This editorial was originally published in the Washington Post.
On Tuesday, 55 percent of Northern Virginia voters said no to a referendum on increasing the sales tax a half-cent to finance transportation improvements. Pundits may long debate why it lost: whether people were fed up with higher taxes, distrusted the highway department, feared a Richmond money grab or suspected a developer boondoggle. While all those factors, some of them not without merit, surely played a role, I see deeper reasons for the defeat. First, the tax proponents never mounted an effective challenge to the opponents' information -- some would say misinformation -- campaign; second, those who framed the measure itself did not make it seem safe enough to vote for.
Leading the opposition were environmentalists and other anti-road advocates: what Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan calls the "congestion coalition." Those activists succeeded in convincing voters who face some of the nation's worst traffic that sprawl causes congestion and that more roads only worsen it. Tax supporters never seriously tried to rebut those contentions. That's why many well-intentioned voters with strong environmental sensibilities aligned themselves with conservative anti-tax forces to defeat the measure.
Referendum opponent Stewart Schwartz, director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, argued that sprawl -- low-density development -- "lies at the heart of traffic problems." Yet compared with many other large metropolitan areas, Washington is a model of compact development; witness the building boom around Metro stops. According to the Brookings Institution, between 1982 and 1997 the amount of developed land in the region increased by 47 percent, while Census figures for the same period show the number of households increased by roughly 40 percent. That means the average new home occupied only slightly more land than the average home -- including those in the high-density inner areas -- that was already here.
The Environmental Defense Fund asserted that "despite billions of dollars in investments in suburban expressways, congestion has gotten worse." It was citing the myth of "induced demand" -- that more roads only result in more driving. What's surprising is not that they constantly repeated that refrain, but that so many people seemed to believe it. Perhaps that was because opponents cited studies by advocacy groups such as the Surface Transportation Policy Project, the chief propagandist for the "congestion coalition." What motivates the STPP and its fellow travelers is an animus toward the kind of lifestyle most Americans have chosen. They think it is wrong for Americans to try to win their patch of suburbia. A better way to live, according to these social engineers, is in an apartment complex above a Metro stop. In short, while they claim they are anti-sprawl, they actually are anti-car, anti-suburbs and anti-growth.
Thus it's not surprising that when the STPP studied 70 metropolitan areas, it found no relationship between building roads and reducing congestion. However, the study conveniently failed to control for the fact that localities that expanded roads faster did so because they had faster-growing populations. As common sense suggests, once that is controlled for, places that added roads faster than population cut congestion.
Finally, the anti-growth proponents constantly reminded voters that over the past 20 years, road building kept up with population growth, yet congestion got worse. See, it's pointless to build more roads! However, commuting to work contributes most to congestion. Because of the rise of two-earner households and other factors, employment grew more than twice as fast as roads. No wonder congestion tripled.
The next time our region debates transportation funding proposals, as we surely will have to do as congestion increases, proponents will need to make a more convincing case. They can start by exposing the congestion coalition's true agenda: thwarting road expansion so people will be forced to live in more densely settled communities and rely more on transit. That is certainly a legitimate goal, but voters, not a small group of ideologically committed special interests, should decide whether to pursue it. But the opponents know that voters would reject such a vision by a much bigger margin than they denied Tuesday's referendum. As a result, they seek to get to their urban utopia through the back door: by making commuting so miserable that people gladly move into apartments and ride mass transit.
Now we come to the measure itself. When skeptical voters suggested that the extra tax would simply become a developer subsidy, there was no way to prove them wrong. Next time around, proponents, including the business community, must have a mechanism for smarter land use. They could start by forcefully advocating the creation of a region-wide transportation authority with tax and land use and zoning powers, modeled after the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority in the Atlanta region. They could also end their opposition to impact fees on new development so that taxpayers don't have to subsidize the public infrastructure costs of new development.
At some point, growing gridlock will again force us to consider taxing ourselves so our infrastructure can catch up with growth. If supporters can learn from this defeat, next time they'll have an easier time winning the hearts and minds of the voters.
