Dulles Airport Metro station with a Metro train sitting on the tracks and vehicle traffic surrounding it in April of 2019 by John Sonderman licensed under Creative Commons.

The new, proposed $76 billion transportation plan for Northern Virginia, TransAction, includes more projects than the region can fund, falls far short on reducing climate emissions, and fails to address the land use and housing issues at the core of the region’s traffic congestion. Can we really call this a plan?

Not really, but there are some worthwhile analyses in it that point toward an alternative, more effective and sustainable solution. In particular, a pricing scenario.

Even better would have been a mixed-use, transit-oriented land use, housing, and pricing scenario that I believe would work more effectively and equitably than the $76 billion project list.

As mentioned in this previous post, TransAction is prepared every five years by the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA), a funding and planning body created by the General Assembly in 2002 and granted access to a range of regional tax revenues in 2013. The draft 2022 plan update is out for public comment through midnight this Sunday, September 18, 2022. Local elected officials at the NVTA (one per each jurisdiction) will vote on the plan in December.

A giant laundry list

One fundamental problem is that TransAction is unconstrained. NVTA uses the future tense to describe the many benefits that “will” occur by 2045 from the entire plan, such as reducing congestion, even though the plan is too exorbitant to build. And the price tag went up over 50% for this current plan, even accounting for inflation, since the last plan just five years ago.

Chart by Coalition for Smarter Growth; 2017 TransAction cost escalated using CPI; funding available for Northern Virginia system expansion is from the Visualize 2045 Financial Plan, Table 3, and is in year of expenditure dollars.  Image by the author.

Staff and consultants spend three years and $3.5 million stapling together projects proposed by local jurisdictions into a giant laundry list and then run it through the regional transportation computer model. The list also includes some good “top-down” regional projects from NVTA staff – a coordinated bus rapid transit network, for example – but also some destructive ones –like the controversial Outer Beltway of new highways from Loudoun and Prince William crossing the Potomac into rural areas of Maryland.

In its report “On the Wrong Road” the Coalition for Smarter Growth has shown that the enormous package of highway and arterial widening projects in TransAction – over a thousand miles – would increase road capacity and driving far faster than population growth in places like Prince William and Loudoun counties.

Failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Despite its stated core value of “sustainability” and the proposed expenditure of $76 billion, TransAction will not lower greenhouse gas emissions. The plan does not even acknowledge the need to slash climate pollution by 2030, rather it calls out some insufficient emissions reductions that would happen by 2045. TransAction recommends investing token amounts in electric vehicle (EV) charging stations by 2045, but otherwise simply assumes and takes credit for emissions reductions resulting from state and federal EV rebates, clean car standards and consumer preferences.

Meanwhile, TransAction ignores the region’s recent study – and multiple national studies – showing that to meet climate targets, we need to be less car-dependent in addition to rapidly transitioning to EVs. For example, look at what Califonia must do, even with the country’s most ambitious EV policies.

Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and California’s greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target Image: California Air Resources Board, May 2022 Draft Scoping Plan, Appendix E Image by the author.

Greater Washington must reduce per-person driving, or “vehicle miles traveled” (VMT), by 20% or more during the timeframe of TransAction – even with electric vehicles. However, the TransAction plan would actually increase per-person VMT by 4% above the future baseline forecast – likely due to the combination of massive road expansion and failure to address patterns of land use and housing location.

Failing to address the critical role of land use and housing

TransAction does not make any land use or housing policy recommendations, despite these driving many of our transportation problems. NVTA says these are local county and city decisions and it just uses their plans to forecast future conditions. Yet, these jurisdictions comprise the NVTA board and could work with NVTA staff to test and adopt a transit-oriented housing and land use scenario that provides travel options, puts people closer to destinations, and reduces congestion.

Our tri-state regional Transportation Planning Board says achieving adopted regional housing targets would reduce congestion by 20%. That’s the same amount of congestion reduction that would be achieved IF the entire $76 billion plan were built. Investing in affordable housing close to jobs and transit would therefore be a particularly effective part of a more equitable and sustainable transportation solution.

Interestingly, a chunk of NVTA funding comes from a tax on house sales in Northern Virginia (the “grantor’s tax”). Perhaps this tax would achieve more if it were used to fund more affordable housing in walkable, close-in activity centers with transit.

A better approach – in NVTA’s own work

The irony is that NVTA’s own studies acknowledge these issues. For example, NVTA’s own Technology Strategic Plan says the region should 1) reduce VMT relative to passenger trips, 2) that we can’t do this through expanding highway capacity because of induced demand, so 3) NVTA needs to “develop pricing mechanisms that manage travel demand and provide sustainable travel options.”

The 2022 TransAction provides a good scenario analysis of what such road and parking pricing mechanisms could look like and includes discounts for low-income drivers and free transit. The incentives and pricing, with equity provisions, achieve largely the same improvements as the record $76 billion and 429 projects. NVTA did not, however, despite requests from advocacy groups, analyze a transit-oriented land use, housing, and pricing scenario with a more feasible and supportive project list.

TransAction’s Incentives/Pricing Scenario performs comparably to the actual plan. Chart by Coalition for Smarter Growth using TransAction 2045 data;  * TransAction uses very different assumptions for adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in its forecasts and scenarios without apples-apples comparisons.    

Pricing strategies, paired with better land use and housing near transit, electric vehicles, and supportive transit, local street network, and bike/pedestrian investments, would be more effective and could be implemented more feasibly and quickly than a giant laundry list.

Northern Virginia’s denser suburbs (Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church, and several notable areas of Fairfax like Tysons), which are leading on transit-oriented development, should double down on their affordable housing efforts, while less-dense and more auto-oriented suburbs (Prince William, Loudoun, and outer parts of Fairfax like Centreville) should prioritize mixed-use, mixed-income, walkable, transit-friendly activity centers and protect rural areas for farms, forests, and water supply.

This approach would benefit suburban residents in communities of all sizes, reducing trip distances and overall driving demand, providing more homes with easy access to transit and services, better protecting our natural resources, and ensuring we meet our climate goals. There is a better path Northern Virginia could take than the proposed TransAction plan. Readers can comment on the TransAction plan by Sunday, September 18 at midnight.