DESPITE taking a symbolic recent detour to debate the death penalty, Virginia's gubernatorial candidates have highlighted some important bread and butter issues during the past year. Among these core issues is the suburban development and traffic that will affect Virginians for decades to come. Unfortunately, neither Republican Jerry Kilgore nor Democrat Tim Kaine has an effective policy for addressing this looming problem.
The importance of land use and traffic policy to Virginians' quality of life is evident on Route 29 here in Charlottesville on any Friday afternoon or weekday evening commute. Multiply that congestion by 10 or 20 times, and you get the situation on Routes 28 in Centreville and 29 in Manassas. Multiply it by a hundred times, and you get the fiasco on I-66 from Arlington all the way to Gainesville.
To forestall further congestion, Kaine tows the traditional liberal line of command and control. He opposes development and would give local governments greater zoning power to block builders from breaking new ground.
But this anti-growth mentality is out of step with Virginia's booming economy. Fairfax County did not become the richest county in the nation last year, according to the Washington Post, by staying put and freezing development.
Kilgore, on the other hand, has proposed giving local governments greater power to levy taxes to build more roads. Kilgore has vowed not to raise taxes at the state level. But tax hikes at the local level are still tax hikes, and these should be anathema to any self-respecting Republican.
Although neither candidate's position is particularly appealing, to be perfectly fair, neither one of them is to blame for their lack of imagination. Rather, it is the system of government that we have grown accustomed to that is at fault. In a society where property development and road construction are divided between the private and public sectors, neither one is accountable to the citizens.
That is to say, retailers are able to foolishly place all of the big-box stores and strip malls on Route 29 in Charlottesville, which only has two major traffic arteries to begin with (29 and 250). Builders can site thousands of new homes along Routes 29 and 28 in Manassas and Centreville, portions of which have only one lane in each direction.
Private developers get away with creating murderous traffic jams because citizens look not to them, but to the government to build more roads. In economic terms, the private sector externalizes the costs of its activities to the government.
Local and state governments, however, have no profit margins or bottom lines to worry about. Without such economic pressures, they have little tangible guidance as to how many new roads would be efficient, nor can they properly determine how much they should raise taxes to fund those roads. The alternative to building roads is to block development. But this power is even less appropriate in the hands of government.
Local governments and planning commissions are too easily captured by either developers or anti-growth extremists, and so they allow either too much development or too little.
The solution to overdevelopment and traffic congestion is to privatize -- everything. A private company would never build a town with thousands of homes and dozens of retail lots without an adequate infrastructure. No one would willingly put up with the traffic when other competing companies offer communities with more livable layouts.
Unfortunately, because we divide and obscure responsibility for land use and infrastructure, neither the private nor the public sector has the proper incentives to get things right. If, on the other hand, private developers were forced to build everything -- housing, retail, and roads -- on their own, they would not begin building until they had first paved adequate roadways. Instead of deflecting responsibility for traffic to the government, they would have no one to blame but themselves.
While Kilgore and Kaine should be applauded for bringing land use and traffic policy to the forefront, both of their positions fall flat. Unless we unify responsibility for development and road building under the private sector, we must continue to rely on government to either block growth or underinvest in infrastructure, all to the detriment of Virginia's economy and quality of life.
Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.
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