Virginia Secondary Roads -- Bad and Getting Worse, with No Remedy in Sight

Strap on your seat belts, folks, it's going to be a wild ride. The condition of Virginia's secondary road system is deteriorating. State funding available for road maintenance is shrinking. And not a single county has accepted the option to take over responsibility for their own secondary roads because they are worried that the state won't provide them enough money to do the job.

Those are among the conclusions of a new report commissioned by Secretary of Transportation Sean T. Connaughton and authored by Jonathan L. Gifford with the George Mason University School of Public Policy, "Policy Options for Secondary Road Construction and Management in the Commonwealth of Virginia."

A defining characteristic of Virginia's road system is that it is overwhelmingly controlled by the state. The state owns 94.62% of all "rural" (non-urban) roads, the highest percentage in the country. Secondary roads comprise nearly four-fifths (78%) of all lane miles maintained by the Virginia Department of Transportation. Only West Virginia, Delaware and North Carolina are remotely close. By contrast, the state of New Jersey owns only 6.23% of rural roads.

There are two very big problems with the current arrangement. First, there is a disconnect between land use planning at the county/city level and transportation planning by VDOT. As Gifford writes, "There is a large and growing recognition that successful development is inextricably tied to transportation facilities and services at every spatial scale, from the parcel level, to the block level, to the neighborhood level, to the corridor level, to the regional level."

The transportation and urban design community is increasingly focused on street design and traffic operations that accommodate a wide range of users, including not only motorists and trucks, but also pedestrians of all ages and levels of able-bodiedness, cyclists, and transit. "Complete Streets," as they are sometimes called, involve a complex set of design elements, including pro visions for parking, bicycle lanes, transit stops and stations, sidewalks, street furniture and other appurtenances.

Legislators tried to address the disconnect during the Kaine administration through new regulations for accepting of new secondary streets into the state system, managing access (curb cuts, driveways) to state roads, and requiring VDOT review of traffic impact for major rezoning and redevelopment plans. But some local governments and developers regard the added layer of review as needlessly intrusive and time-consuming.

The second very big problem is VDOT's inability to properly maintain the roads. With each passing year, revenue from the gasoline tax becomes less and less adequate to pay for maintenance and new construction. Although Virginia supposedly prioritizes maintenance, funding for secondary road maintenance has dropped over the past six years from $483 million in FY 2007 to $345 million in FY 2011.

The consequence has been deteriorating road conditions. Between 2007 and 2009, Gifford says, "the prevalence of deficient pavement on the secondary system increased from 25% to 31% -- that's just two years. In some districts, the pavement deficiency rate approaches 50%. VDOT estimates total needs for secondary pavements of $1.3 billion.

Now, here's the part that should scare everyone. As the condition of roadway assets deteriorates, the cost of returning them to a state of good repair increases exponentially. "The basic science of pavement deterioration recognizes that the cost of restoring a pavement to a state of good repair rises rapidly as the pavement deteriorates," Gifford writes. "Poor pavements also impose a social cost on users in the form of discomfort, increased vehicle operating and repair costs, and compromised safety."

The longer we delay repairs, the more expensive they will get. One day we will rue our short-sightedness.

It makes economic sense to turn over responsibility of the secondary road system to county governments, which can then prioritize road improvements to mesh with their land use plans and supplement with local funds. But that's a losing proposition politically. In 2007 the General Assembly passed a law that would allow several higher-density counties to establish Urban Transportation Service Districts that would allow them to assume maintenance and operation of the roadway network within the district. So far, there have been no takers. No one had faith that VDOT would be able to pay them sufficiently to offset their costs.

Clearly, the status quo is a mess. Gifford advances a range of options for rectifying these problems, which I hope to discuss in a future post.