Over at Bacon's Rebellion, there's a very interesting article examining the potential effect of Gov. Kaine's transportation impact-fee amendments. Bacon makes three key points:
1) "What we don't know yet is the extent to which higher housing prices in fast-growth counties will encourage developers to leap-frog to farther-out jurisdictions that haven't imposed impact fees."
In other words, these impact fees actually could encourage sprawl, thus further worsening traffic problems in Virginia. Or not.
2) The fees end up "financing road improvements on the backs of newcomers," while benefiting current residents ("Not only will existing residents not pay for the transportation improvements, impact fees on new houses will make their houses more valuable in the bargain.")
This is very interesting; are higher housing prices for both potential newcomers and for existing homeowners a good or bad thing? And politically, how does this play out?
3) Impact fees generally are "a blunt instrument," in that they "treat all forms of development on the same basis." However:
By varying the impact fees based on the anticipated transportation impact of the new development -- charging less for transportation-efficient development and more for scattered, disconnected, low-density development -- local governments could stimulate the building of more sustainable human settlement patterns. Combine variable impact fees with Urban Development Areas and the devolution of responsibility for secondary roads to local governments, and we could see major changes in the built landscape.
This sounds very encouraging to me, as someone who strongly favors smart, high-density, transit-oriented development over endless, destructive sprawl. The question is, what will local governments do with their new impact-fee powers, and how will citizens react? As far as I can tell, it is now largely local governments who will determine whether or not we are able to salvage some real good from a Republican-crafted transportation bill that - while improved by Tim Kaine's amendments - leaves much to be desired.
From what I gather, the logic of impact fees on developers and on new homeowners is that the additional developments will add to the traffic. Newcomers are being asked to pay for the additional roads and the additional traffic that their presence will be adding. I think that is fair.
The trick is to not outprice them. There should, hopefully, be a balance where they are paying for the extra traffic they are adding but that fee isn't so great that they can't live here at all.
I'm for slowing down growth and for more rational land use policies. But I certainly don't want to see all growth come to a screeching halt.
Ultimately, raising funds to solve the transporation problem is going to have to come from multiple sources that spread the pain around, tie the fees somewhat to the users (drivers) and hopefully encourage better patterns of land use, such as building higher density developments grouped closer to public transportation.
As for your question, I think there are limits to how far out developers can go. It's been pretty far but it's reaching its limits. How far are people ultimately willing to live from their jobs and how much more commuting time can they realistically put into their day? After all, they only have 24 hours and 8 to 10 of those hours still have to be spent on the job. So, the sprawl maybe reaching the point where it is self-limiting.