Outer Beltway through Northern Virginia revived

Virginia is now thinking about constructing a Capital Beltway Beltway around the Capital Beltway to ease congestion. I myself am now thinking about constructing a metaphor to properly express how poorly this would work. Solving a roach problem by taking half of the roaches in your home and putting them an empty new home so they can spread out? No, that would make commuters sound like pests. But I don’t have all morning, so if you can help me out by devising a better metaphor, you know where to find the comments field.

The Beltway to get another belt upon belt?

Here’s what I’ll concede: if we spend ten years and billions of dollars building a beltway around the beltway, congestion on the original beltway will indeed decrease for a while—let’s say for ten more years. That’s about as long as it will take before the new beltway is as crowded as the old beltway. Then, after ten further years of unpleasant congestion and ten years again of total unworkable gridlock, it will be time to spend another confounding amount of money and another ten years building a third beltway around the second beltway around the first beltway.

This of course assumes we never reach peak oil and commuting habits never change over forty years.

The pro-roads crowd likes to act as though congestion is some organic scourge, like ragweed pollen, beyond our control. To mitigate our allergies, we can take antihistamines, but we can’t eradicate pollen. (This is more innocuous than the roach analogy, but I’m making a somewhat different point here.) Similarly, they say, congestion is an inexorable, eternal force whose encroachment must always be staved off by building MORE ROADS!

This attitude, which could seem intuitive if you never once stopped to consider long-term effects or unintended consequences, maybe explains why some people hate light rail. Light rail comes at the expense of MORE ROADS; it’s also, for the most part, being built in parts of town that already have a ton of roads. Why select the neighborhoods with the most roads and give them even more roads, especially when the new roads aren’t even real roads?

If light-rail haters get their way and the track is never extended, the Tide as-is may indeed be doomed. But if we behave sensibly and extend the route north past ODU to the Naval Base and then across to the Peninsula, and we also extend it to the Oceanfront, then the forces that create congestion will gather energetically around nearly all of the Tide stops. Yet they won’t create any of the bad kind of congestion!

To any who believe in the beltways-around-beltways-around-beltways approach to solving congestion, the paragraph above must seem almost like magical thinking. If so, I invite you simply to travel to any major city with a viable subway or tram system, and observe how commerce and foot traffic and other traffic all function within 1000 feet of heavily used stops on that system.

Road subsidies

Trains are our friend. (Pic | HRT)

My apologies if you thought I was done talking about roads. Click here for observations by Matt Yglesias of Think Progress about some hidden road costs that aren’t even included in the enormous upfront price tags of most roads. Yglesias talks in particular about “ramp spaghetti,” his term for the tangles of highway onramps and offramps that use up valuable land in cities, and points out that the “allocation of expensive space to automotive purposes is a major source of subsidy to car owners.”

I’ll now link to three stories about Governor Bob McDonnell and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli without criticizing either man, just to prove that I can.

McDonnell endorses federal role at Fort Monroe

The governor supports efforts to turn Fort Monroe into a national park.

McDonnell to appeal U.S. denial of aid after tornadoes

FEMA is taking the position that the recent tornadoes in Virginia were “not of such severity and magnitude to merit” funding; the governor disagrees.

Va. nonprofits still waiting on impacts of Cuccinelli funding opinion

Ken Cuccinelli’s office says his opinion about state donations to nonprofits “is based on a plain reading of the Virginia Constitution, and it’s up to lawmakers to change that Constitution if there’s a law they don’t like.”

Costa Rica-to-Norfolk coke ring busted

A deal between two New York men and an undercover agent to deliver five kilos of cocaine for $30,000 was videoed by the DEA at a Hooters in Hampton. “The Drug War is won,” said a DEA spokesman; “mission accomplished.” Now that it’s over, one wonders if, like WWII veterans apocryphally stranded later on remote Pacific islands, DEA agents will still be skulking around Hooters years from now, promising riches to anyone willing to smuggle coke.

Multitude of agencies complete 3-day anti-terrorism exercise in Hampton Roads

Employees of these agencies are having an understandably hard time waiting for the next Survive Norfolk. I counsel patience. It will come.

America’s most isolated federal prisoner describes 10,220 days in extreme solitary confinement

For anyone who doubts solitude is torture, read this account.

Tyler Hamilton, ex-teammate, says Armstrong used banned drug

Oh Lance.

Another teammate comes forward to say he saw Lance Armstrong using performance-enhancing drugs during his pro cycling career. Bad news any time of the year, but especially during Norfolk Bike Month.

I sure hope we don’t learn that Armstrong used EPO. The revelation, should it come, will probably bring a huge amount of disillusionment to bear on the sport of cycling in America. That’s why, when I celebrate Norfolk Bike Month next Saturday with a ride up Tour de France landmark Mont Ventoux, I vow not to engage in any form of blood doping, even if the peer pressure from my teammates and my directeur sportif becomes overwhelming.

Hitting the ceiling

Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist who writes biweekly columns for the New York Times, blogs here about his justifiable fears that debt-ceiling brinksmanship by Congress will help turn us into a “banana republic.”

I don’t get to read Krugman much now that the Times firewall has exiled me along with everyone else unwilling to pay $200 a year to read news that appears free in the Guardian, the L.A. Times, et al. But I’ve been careful with my clicks this month. If  you have been too, read Krugman; otherwise save your clicks for the Times’s apocalypse coverage tomorrow, since their reporting will be so much more penetrating and in-depth than other papers’.

Harold Camping, leader of May 21 ‘End of the World’ movement, says gays are to blame

Gee, my bad. I’d try to make it up somehow, if there were only more time. Well, here’s one thing. I’m in a time zone six hours ahead of Hampton Roads. The world will end here first. Tomorrow, if you’re sitting around thinking, Is Europe still around? then email me, and I’ll reply “For now,” or perhaps, “It is no more.”

In Neil Jordan’s film The Butcher Boy, based on Patrick McCabe’s novel and set in small-town Ireland during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a woman at a shop says, “It’ll be a sad day for this town when the world comes to an end.” Which leads me to my own similar point: it’ll be a sad day for Norfolk when the world ends, because exciting things are happening in Norfolk now—which leads me in turn to:

What AltDaily does

If for some strange reason you’re reading this space but not AltDaily’s featured items, I beg you to click here for editor Jesse Scaccia’s articulation of AltDaily’s function, its mission, its accomplishments to date. Just the list alone of recent and ongoing projects is staggering in both the size and number of achievements.