I am here to speak in opposition to Transform66. There is an old and apt cliche that if you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there. Do we know where we want to go in terms of local transportation? I know that members of the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB)
are from all over the Commonwealth, but all of you must be familiar
with the Transportation Planning Board (TPB), the federally designated
Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the region. After what the
TPB describes as an extensive three year public outreach, the TPB
articulated its goals and objectives. Goal 1
reads "The Washington metropolitan region's transportation system will
provide reasonable access at reasonable cost to everyone in the region." Objective 1 reads "A comprehensive range of choices for users of the region's transportation system." I
think the TPB's vision articulates where we should go in terms of
transportation. Does Transform66 help achieve our goals and objectives? There are a few key questions we should ask about this and other transportation projects. The first question is what does it mean to provide reasonable access at reasonable cost to everyone? I
don't think that means that we should have a system for white people
and a system for black people, or a system for affluent people and a
system for poor people. But that's what we have today. Take our local
bus system. Metro reports that while the majority of people riding
MetroRail are white, the vast majority -- 75% -- of the people riding
buses are non-white. What does that matter? After
Hurricane Katrina, researchers studied car ownership to understand who
was and who was not able to move to safety as the hurricane bore down on
the city. What they found is that nineteen percent of non-white
households didn't have access to an automobile so they were dependent on
public transportation. Non-white households were four times as likely
to be without access to an automobile as white households. I
hope no such disaster befalls this area but reasonable access at
reasonable cost with a comprehensive range of choices should be provided
to everyone. So, is Transform66 really a
multimodal solution like VDOT likes to say? The I66 Multimodal Study
Inside the Beltway from August, 2013 shows current auto mode share --
the share of trips taken by different modes of transportation -- of 70.
Projected auto mode share in 2040 under the current proposal is 72%. Yes
-- auto share is projected to increase. That doesn't sound like
multimodal to me, it sounds more like unimodal. What
about outside the Beltway? The Tier 2 Draft Environmental Assessment
dated May 2015 reports that the average auto mode share in the corridor
outside the Beltway is 91.2%. Despite numerous requests to and promises
from VDOT staff, no one has ever provided projections for future mode
share. What are they hiding? We don't know. I
think it is clear. This project does not meet the goals and objectives
of this community today or tomorrow. It does not take us where we want
to go and it should not be approved. - Stuart M Whitaker, Founder |
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