The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) controls a tremendous amount of your tax dollars and doles it out to regional transportation projects.  It is required by law to prioritize projects that provide the most congestion reduction compared to their cost.  The problem: they completely fail to model "induced demand", a well-understood phenomenon that says new lanes miles of road in urban and suburban areas, if free to use, induce additional trips and longer trips in cars, erasing the congestion improvements the project aimed for, and often making them worse.  This modeling failure causes NVTA to dole out huge amounts of money to road expansion projects, far from jobs and transit, exacerbating traffic, accelerating climate change, and poisoning our air.  Just this month NVTA used nearly 50% of its available funding for the year to approve new highways that will add an estimated 50-74 million additional vehicle miles to our roads every year, and emissions equivalent to burning an additional 3 million gallons of gasoline each year to our air.* 

The time is right to tell them to stop.  They are currently asking for your feedback on what they should prioritize in their next major transportation plan.  Tell them we cannot continue to invest in environmentally-damaging road projects.  We must make it easier to walk, bike, and take transit. We must allow more people to live close to work, school, shopping, and transit. Step 1: properly modeling these road projects to expose them for the boondoggles that they are.

*Results from RMI's Shift Calculator, run for NVTA's recently-approved Route 50 North Collector Road and Van Buren Road North Extension projects.