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I have a bad feeling about this
Here is the latest on Tysons redevelopment:
Remaking Tysons Corner into the second city of Washington will take a lot more than a new Metro line and a downtown of tightly clustered buildings designed for walking. It will take almost $15 billion in new roads and public transportation.
Even in this age of sticker shock, that's a lot of money for a local project. You'll recall my earlier prediction that Tysons will get the road widenings but not enough of the other changes needed to make it a walkable downtown; the road widenings will on net make things worse. Call me an apologist for suburbia if you wish, but I sooner view myself as an apologist for public choice theory. Some parts of the redesign will be more popular than others and we will get a very unbalanced mix of reforms. This is indeed what I predict:
The numbers also have prompted some proponents of dense development in Tysons to argue that if the county pushes too many costly road improvements and makes room for more cars, the vision could unravel.
To simply insist that it "should be different," or to charge that I do not spend enough time criticizing interstate highway subsidies, is to miss the public choice point. Now that the stimulus is up and running, you can see road widenings all over NoVa and they will be finished. Who will put up the money for the rest of Tysons reform?
For funding, Fairfax officials say, they will look to the Obama administration, which is committed to subsidizing growth projects in urban areas. They hold out little hope from the Virginia Department of Transportation, which this year slashed the county allocation for secondary roads to zero. Given the millions of dollars Northern Virginia has gotten for big projects such as the HOT lanes and new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, "More state funding is pretty much politically doomed," said Kathy Ichter, the county's chief of transportation planning.
Stay tuned...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 1, 2009 at 05:15 AM in Current Affairs, Political Science | Permalink
Comments
The prediction that road widening will only make things worse is correct-- the problem is that there is no scenario in which things get 'better', i.e., in which congestion is reduced. Unless Tysons Corner simply chokes to death, there will be greater congestion in all cases; the only question is the degree to which the congestion will have an urban, rather than suburban character. My own opinion is that urban congestion is 'better' than suburban congestion-- but in any case, that's the choice.
Posted by: MattF at Nov 1, 2009 8:28:58 AM
I haven't been to Tyson's in a while, but my recollection and impression was that the mall with the Macy's in it was very walkable, and filled with people speaking many different languages, many of which I didn't recognize. And IIRC, doesn't it also have 1 or 2 decent restaurants (Thai and something else?).
Eden Center isn't a "walkable downtown" but so what.
Do we really need the homogeneity that a "walkable downtown" in a major metropolitan area means? Like LoDo (Denver), Georgetown, Ballston, or what Old Town Alexandria seems to be turning into?
"Walkable downtown" sounds like a dream by the major chains to create "quaint" places where the chains can look like mom-and-pops and one of a kind shops rather than like chain stores.
Unless you mean Starbucks after Whole Foods and brown flip flops and Starbucks after Starbucks: see Arlington, The Rap -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T1RMuoQnKo
Create all the walkable downtowns you want - just don't tax me to do it.
Posted by: anon at Nov 1, 2009 9:57:52 AM
The folks at greater greater washington find the $15 billion figure ludicrous: http://tinyurl.com/y9fujpy
Posted by: Kevin Scott at Nov 1, 2009 10:00:17 AM
Increasingly, I get the feeling that Tyson is Tyler's other brother; the one he is completely ashamed to acknowledge.
Posted by: David Heigham at Nov 1, 2009 11:32:45 AM
The $15B does appear to include the cost of extending Orange Line from Vienna past Fair Oaks Mall out to Centreville. It's also an estimate that runs through 2030. It's not entirely unreasonable.
The Greater Greater Washington people also had posts in favor of a taxi medallion system for DC, so I don't really trust them on economics.
Posted by: John Thacker at Nov 1, 2009 11:41:38 AM
It seems actually that the Greater Greater Washington folks do find the number plausible, they just are annoyed because the $15B is a planning estimate released for all of Fairfax County for the next 20-40 years, not just for Tysons, and so they find the headline misleading.
I suppose it's possible that development in Tysons will lead to needing the roads and rail elsewhere in Fairfax, but some surely would be needed anyway.
Perhaps this is intended to indicate the costs of switching to a rail-based strategy.
Posted by: John Thacker at Nov 1, 2009 11:55:34 AM
Ok, whether or not the $15 billion is Tyson's redevelopment or for all of Fairfax County, I think we can apply past experience and say that the true figure will be $75 billion (same dollars) or more, with, in the end, far less actual useful infrastructure than expected.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Nov 1, 2009 12:39:59 PM
How about putting up toll booths around it, put in lots of parking meters, and other fees, then package them of into a 75 year lease, turn over construction and maintenance to the private firm setting rates and collecting the revenue, and hold an auction for it?
Maybe a Spanish, Saudi, Australian consortium will bid on it and do it all without taxpayers paying for it. That is one of the strategies employed in Chicago - Mayor Daley actually got $2B for shedding the maintenance and fee collection over to the private sector, following the lead of China.
Maybe the entire Tyson's Corner can be leased to some rich multinational sovereign wealth funds at a profit.
Posted by: mulp at Nov 1, 2009 4:21:31 PM
I smell money illusion here. Seven billion will not be spent until after 2030. These projects would almost certainly go overbudget without proper controls, but 7 billion after 2030 is not 7 billion 2009.
On another note, if peak oil is true, and I think it is, America will need to move to a system where we get energy for transportation from the grid rather than the pump. I'm a peak oil doomer, saying billions will die because of it, but I do think we need to move towards systematically shifting our transportation structure little by little.
Think of it this way, the price tag is so high because the infrastructure at Tyson's corner is based around unplanned, circuitous rural roads. While it looks like a lot now, the oil economics of 2030 and beyond will strongly favor higher density. Doing the work now, with today's oil and material's prices, could pay a lot of benefits down the road.
Posted by: mw at Nov 1, 2009 7:39:59 PM
Gosh, whatever happened to the idea that growing cities fund their own growth?
I live in Buffalo which, in the 1800's, would have been laughed out of the country for suggesting that taxpayers in Virginia fund its expansion.
Nonetheless, grow it did and it was paid for entirely by the people who lived here and those who wanted to.
The 19th century equivalent of today's urban planners were probably appalled at the helter-skelter nature of the development, but, oddly enough, today's planners consider it a model of how human life should be lived.
And so it goes
Posted by: Craig at Nov 1, 2009 7:44:43 PM
I agree Craig.
Especially with our massive debt and massive financial overcommitments. But its all part of the drunken sailor = prosperity mentality.
Posted by: Al Brown at Nov 3, 2009 9:10:40 PM
