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plan is.”
Mrs. Watts said that the funding reflects the number one priority given transportation by people throughout the state. History shows that every four years, whether in a Democratic or Republican administration, the new governor comes in “raising the gas tax, raising a source of revenue to put more money into roads,” she reported. This standard procedure, the same followed by Gov. Gerald Baliles, is a response to public pressure, Secretary Watts contended. But that public pressure isn’t there for phase two, which she described as consensus building.
As to specifics of any plan, Watts only cited pressure from local governments to have the state highway planners identify “center lines” of new or improved roads and to give localities more involvement in preliminary engineering.
Mrs. Herbert recalled that last year, Gov. Baliles said he would work to overturn the Hilton decision which precludes local government from requiring developers to make off-site road improvements.
“That’s certainly on the agenda,” Mrs. Watts confirmed.
The former PEC attorney added that support was also supposed to be forthcoming for legislation to give local government the authority to turn down development proposals if roads serving the development were deemed inadequate.
‘That’s the next legal tool put on the list of local interests,” Mrs. Watts said.
In response to another question, Mrs. Watts called the fedend Highway Administration’s review of Virginia’s Western By-Pass proposal a “quick and dirty” study done in a couple of months with old data. (The FHA study used data supplied by the Virginia Department of Transportation. It concluded that a western by-pass without a Potomac River crossing would divert only three to seven percent of the traffic from the Capital Beltway and called the proposed superhighway a developer’s highway.)
Watts said that any solution to Northern Virginia’s traffic crisis will have to include mass transit and HOV (high occupancy vehicle) extensions as well as a new transportation corridor. Asked why only 2,000 parking places are provided at the Vienna Metro stop, the most outlying in Virginia, when over 100,000 cars a day use 1-66 to Washington, Mrs. Watts said that if she controlled “piles of money” and was “empress,” she’d focus on building structured parking at the metro
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