ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, September 26, 1996 TAG: 9609260053
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
READER Jeffery Scott made a good point in his letter, published Wednesday ("Blame weak land-use rules, not VDOT"). He was responding to our editorial on the untenability of trying forevermore to build wider and more roads to ease traffic congestion and provide for future transportation needs.
Argued Scott: Virginia's Department of Transportation may be fixated on road-building, as the editorial suggested, but "VDOT must provide new transportation facilities to deal with the consequences of land-use planning (or lack of land-use planning) conducted by Virginia's hundreds of towns, cities and counties."
Scott is right.
Much of the stress on road capacity is created by the relentless creep of suburbia out from central cities. Houses go up where land is cheap, roads built for far less traffic become overcrowded, residents demand safer and wider roads, improvements are made - paving the way, literally, for more development and the push to move out even farther, where land is cheap. Core cities and older suburbs, meanwhile, are abandoned by those who find their convenience not worth the price of keeping them up.
The cycle is unsustainable. Americans are chomping through land and burning gasoline as if both were limitless.
Scott blames poor land-use planning for the pattern, and in most localities, the swipe is well-deserved. Developers, not planners, seem to be directing growth, sometimes in ways that conflict with comprehensive plans, which are themselves often poorly crafted and almost always neglected. Localities are left scrambling to extend infrastructure and provide services.
Planners and local governing bodies instead could - and should - use land-use tools at their disposal to direct growth to fit the community's vision for its future. But the community first must embrace a vision, and people must care about it enough to fight for it beyond the boundaries of their own back yard. (Do we want livable neighborhoods and open spaces and the character of a place preserved?)
Even then, planning and zoning alone cannot turn the growth wave along a less wasteful course. Relatively eco-friendly residential development such as clustered housing, which preserves surrounding countryside, still puts a lot of commuters on the road.
A change in broad patterns of behavior will occur only when individuals want to change because change will benefit them. And that will happen when the costs of unfettered growth are borne by those driving it. A hefty gasoline tax, in particular, might affect how eagerly a commuter driving alone to work every day would switch to car-pooling or another environmentally beneficial alternative.
Alternatives must be available, of course. With more mass transit, such as rail; with "smart" highways that can accommodate more traffic in greater safety; and if VDOT could become, as hard as this is to imagine, fixated on adding bike trails - the need to keep pouring more and more concrete might eventually reach the end of the road.
LENGTH: Medium: 57 linesby CNB