. If they don't live in Prince William, they'll move to Stafford or Spotsylvania. But they'll drive back through Prince William to get to the jobs closer to the urban core, only adding to congestion on Interstate 95 and other traffic corridors.

Third: Let's say the General Assembly raises another $1 billion a year in taxes, as Gov. Kaine and the state Senate want to do. Prince William, with about 350,000 residents, accounts for about 4.7 percent of the state's population. The county's share of that $1 billion would be $47 million a year. That's not enough for P.W. to pave its way out of its traffic congestion problems. But it is enough to perpetuate Business As Usual, supporting the same dysfunctional land use patterns that created the mess.

As Ed Risse was quoted in the article as saying, the moratorium could have the unwanted effect of bogging down the county's land-use policy in court. What Prince William and the rest of Northern Virginia really need is more control over funding and building roads. "It's nice that Prince William's evolved to the point where it can put its foot down, but it will take some reallocation of powers for transportation planning until something happens."

Update: Turns out that PWC doesn't have the legal authority to put a freeze on new house rezonings. So, the board of supervisors has decided instead to defer action on rezonings as long as legally permissable, 12 months. The Gainesville Times has the story.

Who Will Gather the News? Media General Aligns with Yahoo!

Media General Inc., owner of newspapers in Richmond, Charlottesville, Lynchburg, Danville, Bristol and other Virginia cities, has entered into a strategic alliance with Yahoo! and a consortium of other newspaper chains. Media General newspapers will transition their online career sections to Yahoo's HotJobs platform, with the goal of creating one of the most comprehensive jobs networks in the country. (See press release.)

The move attempts to address the dangerous erosion of employment classified ads, traditionally one of the most profitable revenue sources for daily newspapers. Said Neal F. Fondren, president of the Interactive Media Division: “Our visitors will benefit the Yahoo! state-of-the-art search and targeting features and user-friendly tools. Advertisers can also use contextual, streaming and interactive media to engage job candidates as well as leverage Real Simple Syndication feeds, job search agents, newsletters and a job recommendation engine.”

Clearly, Media General is better off aligning itself with the Yahoo!-led consortium than trying to develop these interactive tools itself. But the move is essentially defensive, an attempt to staunch the hemorrhaging of market share in a former newspaper monopoly. It will be interesting to see if the Yahoo! initiative leads to similar deals to salvage market share in automobile and real estate classified ads.

As memory serves, classified ads generally account for roughly half the profits of the typical daily newspaper. It is essential that newspapers find a way to preserve this revenue stream. If they can't, they face a very bleak economic future. And the rest of us will face a future with a much-diminished stream of local news.

Mullah Nichol

A friend of mine, whom I will identify only by his nom de plume, Veritatus, has offered the following satire of the Wrenn cross controversy at William & Mary. I will say only this about our pseudonymous contributor: He, like me, is not particularly religious. But he, like me, is distressed by political correctness that expunges our historical heritage. Unlike me, he is a W&M alumnus, which means he's reaallllyy mad.

This happened in early 2001...

In Afghanistan supreme Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar has issued an edict against un-Islamic graven images, which means all idolatrous images of humans and animals. As a result, the Taliban are destroying all ancient sculptures. Explosives, tanks, and anti-aircraft weapons blew apart two colossal images of the Buddha in Bamiyan Province, 230 kilometers (150 miles) from the capital of Kabul.

Let’s fast forward to late 2006...

At the College of William and Mary in Virginia, Supreme PC Taliban Mullah Gene Nichol has issued an edict against all un-PC images, most notably the Christian cross or any other artifacts of the College’s unfortunate past linked to the Church of England, the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginal or any other historical references to Christian or other religious connections that that College may have had. Mullah Nichol indicated that by starting in the chapel by removal of the altar cross, he is sending a strong message that more vigorous measures are to follow.

Renovation of the chapel soon will begin because, though a reconstruction of an earlier chapel, the present form and furnishings comport with 17th and 18th century Anglican requirements for a Christian place of worship -- a PC heresy.

The next more dramatic step will be to pull down and destroy the large statue (adjacent to Blair hall) of the College’s founding president (1693) James Blair who served as both a minister of the Church of Scotland and the Church of England. During his long tenure as William and Mary president, Mr. Blair also served as the Bishop of London’s Commissary in Virginia, making him the Anglican Church's leader in a colony that had no bishop.

Mr. Blair’s statue presents him in the garb of an Anglican clergyman of his day. Public display of such vestments at a liberal arts university such as William and Mary has also been declared PC-heretical by Mullah Nichol along with free thought and free speech and common sense.

Mullah Nichol has also decreed that a vigorous campaign to purify the campus of all historical Christian symbolism or reference will be on-going and may include public burning of the original charter or at least a replica of same if the original cannot be found. References therein dwell upon the training of young men for the Christian ministry. King William and Queen Mary were co-heads of the Church of England making all future reference to them inappropriate. Sources indicate that the school may need to be renamed because of this heretical tie to Christian monarchs.

As leader of the secular religion of PC at William and Mary, Mullah Nichol will soon rename the College. Mullah Nichol Taliban U. may be selected.

Kaine Takes His Case to Virginia FREE

I've been a vocal opponent of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's proposal to raise $1 billion in taxes for transportation. And after hearing him address the Virginia Foundation for Research and Economic Education (VA FREE) yesterday, I still oppose his plan. But I believe in giving the devil his due. Kaine made a more lucid case for his tax plan than anything I have read in the voluminous newspaper coverage of the issue. In the interest of elevating the transportation debate to a higher level of discourse, I present his arguments here without my usual commentary.

Kaine's transportation plan does not hinge upon taxes alone. The Governor acknowledges the need to change the way the system works. Virginia has made good headway in improving the accountability of the Virginia Department of Transportation, and the state has begun connecting transportation and land use decisions. "Five years ago VDOT could not finish a construction on time or on budget," he said. The Commonwealth Transportation Board could not build a reliable six-year plan -- its list of transportation projects bore no relationship to the actual costs of the projects or revenue available to fund them.

Today, VDOT is 1,000 employees leaner and engaging in a round of facility consolidations that will make it even more efficient. The number of projects coming in on time and on budget has reached roughly 90 percent. And the projects listed in the state's six-year transportation plan, though sharply curtailed, are at least realistic.

As for land use, Kaine said, "We will have more discussions about that next year" -- presumably in reference to legislative proposals submitted by the House of Delegates but not acted upon in the September transportation session.

Even with all those reforms, Kaine contends, the transportation system needs more funding. One of the core revenue sources, gas taxes, has been flat since 1986 but construction costs have escalated steadily. In "a growing, thriving state with population growth ... the only way to solve our challenges is to find more revenues. ... You cannot have an 'A' system on a 'C' revenue stream."

The question then becomes: Where do the revenues come from? Kaine does not want transportation to "compete with" schools, health care and other General Fund priorities. Transportation needs its own dedicated revenue sources. Kaine proposes to raise about $1 billion a year through "user based" taxes -- on auto insurance, car registrations and auto titling, supplement by abusive driver fines. A competing state Senate plan would rely primarily upon a wholesale gasoline tax.

In setting new tax rates, Kaine compared current Virginia tax rates to those of neighboring states. In most cases, our taxes are lower -- often significantly lower. Our 17.5 cent-per-gallon gasoline tax compares to $.30 in North Carolina, $.22 in Washington, D.C., $.245 in Maryland, and $.21 in Tennessee." Only South Carolina, at $.16, is lower. There are similar discrepencies in the auto titling tax, he argues. Bottom line: Virginia can raise the extra $1 billion a year without raising its transportation taxes any higher than its neighbors.

People who think Virginia can solve its transportation problems without more revenue, Kaine suggested, either "don't understand economics" or are willfully obscuring reality.

Update: Read Michael Shear's account of Kaine's speech in the Washington Post. You'd hardly know we attended the same meeting or heard the same speech. Shear focused exclusively on the political elements of the Governor's speech, especially the implied criticism of the House of Delegates, and totally ignored the substance of his arguments. It causes me to wonder -- what else is Shear leaving out of his stories? Which is a scary thought because Shear is less captive to his partisan/ideological prejudices than many of the reporters covering state politics. What are they leaving out of their stories?

If journalists don't report the substance of politicians' arguments -- as I have done in this post, even though I don't agree with them -- citizens have no hope of understanding the complex issues that confront them.

Note: I have corrected a couple of facts and typos brought to my attention by readers in the comments section.

VHB to Design Reston MetroRail Stations

Fairfax County has hired Vanass Hange Brustlin Inc., a transportation and land development firm, to design two key stations in the proposed Rail-to-Dulles project. With construction expected to begin in early 2007 and end in 2012, the county wants to get this "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" right. Says project manager Rick Stevens: "The Dulles Corridor is already a busy corridor. With the arrival of the MetroRail at two stations in Reston, we must ensure pedestrian and vehicular access is efficiently maintained and that the desired community character is reflected at each station."

VHB's context-sensitive design plans will improve mobility for all modes of transportation and create a series of walkable, pedestrian-oriented environments and unique public spaces, states a VHB press release.

I'm still not persuaded that Rail to Dulles is a justifiable project as currently envisioned and financed, but if it's going to happen regardless, this is a necessary step. If people are going to use the heavy rail service, planners need to take special care in designing access to the stations.

Kaine Embraces Transparency in Health Care

Kudos to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for backing meaningful market-based reform of Virginia's health care system. The Commonwealth of Virginia has joined a federal initiative to stimulate effective market competition in the health care sector by giving citizens the information they need to be effective consumers. The four key measures include:

• Public reporting of the quality of care delivered by health care providers
• Public reporting of the price of care
• Commitment to health information technology standards, and
• Commitment to use incentives for high quality care, competitive costs and consumer choice.

"Health care transparency provides consumers with information and creates an incentive to choose health care providers based on value,"Kaine said in a press release. "It will help Virginians spend their health care dollars wisely when they know their options in advance, know the quality of hospitals in their area and know what procedures will cost. This transparency also will further motivate our health care providers to provide quality care at competitive prices."

Kaine elaborated briefly on this consumer-driven health care initiative in comments at the Virginia Foundation for Research and Economic Education banquet today. The purpose, he explained, is to create "a health care system that works like a market." Between the Medicaid program and medical insurance for state employees, the Commonwealth provides health care for one in eight Virginians, the Governor said. The state will use its clout as a buyer to help shape the medical marketplace.

Reforming the health care system is one of Kaine's top legislative priorities. It is reassuring to see that he has embraced market-based reforms.

Revolt of the Insurance Giants

Waking up to the threat of global climate change, the giant insurance companies are re-thinking their potential exposure to storm damage along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts -- even as far north as New York and New England, where hurricanes haven't hit for a half century. They're jacking up rates and raising deducations for houses vulnerable to storm surges and floods. Insurance has gotten so expensive in places that it's putting a crimp in coastal real estate development. Joel Garreau has the story, "A Dream Blown Away," in the Sunday Washington Post.

You don't have to be a believer in the more hysterical scenarios regarding global warming to appreciate the risks that insurance companies are appraising. Almost everyone, even global warming skeptics, agree that the northern Atlantic Ocean is probably entering a lengthy upswing in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. Coastal development, often underwritten by state and federal schemes to keep insurance affordable, now adds up to trillions of dollars. A string of Katrina-size disasters could prove crippling to the economy.

Coastal real estate developers won't like it, but any sane person will recognize that we need to begin controlling our risks -- now. The issue is especially urgent in a low-lying areas like Hampton Roads, which is incredibly vulnerable to flooding -- my elderly parents were delayed leaving downtown for hours on the day before Thanksgiving because a rainstorm had flooded the streets -- and lacks the means to evacuate the population in a timely manner.

Higher insurance premiums will provide people the incentive to storm-proof their properties or, better yet, not to develop in areas vulnerable to storms and floods at all. State policy needs to reinforce the marketplace signals sent by the insurance companies.

Wealthier Whites Prefer the City

In a trend that bodes well for the future of America's core urban jurisdictions, the white people living in central cities are wealthier on average than their suburban counterparts -- and the city/suburb wealth gap is actually widening. That's the conclusion of University of Virginia scholars William H. Lucy and David L. Phillips in their latest research, "Whites Lead Cities' Income Revival 2000 to 2005."

The situation is different for African-Americans who, as they increasingly enter the middle class, are moving into the suburbs, and for Hispanics, who are swelling the ranks of the poor through massive immigration.

Write the authors: "This finding reverses the standard belief that most middle and upper-income whites had left cities before 2000 and that white middle and upper income newcomers usually choose suburbs over cities, leaving mainly low and moderate income whites in cities." The finding also confirms the oft-state contention of fellow Bacon's Rebellion columnist Ed Risse that Americans with greater financial resources, who enjoy wider latitude in the places they can afford to live, have demonstrated through their decisions in the marketplace that they prefer more compact human settlement patterns.

A driving force in rising city incomes in recent years, say Lucy and Phillips, is the surge in condominium construction. "We believe the condominium construction has contributed to relative income increases in cities, especially for young professionals and middle-aged and elderly empty nesters."

Note: The authors are tracking per capita income, not household income. Because central cities contain disproportionate numbers of single people, average household incomes may be lower even if per capita incomes are higher.

Solar: Not Yet Ready for Prime Time in Virginia

Photovoltaic solar cells have an undeniable "cool" factor, but they're not yet ready for prime time in Virginia. An Arlington blogger who goes by "X Curmudgeon" describes the economics of a 14-cell solar array he installed on his roof. The installation job cost him $24,000 -- or $22,000 after a federal tax credit. He expects to cut his electric consumption about 17 percent, saving roughly $300 a year at current electric rates. That's less than a 1.4 percent return on investment.

Of course, the return will increase as electric rates increase, which they surely will do when Dominion lifts its rate cap in a few years. And X Curmudgeon will always have the knowledge that he's guaranteed enough electricity to keep the refrigerator running in case of a Dominion power outage. But under current conditions, only hard-core greenies are likely to invest their money this way.

However, things may change. Global production bottlenecks on solar units could ease, allowing prices to come down. Likewise, technological breakthroughs could improve solar PV efficiency. Virginia lawmakers still need to ensure that there are no regulatory barriers to widespread adoption should solar PV become economically competitive.

(Hat tip to Ray Hyde for pointing me to this blog entry.)

War on CHRISTmas: The Blogging Front

Parents and citizens in York County have a blog at their web site to monitor the County's compliance with the School Board-approved changes to policy. Last year some schools were culturally cleansed of Christmas. The change in policy is to make sure that Christmas is observed as a Holiday in public schools.

You can see the latest status reports at http://blog.ycchh.org

This is a very innovative way to spread the word in near real time on any policy issue. Well done York County folks!

Natural Floods vs Manmade Floods

Localities on the Virginia Peninsula are facing the prospect of spending millions of dollars to prevent or repair damage from storm water flooding. Floods have been with us since Biblical times, but dysfunctional human settlement patterns makes them worse. As a Daily Press editorial observes, "Nature has its way of dealing with heavy rain." Some of the rain filters through the soil where it joins underground water tables; run-off gets buffered by vegetation before it enters streams and rivers.

But development has in many places robbed the land of its ability to cope with a deluge. Residential and commercial development has replaced open land with rooftops and asphalt. It has stripped the vegetation that hung on to soil, so it erodes and runs off, clogging streams and rivers. When heavy rains come along, with hurricanes or just big storms, the water backs up. Into houses and apartments, and deep on roads.

Well said. I would observe only that it isn't entirely helpful to blame "development," as if all development was created equal. Land-intensive development that paves over thousands of acres of roads and parking lots make the problem of storm-water run-off even worse. Asphalt is impermeable. The more of it you have, the more run-off you have.

Any long-term solution to stormwater run-off should contain at least two elements: (1) new techniques for creating natural, vegetative barriers to buffer the flow of run-off into Virginia waterways, and (2) human settlement patterns that disrupt less land and create less run-off to begin with.

Update: This from today's News Virginian: "Hayes, Seay, Mattern & Mattern Inc. outlined eight different ways the council could pay for the stormwater management plan approved earlier this year, with each option centered around the same idea of charging property owners based on the amount of impervious surface they own. ... A proposal to offer discounts as an incentive to those who improve their onsite stormwater management facilities was met with a more favorable reception."

A fundamental principle for any tax that pays for stormwater management systems should reward landowners who (a) reduce the area of impermeable surface or (b) improve onsite stormwater management facilities.

Parking Wreck

Free parking, like free lunch, is not truly free. Someone pays for it, whether they know it or not. Outside of downtown areas, the cost of parking is usually embedded in the price of real estate, and passed along in the form of higher leases, rents and prices for products and services. Donald Shoup, a UCLA urban planner and arguably the nation's foremost academic expert on parking, estimates that the capital value of parking facilities -- parking decks, parking lots, on-street parking -- equals that of motor vehicles and roads combined.

"Free" parking has at least two pernicious consequences: (1) by reducing the cost of driving, it encourages people to drive more often than they would otherwise, and (2) by separating buildings spatially, it reduces the number of buildings that fall within the 1/4-mile pedestrian shed of bus and transit stops, thus undermining the economics of mass transit.

As I argue in my column this week, at the root of this problem is the universal practice of local governments to set minimum parking-space requirements for every conceivable land use. Although a free market would provide a lot of "free" parking, it would provide significantly less of it than under the current regime. Yes, thanks to government regulations, American landowners have over invested in parking spaces to the tune of tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars, kneecapped mass transit and subsidized traffic congestion!

The very first thing we should do is repeal minimum parking-lot requirements and let property owners make their own calculations of how much parking they should provide. A free market, I suggest, would encourage property owners to devise creative solutions, such as clustering land uses that generate peak traffic demand during different times of the day: apartments at night, offices during the day, shops and restaurants in the evening.

The second thing we should do is embrace emerging GPS satellite technology that will simplify tracking and billing for parking services. Parking managers soon will have the latitude to apply a wide range of creative pricing strategies that will maximize parking-space utilization and charge motorists the full cost of their driving. For this article, I had the opportunity to interview Bern Grush, the visionary founder of Skymeter, a Canadian start-up that has solved the technical problems that had made satellite metering impracticable. Grush is taking Shoup's academic thinking about parking and figuring out how to apply it in the real world.

Grush has some must-read ideas related to congestion pricing and other transportation-related topics that I will share in due course. For now, make sure you check out "No Such Thing as a Free Park."

(Photo credit: Richmond parking lot after Hurricane Gaston.)

Bacon's Rebellion: Revolt of the Comfortable, Middle-Aged Bourgeoisie

The December 4, 2006, edition of Bacon's Rebellion has been published. You can view it in its entirety here. Make sure you don't miss a single issue and sign up for our free subscription.

In case you're feeling too lethargic to click the mouse and transport yourself to the Bacon's Rebellion website directly, here are the columns:

No Such Thing as a Free Park
"Free" parking is like a free lunch: Someone pays, whether they know it or not. Trouble is, the hidden subsidy increases driving and worsens traffic congestion.
by James A. Bacon

Blueprint
Northern Virginia localities have the transportation plan should the General Assembly ever stop dithering and decide to fund it.
by Doug Koelemay

Clueless
Politicians talk about protecting the "American Dream." What they refuse to tell voters is that the greatest threat to an unsustainable American way of life is... the American way of life.
by EM Risse

William & Mary vs the Cross
Multi-cultural expression is great for everyone -- except Christians. The removal of the cross from William & Mary's Wrenn Chapel is just one more reminder of academe's hostility to Christianity.
by James Atticus Bowden

Good Government Is Good Business
Virginia may have the top-rated business climate in the country, but lawmakers could make it even better by addressing transportation and making the legislative process more transparent.
by Clayton Roberts

Nice & Curious Questions
Mailbox Ballots: Absentee Voting in Virginia
by Edwin S. Clay III and Patricia Bangs