By Robert Burke and Brett Lieberman

This startling exchange, pieced together from several attendees of that closed-door meeting last year, shows just how heated the problem of Northern Virginia’s rampant growth and congested traffic has become. It raises important questions. Will Virginia, for all of its business-friendly climate and acclaimed quality of life, alienate the info-tech companies that drive the state’s economy? Or will the voracious needs of Northern Virginia’s tech industry overthrow the low-tax, low-debt philosophy that has been affirmed by Virginia voters in election after election?

While the powerbrokers clash over solutions, the facts on the ground are undeniable: Northern Virginia’s transportation system is gaining a national reputation as hell on wheels. According to the American Highway Users Alliance, this high-growth region has two of the worst bottlenecks in the nation – the Capital Beltway’s intersections with Interstate 66 and Interstate 95. The Washington metro area has the worst gridlock, outside of Los Angeles, of anywhere in the country. On average, congestion in 1997 caused Washington drivers 76 hours of delay and wasted 116 gallons of gas annually, according to a study by the Texas Transportation Institute. The same study calculated the average cost per Washington driver at $1,260 that year in time and wasted gasoline. And those numbers don’t include the negative air-quality impact of burning an additional 327 million gallons of gasoline.

The region’s traffic problem is bad news for more than just commuters. Longer, more nerve-wracking commutes make it more difficult for Northern Virginia companies to recruit and retain employees. Suffering a severe labor shortage, the tech sector in particular is desperate for relief. Employment in the high-tech sector has grown at twice the rate of total employment over the past five years. Tech wages average $67,800, compared to $33,000 for all industries in Virginia. Northern Virginia’s three core counties — Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington — represent just 3.5 percent of the state’s land area but a fifth of its population and a third of its economic base.

Fixing the problem will require money, gobs of it. Transportation experts estimate the region will need a whopping $15 billion for roads and transit by 2020 just to keep traffic from getting worse. The state’s $10.3 billion six-year transportation spending plan doubled funding in 2001— about $617 million — for road and transit in Northern Virginia. Even so, much of that is headed for the Springfield Interchange project at the intersection of Interstates 95 and 395 and the Capital Beltway, which has suffered horrendous cost overruns. Estimates of that project have risen more than $200 million recently and now exceed $567 million over eight years.

Political and civic leadership is fragmented at the regional and state levels on how to deal with the seemingly intractable problems. While Northern Virginians fantasize about seceding from the Old Dominion, they’re trading potshots with Maryland over the construction of a new Woodrow Wilson Bridge across the Potomac and squabbling about plans to build a new bridge between Fairfax and Montgomery County, Md. Meanwhile, Northern Virginians can’t even agree amongst themselves over fundamental land-use issues. Business interests call for more road and bridge construction, but environmentalists contest every project. Planners contend that high-density development and mixed land uses can reduce the number and length of automobile trips. Fine, say neighborhood groups, but Not In My Back Yard. Even business and local government can’t agree. In November, an effort to find agreement between high-growth localities and the state’s building and business interests collapsed.

Road rage has exacerbated the split between Northern Virginia and the rest of Virginia. The issue magnifies the chasm between the practical, conservative Downstaters and more cosmopolitan, but self-serving Northern Virginians. And, despite the priority he’s given to building a legacy as the High-Tech Governor, Jim Gilmore has lost a lot of political goodwill. "Thank goodness he’s a one-term governor," says Gerald E. Connolly, a Democrat and chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a regional organization of 17 Washington-area localities. COG members also include area congressional representatives as well as the legislatures of Maryland and Virginia.

How did things get this bad? A burgeoning population for one thing. While Virginia’s population rose 11 percent in the 1990s to 6.8 million people, Northern Virginia’s population surged nearly 19 percent to 1.67 million people. Even that figure understates the staggering rate of growth in the outer counties. Consider Loudoun County — its population is up 80 percent to 155,900 people since 1990. Prince William’s is up nearly 25 percent. The flood of people and jobs to the Northern Virginia suburbs is expected to continue: A recent report predicts employment in the counties of Prince William and Loudoun alone will rise 73 percent by 2020 to 319,300 people, and population there will increase by 63 percent. Overall, Northern Virginia’s population is expected to increase 31 percent by 2020 to nearly 2.4 million people.

Decades of sprawling development and poor planning, especially in Fairfax County, have aggravated the impact of population growth. Arlington, an older community developed according to classic urban design principles – grid streets, mixed uses, higher densities – doesn’t have a significant congestion problem outside the overloaded freeways that move people, including Marylanders, into downtown Washington, D.C. Despite a dense population and road network, Arlington County had only 508 lane-miles of arterial roads operating under congested conditions during peak periods in 1990, according to Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) figures. By contrast, Fairfax County, with five times the population then had 17 times the number of congested lane-miles. The disparity has probably gotten far worse since then.

Fairfax County planners designed the land-use standards adopted by many other Virginia localities. Ironically, Tysons Corner, the largest employment center in Virginia, stands as a monument to suburban dysfunction. Despite the concentration of businesses, this Fairfax County business center doesn’t have a single Metro stop. Street-level design is so hostile to pedestrians that many people literally use their cars to cross the street. Elsewhere, instead of surrounding its three Metro stations with high-density offices and apartment buildings, Fairfax County has restricted the use of this incredibly valuable land to parking lots. While billions of dollars pour into new development around Washington Dulles International Airport, aging inner suburbs along U.S. 1 are deteriorating badly. Northern Virginia has no lack of roads – they just aren’t where the drivers are.

Atrocious urban design continues unabated. No one requires developers to link their subdivisions with neighboring projects. The popularity of cul de sacs creates subdivisions that dump tens of thousands of commuters into a limited number of feeder roads and arterials. Disconnected from the local planning process, VDOT focuses on adding more lanes to the hardening arterials. "The pattern of development we have, the scattering of office sites, the separation of homes from work and homes from stores has created the traffic problem we have today," says Stewart Schwartz of the Washington-based Coalition for Smarter Growth. Northern Virginia business leaders have made problems worse with their site location decisions, Schwartz says. "While it may [benefit] the company bottom line to locate an AOL or a WorldCom on the west side of Dulles, it’s also imposing significant cost on the region in terms of new transportation infrastructure that we have to provide," he says.

Schwartz accuses politicians and business leaders of ignoring the link between land-use patterns and traffic woes. "[They] are focusing on simply spending more money in bigger highway projects to try to dig our way out of this. We think they’re missing the point."

Of course part of the reason such companies have come to Northern Virginia’s outer suburbs is because they were offered tax breaks and other financial incentives by localities and the state in the first place. For AOL’s $555 million server farm in Prince William County, for instance, the state and county agreed to cover about $1 million in land acquisition and site preparation costs. Virginia Secretary of Technology Donald W. Upson says there’s nothing wrong with such incentives. "We’re trying to attract businesses. The question we have to ask is not whether it’s good or bad or right or wrong, the question is will somebody else do it? If somebody else is going to do it, we need to too."

Incentives measure in the millions of dollars annually. That sum is insignificant compared to the implicit subsidies associated with transportation projects, which impact on real estate values. Gilmore’s current six-year spending plan includes $100 million for improvements to one of the region’s worst bottlenecks — the interchange of Interstate 66 and the Capital Beltway. It also calls for $75 million to develop express bus service and rail along the Dulles Toll Road, a project that will eventually total an estimated $2.2 billion. Metrorail would receive an extra $76 million, and $10 million would be spent on upgrading the Virginia Railway Express lines, which carry commuters to Washington from Manassas and Fredericksburg. The plan also has money for a planned widening in 2002 of Interstate 66 west outside the Beltway, as well as for widening a portion of I-95 in Fairfax starting in 2004. "We have been working very hard to address the issues and work with the people in Northern Virginia to try and find solutions, not just laying more asphalt," says Gilmore’s Secretary of Transportation, Shirley Ybarra.

Gilmore’s current transportation budget this year is up 22 percent from last year, she says, and Northern Virginia this year is getting 70 percent more in state and federal dollars. "There’s a tremendous amount of money being spent." State transportation leaders are also exploring "new approaches" to reducing congestion and paying for projects — such as public-private partnerships and special tax districts. And they’ve taken other steps, such as changing the fuel-tax collection methods, which is supposed to produce an additional $228 million over six years.

But Northern Virginia leaders such as Connolly say it’s disingenuous for Gilmore and Ybarra to suggest that the state is responding to the region’s transportation crisis with millions of dollars of new funding. Nearly all the money comes from forward funding of existing projects, not from new revenue sources. In fact counties like Fairfax actually will see reductions in state funding for secondary roads this year and next. Even if funding does increase, spending in the region has not kept pace with demand for the last 30 years. "That doesn’t begin to address our funding needs," Connolly says.

Area business and political leaders say new approaches are needed and they plan to hold accountable politicians who don’t support them. Northern Virginia, which already has its share of business-related umbrella groups, got another in November. Eighteen business organizations announced the Northern Virginia Transportation Compact, asking state legislators to give localities more power over road and transit decisions. They also want a regional authority capable of charging tolls, raising local gas taxes or doing whatever is necessary to provide funding sources for transportation projects. Several Northern Virginia businessmen, including Todd Stottlemyer, a high-technology executive in Fairfax County who helped broker the compact, believe the business community will make transportation funding a litmus test in next year’s governor’s race. Part of what brings the groups together "is an absolute belief that this is a crisis," Stottlemyer says. "Today we don’t have any meaningful solutions to address the situation."

Tech leaders in Northern Virginia have lined up behind a proposed ‘Techway,’ a 12-mile, privately funded toll road from Route 7 in Fairfax that would connect to the Interstate 270 corridor across the Potomac River in Montgomery County, Md. The road could link two employment centers and cut the current commute between the two. In October, Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-Va., won $2 million in federal funding to study the idea. The weak link in the project is the need for a bridge across the Potomac. Cooperation from Maryland, which has little incentive to ease the commute of its residents to commercial centers in Virginia, may prove elusive.

Connolly is pushing telecommuting as a faster and cheaper solution. "We’re never going to have enough money, we’re never going to build enough roads if we don’t deploy technology," he says. About 185,000 fewer commuters and 70,000 fewer cars would be on the road if the Council of Governments’ goal of 20 percent of Washington-area workers telecommuting is reached by 2005. It would mean a 6 percent reduction in traffic — equivalent to the number of passengers that Metrorail carries daily. "The billions of dollars it took to build Metro, we could match those numbers in five years," Connolly says.

For an example of how making simple changes in work styles can make a big difference on the roadways, consider how one newspaper columnist goes to work. Walter Mossberg, a technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal told a recent Council of Governments annual meeting that he starts working at his Potomac, Md., home by reading and answering e-mails. Then, he breezes into his downtown Washington office about 11 a.m. when the roads are clear. Not only is his life simpler, says Mossberg, he’s not part of the congestion problem either.

Many experts, however, believe that Mossberg’s experience can’t be replicated very often. The 20 percent telecommuting goal, laudable as it may be, is unrealistic. It would be among the highest telecommuting rates in the country. But Connolly notes that only a fraction — about 2 percent — of the region’s 350,000 federal work force telecommutes. "They can do better. It’s something that can make a huge difference," he says. "Changing behavior is going to be key to solving some of our problems."

The dispute over transportation seems to have worsened the long-standing divide between Northern Virginia and the rest of the state. "I think a lot of people in the General Assembly see Northern Virginia as a big bunch of affluent, whining Yankees," Connolly says. "We have an endless series of complaints and we’re never satisfied." For their part, Northern Virginians feel unappreciated. Connolly says the region generates more than 40 percent of entire state revenues. "Virginia needs to understand that if we are going to continue to generate the wealth that benefits everyone, they need to invest." Commuters, he says, "are fed up with the inaction and bumbling incompetence coming out of Richmond."

Some are trying to revamp the state’s entire approach to funding. A bill carried over from last year’s General Assembly session sponsored by Sen. Warren E. Barry would limit the growth of state spending to the rate of inflation and population increases and put the excess in a separate fund for infrastructure needs like schools and roads. The idea is to force government to budget like a business would, says Mike Thompson, director of the Fairfax-based Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. The institute will host a discussion on the idea with legislators in Richmond in early 2001.

Besides revamping the financing method, the state could look to other common tools for handling congestion — such as toll collections on bridges and even HOV (high occupancy vehicles) lanes, or double-decker highways, Thompson says. Technology Secretary Upson advocates building a smart transportation network that e-mails traffic updates over wireless phones to guide motorists past bottlenecks. It would be faster than building highways, he says. "If we build every road that everybody wants, we’ll be dead before we get through the environmental impact statements."

As bad as Northern Virginia’s plight may be, there aren’t any other booming tech towns that have it any better. Silicon Valley, the heart of the cyber industry, may have even worse traffic problems, exacerbated by constricted geography and exorbitantly priced real estate that forces commuters to live farther and farther from their jobs. Certainly no one else in the United States has found the magic mix of land-use controls and transportation strategies that cures sprawl. Indeed, some urbanists think Americans have exactly what they asked for: a settlement pattern that places a premium on dispersed single-family homes, untrammeled mobility for the automobile and local government authority over land use. According to this line of thinking, traffic congestion is an unavoidable consequence that must be endured.

That may well prove to be the case in Virginia. Arguably, the Old Dominion’s low-tax, pro-business policies helped nurture Northern Virginia’s high-tech industry. You don’t hear the local tech community saying how much they’d prefer Virginia to be like Maryland. Virginia’s info-tech giants could have located in the Terrapin state if they’d wanted to, but they didn’t. The combination of higher taxes and greater regulation has little appeal south of the Potomac.