by Alex Marshall - articles and essays

Moving Hampton Roads

For "The Joseph Papers", Summer 2000

This paper was commissioned by The Joseph Center at Christopher Newport University for the study of local, state and regional government. It was the inaugural edition of "The Joseph Papers," which are meant to provide a forum for the discussion of regional cooperation in the Norfolk Metropolitan Area. The "Joseph Papers" are scheduled to be published biannually. This paper examined regional transportation.

By Alex Marshall

Three hundred and twenty years ago a surveyor pulled his boat up on the muddy bank of a river and laid out the rudiments of a street system; streets for a new town named Norfolk, carved out of what was then Lower Norfolk County.

Virginia didn't need towns much in 1680. Plantation owners shipped tobacco directly to England from docks on the James and other rivers. But the King didn't like this decentralized system, so he ordered the General Assembly to set up towns to facilitate trade; twenty new towns in all, including Norfolk, Elizabeth City and soon afterward Hampton -- and what we now call Hampton Roads was born.

Transportation has always been central to Hampton Roads, as it has to most cities. If they didn't sit on a huge body of water that opens onto the Atlantic Ocean, Norfolk, Newport News, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Hampton, and Virginia Beach would not exist. Things have changed a lot in the past 400 years, but access to principal transportation links is still crucial to a region's economy.

Today, Hampton Roads is contemplating many transportation projects; from the 3rd Crossing and getting in on a high-speed rail line down the East Coast, to the everyday widening of boulevards and streets. How can we think about these projects and others in ways that maximize the wealth of the region and its quality of life?

I posit something here. That we in Hampton Roads have tended to think about transportation the wrong way, and that this wrong way of thinking is hurting our living standards, our potential as a region and our quality of life. Like most regions, we have tended to make transportation decisions reactively, in response to traffic jams or the loudest complaints. What we have seldom done is to use transportation the highways, train lines, airports and smaller pieces like streets, bike paths and sidewalks strategically, in order to build a better economy, and a better place to live.

Transportation is one of the core functions of government. Where and how we build roads, train lines and airports are wagers by society, bets placed on the best way to structure ourselves. But they should be seen as such. As with education decisions, transportation decisions build the future.

When one's eye stretches across Hampton Roads, one sees a sprawling mass of subdivisions, shopping centers and office parks, stretching from Williamsburg to North Carolina, connected by thin reeds of superhighways across meandering bodies of water, and punctuated by isolated airports. How do we knit this assemblage into a more prosperous and cohesive whole?

We have two big problems in Hampton Roads: Our practical isolation from the rest of the country, and our over abundance of suburban sprawl. Thinking differently about transportation could solve both these problems.

Forty years ago, Lewis Mumford, the great urban planner and historian, asked forty years ago: "What is transportation for?" That's still the key question. As Mumford answered, it is NOT about just moving cars from place to place. It is about understanding how highways, train lines and airports the tools of transportation interact with their environment, and build a community.

To Paris, New York, or Raleigh
Let's say you leave your house in the morning to take a plane, train or private car to a meeting in Washington. How will that experience be? Not very nice. The train is slow and seldom. The plane is outrageously expensive. And the private car on the public highway is shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of other travelers. And unlike on a plane or a train, in a private car you cannot prepare for the meeting by reading or writing.

Let's change the trip. Let's say you are going to Raleigh, not very far away as the crow flies. How are the connections? Even worse. In fact, our connections are poor to just about anywhere outside Hampton Roads.

These linkages to other parts of a country and the globe are what I call external transportation. They are the building blocks of a region's economy. They are our airports, sea ports, Interstates and train lines. To make it today, a region should have a great airport, great train links, great Interstate connections, and a great port‹or as many of these as possible. Right now, Hampton Roads has only one a great port.

Hampton Roads has historically done a poor job of establishing major transportation links‹air, rail and highways‹that would complement the port and multiply its economic power. This is partly the fault of national transportation policy, but it's also a product of poor local and state decisions.

In 1957 Congress passed The Defense and Interstate Highway Act. As the first part of its name suggests, the official rationale for the largest public works project in human history was to help move troops and supplies across the country. So it is odd, and unfair, that the Norfolk/Newport News/Virginia Beach metropolitan area was left with some of the poorest Interstate connections in the country. State legislators, part of the Byrd machine, paid little attention to Hampton Roads. They focused on Richmond, which ended up with I-95 and I-64.

The 1960s and 70s were a time of great airport expansions. Hampton Roads missed out once again. Around 1970, we had a chance to build a major regional airport. Sites in then rural Chesapeake and Suffolk now covered with subdivisions were examined. But unsure if air traffic would materialize, and unable to agree among ourselves, we expanded the isolated Norfolk and Newport News airports instead.

By comparison, let's look at Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1970, the Charlotte and the Norfolk airports had about the same amount of traffic, a few million passengers a year. Now, the Charlotte airport handles about 25 million passengers a year. Norfolk International Airport, our region's largest, handles only 3 million passengers a year. Norfolk, once the 43rd largest airport in the country, has slipped to 60th.

If Hampton Roads is to improve its economy, then beefing up those major transportation links should be a top priority. It will not be easy.

Building A Better Place to Live
Let's step out of that house again, only this time you are driving to work, to the mall on a Saturday, or just walking across the street to a neighbor's. With any of these tasks, you are linked by a public web of streets, highways, and sidewalks.

It's these I call the internal system of transportation. This system not only gets us from here to there; it helps determine the form of the places where we live. It even determines the type of home we live in. It's no accident that homes in Ghent in Norfolk a neighborhood built around a streetcar line in 1890 are tall and statuesque, and packed closely together. Just as it is no accident that the homes in those new subdivisions around Williamsburg built around easy access to the Interstate, are low-slung and sprawling.

Just as we usually fail to use external transportation strategically, we fail in a similar way with internal transportation. We should be building transportation systems with an eye toward what type of environment they produce. Instead, on a day to day basis, our planners build roads to solve traffic jams which demonstrably does not work. In fact, in the last 50 years, we have built more roads than in all of human history, and traffic has gotten worse and worse.

One need only look at Atlanta to see the effects of trying to solve traffic problems by building roads. This central southern city has invested more in highways per capita than almost any city in the country. The result? Its residents now drive more miles per day than anyone, and spend more time stuck in traffic.

In 1982 the average American spent 16 hours sitting in traffic. In 1997 that number rose to 45. Atlanta's numbers went from 16 to 68! In Hampton Roads, delays increased from nine hours in 1982 to 34 in 1997‹that's not as bad as Atlanta, but it's still an increase of almost 400 percent in just 15 years!

With both internal and external transportation, a balanced system is best. We should build cities where people have alternatives to their cars. The roads might still be congested, but fewer people would depend on them if they could use a bicycle, a trolley, or their own two-feet. That's why efforts to build light rail lines around Hampton Roads should continue. That's why less publicized endeavors, like making areas more accessible by bike, should proceed.

Portland, Oregon is fashioning an American version of the European compact city. A regional growth boundary has helped shrink the area, and the transportation department is building fewer roads and highways. Meanwhile, the regional government encourages neighborhood and smaller city centers to develop in a way that allows people to drive, bicycle, or walk to them.

The result: Portlanders drive an average of 20 miles a day, compared to 32 miles in Atlanta.

What we don't need more of in Hampton Roads is limited-access highways within the developed metropolitan area. These roads were designed for long-distance travel, not daily commuting and shopping. That's why the Southeastern Expressway, proposed from Virginia Beach to Chesapeake, is a bad idea. It goes from one suburb to another, exactly the type of highway unsuited for short commuting. It would greatly exacerbate sprawl.

It bears repeating. To diminish sprawl, we should diminish highway building and widening within the developed area. We should put that money into improved bus service, light rail lines and redesigning streets to accommodate more bicyclists and walkers.

Not Doing The Job
In our region, the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission is the principal long-range planning body for transportation. In general, it has missed opportunities by oiling the squeaky wheels of traffic congestion, rather than building a long-term vision for the area.

In its 1999 report, The Future of Transportation in Hampton Roads, the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission examines and endorses seven major projects: the Hampton Roads Crossing ($2.4 billion), the I-64 improvements on the Peninsula ($1.3 billion), the CSX corridor light rail line ($600 million), the Route 460 expansion ($1 billion), the Norfolk/Virginia Beach light rail ($1 billion), the Midtown tunnel and Pinners Point connection ($650 million), and the Southeastern Expressway ($425 million.)

The weaknesses are not in these individual projects some of them are needed, some of them are useless but in the method the planners use for selecting and evaluating them. In general, the planners picked these transportation projects by looking at where congestion is heaviest and recommending expansion.
The HPRDC planners should be asking how a proposed project will affect land-use, and how it will affect economic development. Building highways in response to traffic jams usually makes congestion worse in the long run by increasing reliance on the automobile.

Art Collins, executive director of the Commission, said the Commission was hampered because it lacked the authority to combine land-use and transportation into a planning package. This is true. It would help Hampton Roads if land-use and transportation planning were combined under one regional entity. But absent that, it does not mean that the HRPDC cannot predict how its projects will affect land-use, or how major transportation projects can promote economic development.

Regional leaders are recognizing these problems: "It's obvious we can't continue to build more and more roads," said Clyde Hoey, the head of the Chamber of Commerce on the Peninsula. "You reach the point of diminishing returns."

Southbound An Opportunity
If we thought more strategically about transportation we might find our vision drifting southward.

Standing on the southern-most border of Hampton Roads in Virginia Beach on the North Carolina line you are almost as close to Raleigh as you are to Richmond. As the crow flies, you are only about 125 miles away from one of the richest and fastest growing areas in the nation.
The average income of Hampton Roads residents continues to decline relative to the rest of the nation. Just the opposite is true for Raleigh-Durham, due to its growing concentration of high-tech industry based around the Research Triangle and the universities. But we here in Hampton Roads are cut off from the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area. By car, the usual means, it takes a good four or five hours, half of which is non-interstate. Politically, culturally and economically, Raleigh seems a million miles away.
If Hampton Roads could connect itself better to Raleigh, we could end our status as a dead-end cul-de-sac on the East Coast. We would connect with several Interstates, as well as a new train line being built between Raleigh and Charlotte. And with our huge port, there are natural connections. Virginia International Terminals now gets 30 percent of its total volume in shipping through North Carolina. Direct highway linkage would improve the port's competitive advantage.

Our planners have ignored this opportunity because they plan in response to existing traffic patterns. Thinking more strategically about transportation could cast the now light traffic between Hampton Roads and Raleigh in a new light.

High-Speed Rail the Next Interstate?
We are doing something correctly in the present. And that is the commitment regional leaders are showing to being part of the proposed high-speed rail system down the East Coast. Leaders understand that being left out of this line would be comparable to being left out of the Interstate highway system in the 20th century or the railroad system in the 19th century.

The decision by the General Assembly this year to award $25 million for initial planning of a high-speed line down the Route 460 corridor from Petersburg is wonderful news.

How can we ensure that this high-speed rail system does not pass us by?

I suggest playing the military card as strongly as possible. Navy and business leaders should argue as a team that a high-speed line must connect to the country's largest naval base. After all, defense concerns justified the Interstate highway system. If a major war occurred, high-speed train connections could be vital for moving troops and supplies. Can the cooperation of Navy officials be gained now?

And Hampton Roads should be part of the main line‹not a spur. That's why the 460 path might be better than a route down the Peninsula, because it would be easier for the line to continue south to North Carolina.

The point with all these choices is that we can build better places to live if we think about transportation more consciously and understand its effects. It is the most important tool we have for shaping our environment. If we learn to use it more effectively, we'll have a more livable and prosperous region.

ALEX MARSHALL, A FORMER STAFF WRITER FOR THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT, IS A LOEB FELLOW AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY'S GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN. HIS FIRST BOOK, HOW CITIES WORK: SUBURBS, SPRAWL AND THE ROADS NOT TAKEN, WILL BE PUBLISHED THIS YEAR. MARSHALL SPECIALIZES IN WRITING ABOUT URBAN PLANNING ISSUES. THIS ESSAY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AS THE INAUGURAL EDITION OF "THE JOSEPH PAPERS," A PROJECT BY THE JOSEPH CENTER FOR THE STUDY OR LOCAL, STATE AND REGIONAL GOVERNMENT AT CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY IN NEWPORT NEWS.