Our task in NoVa in 2009 is to let every single voter in Fairax, Prince William, and Loudoun Counties know that voting for ANY Republican ensures that career obstructionists and demagogues like Morgan Griffith will continue to be emboldened and enabled.

Flipping all the NoVa Republican seats alone gets us to a majority [note: I am NOT saying that we shoul only focus on NoVa in '09 -- I think we need to seriously contest thirty (30) House seats with quality Dems to hope to flip 15 to give us a good governing majority].

That's the rallying cry of the anti-government republicans... unfortunately, it resonates with those, uh, "bitter" small town and rural residents who see no problem with their roads, and feel no obligation to tax their meagre incomes to help rich elitists up in Northern Virginia, who have more than enough wherewithall to solve their own so-called problems... that is, we may be stuck in traffic, but we are just spoiled brats and should suck it up.

I personally do not believe we will get any sensible transportation plan for Virginia until some one from rural Virginia comes up with such a plan and convinces his own folks to go along with it... in other words, some one like Creigh Deeds from Bath County, who says he can do exactly that if he is elected Governor. Maybe Raising Kaine should ask Creigh about it.  

So, the ditch has been avoided for a while. But those children in the back seat are a horrible distraction and are fighting to hijack success after all.

A Warner-Gilmore matchup may be the very thing Virginia needs to let the sun shine on the lunacy of Republican "management" and "business sense." The Gilmore nomination is a precious gift to Virginia; but not in the way his backers are thinking. It on its own may guarantee a Blue HOD.

FCDC just issued this press release regarding transpo and the veto session:

http://fairfaxdemocrats.org/20...

State GOP will employ the strategy of linking the so-called Regional Authorities proposed by then Gov. Warner and then implemented by Kaine as an attempt to captitalize on the rather intense opposition to this authorities covering up the failed transportation plans of 2007 by the Republicans. It will be interesting to watch if they do so because just about everyone I talk to fails to see how these authorities which at the outset were to have taxing authority would impact the quality of life in the region.

This is a familiar story, but obviously not known well enough to Virginia's voters who keep electing these juveniles to the General Assembly. Surely the time has come for Democrats to contest these often uncontested seats and get the message out....and not just in NoVA.
Del. H. Morgan Griffith has been running multiple times with no opposition in his district. With only 27% of voters turning out in the 2007 election, he won 95% of the ballots, with a few hundred write-ins.
Is this democracy? Surely this guy can be taken down!

Failure to deal with this problem discourages sprawl.  That combined with the mortgage meltdown, the undocumented worker crackdown in Prince William, and high gas prices should shrink the sizes of PW and Loudon.  It should make the district and inner counties more attractive.  

And let's not kid ourselves on the old transportation package, that was just maintenance and some minor tweaks here and there.  The solution for NoVA, HOT Lanes, are unaffected by this.  And maybe this situation pushes us into relying more on those public-PRIVATE Partnerships.  I hope this doesn't cause us to lose our federal matching funds.

On the bright side, this entire discussion just serves to inform the public (those who pay attention anyway) just how expensive maintaining this paradise built for the internal combustion engine is.  And maybe now is the time that localities use their authority to address land use in a way that creates communities that rely less on the internal combustion engine for travel and more on feet power (i.e. pedestrians).  

This legislative session seems like a spectacle put on for our benefit.  Because honestly, they knew that this would be a waste of time since they have had such difficulty reaching agreement on so many other things.  Republicans have this line drawn in the sand and if they want to stick to it, whatever floats their boat is what I say.  I don't know all the ins and outs where this issue has been since January, but I would think that Governor Kaine has met with legislative leaders to negotiate a bill on this.  And at opportunities before his calling of this special session, Republicans must have told him to piss off.  So, maybe this is a strategy for getting them to budge.  But then again, I am back to it being a waste of time, because you know those Republicans are ornery.

So how about an RK poll about this.  There could be several.  Has your commute gotten worse in the last year or two years?  What is your average commute?

Yes, my commute has gotten worse. But I don't want the state or anyone to do anything about it. If you widen the road that is the problem for me (Rt. 250 from Shadwell into Charlottesville) then I'm pretty sure that things will only get worse. I say this based on years of experience of watching this same pattern again and again.

I'll have to deal with a year or so of construction and traffic will be even worse. Then the wider road will encourage more developments, which will mean not only more traffic but higher property taxes because all the new residents at once will mean more demand for policing, fire protection, schools and on-grid water and sewer. Eventually, taxes will get high enough that I'll not be able

No thanks. I'd rather accept the current traffic for what it is. A wider road will only invite more people from New Jersey or wherever the hell most of them come from.

 

Metro, trolley lines, bus rapid transit, etc.  I also want money to fix our crumbling bridges before they start collapsing on us.  Besides that, I definitely agree that building a lot more roads will only worsen sprawl and lead to further gridlock and the demand for more roads, perpetuating the vicious cycle.

Jack Landers, I understand your observation that widening or building roads only "encourages" someone to build homes near the improved road, and that means you will see more traffic in that corridor... It is a well-known phenomenum: roads breed traffic, cause and effect, i.e., pavement creates human babies who ride in cars. (note: snark attack)

I will point out, however, that if  people (rather than pavement) would stop breeding, we would not have more people who would have to move to the place where they can find jobs and so can afford to eat (and make more babies and thus add to traffic in an endless circle based on worshipping God Auto). Maybe the difficulty's solution is to stop this reckless making of babies; the world seems to be running up on limits to how much human biomass it can feed anyway.

Or, maybe the time has come to re-design our Western culture, replacing hop-scotch suburban development based on an automobile-centric life-atyle with a more sustainable way of living together on our shrinking planet... Excuse me, guess that is too much to ask.

PS: Full disclosure: I, too drive an auto and fear the day when I can no longer drive: there goes my adult independence.

gets me is these morons GET AWAY WITH THIS STUFF. No one holds them accountable-certainly not the voters. Certainly not the DPVA. Certainly not Kaine.

Doesn't anyone know how to just stand up and say ENOUGH?

Jeeeeeeeezzz. Every dem in the GA, every dem running for a seat, the honchos at the DPVA ought to stand in front of the Capitol and hold the biggest, baddest press conference or rally anyone has seen for awhile. But nooooooooooo we just sit around. I know plenty of folks that would go to Richmond for a rally.

But nooooooooooooo we might hurt someone's FEELINGS.

I think the Republicans who control the House are the ones that need convincing.  They apparently feel that their losses in recent elections are attributable to their apostasy in the Warner Administration (regarding conservative economic truth, anyway).  They have now discovered that true belief is best demonstrated by zealotry; thus, any and every tax is a bad tax.  It's also easier to see things this way.  The world becomes much less complex when everything can be boiled down into good and bad, binary viewings.

There's no consequence for them though.  Because the rest of the state could care less that NoVA and Hampton Roads folk sit in traffic.  And why should they really?  Out of sight, out of mind.  Hampton Roads and NoVA residents don't care that other parts of the state are saddled with nasty coal-fired power plants to serve our demand.  And why should we?  Again, out of sight, out of mind.  So, it's a trade off, for now.