November Election: More of the Same?

On Sunday, the Post included four "takes" on November's gubernatorial election. Garrett Epps, a political analyst, settled more platitudes. According to Epps, Virginia's elections are always about what happens next. Well, that clarifies everything. Bob Chase, Director of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, made the argument for more transportation funding. A one percent sales tax would yield, Chase argued, $1 billion a year, funding most of Virginia's most important strategic transportation priorities over the next 20 years. What Chase did not say was that the Alliance's notion of transportation is paving over as much as Northern Virginia as possible. Governor Kaine argued that Virginia's voters wanted business as usual and that, therefore, Creigh Deeds was best suited to spend the next four years in the governor's mansion. Morgan Griffith, the leader of the Republican majority in the House of Delegates, came out for a free lunch for everyone: a state government that delivered results but placed no additional burdens on Virginia's citizens.

As you sit in a traffic jam on the Toll Road or on Reston Parkway, contemplating that your car and those around you are consuming an unsustainable amount of gasoline, polluting the air, and warming the earth, you might wonder whether there's any reason for hope. An election that pits "business as usual" against "a free lunch for all" doesn't seem likely to produce any solution's to Northern Virginia's transportation and environment woes. At least, the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance acknowledges that transportation is a problem and that fixing it will cost real money. Too bad all the Alliance wants to do is build more roads. The only mass transit projects mentioned on its site are Dulles rail and extending the Orange Line to Centreville. The Alliance's priorities are what it calls the missing links in the area's road network. And the Alliance's notion of a funding source -- a one percent sales tax -- will put the burden of funding transportation on the least affluent portion of the population.