About a hundred folks were in a ballroom at Blue Ridge Community College Wednesday afternoon, hoping to learn something about plans to make I-81 a little less dangerous and a lot less frustrating.
VDOT officials and a consultant showed a few slides that they told the audience validated their concerns about the roadway.
To my eye, the slides compared relative rates of various problems on I-81 vs. everywhere else. Pretty charts to be sure, but they could just as easily have been interpreted to mean I-81 drivers are relatively fortunate that the road doesn’t get the same share of other types of delays more common on urban highways, volume-based congestion, for example. Percentage charts can show what you want them to show.
Then everyone was sent to stick dots on maps and fill out comment sheets, presumably so engineers could get benefit of their deep local knowledge as drivers before getting serious engineering real-world solutions.
I had to wonder whether this information gathering was intended to shape a solution or will simply be used to sell a solution? After all, how likely is it that residents’ color dots on a map will somehow be overly useful in shaping every nuance of a new road? Will they be helpful compared to actual studies of loads, traffic patterns, truck usage and accidents? Maybe, but I have to wonder.
Asked what useful and actionable information VDOT gleaned from Wednesday’s dots and notes, a spokesman said it was too early to tell.
The issue slalomed around by the VDOT folks and the politicians in the audience was that this study has strings attached. While VDOT can study as many funding options as it wants and can afford, the General Assembly made it clear that it wanted truck tolling and tolled express lanes studied as part of this plan. That gives the project a scope – only as much money as you might be able to raise that way. It won’t be enough to add another lane for I-81’s length, so we’re talking nips and tucks at best. Maybe it’ll be enough.
Realistically, the bill seems to make other funding mechanisms less likely.
Sen. Emmett Hanger has favored a regional gas tax, not unlike the ones in place for Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.
We’ve argued in editorials that all of Virginia has a responsibility for all Virginia roads, and therefore it makes no sense to use tolls or local gas taxes to Balkanize our transportation network.
The Virginian in Grundy, far from the Interstates, benefits when Virginia’s economic arteries are healthy. Exactly as much as a taxpayer along I-81 or I-66 or I-95? Maybe not. But there needs to be a base level of buy-in and investment, otherwise there’s no justification for any statewide tax. And that base level needs to fund a complete, robust network of economic arteries. Today, it does not.
I’ll be curious to see where this goes next. Maybe VDOT will find some diamonds among the round dots as they design their solution.
But in my mind we hurt ourselves when we refuse to pay for a statewide transportation network and constantly try to shift costs off to the other guy, be they be owners of trucks passing through or drivers in other regions of the state. Like it or not, we’re all in this together.
And when we’re on I-81, we’re all hurtling toward an uncertain future.
Write David Fritz, executive editor of The News Leader, at dfritz@newsleader.com