DALLAS – Virginia's Commonwealth Transportation Board has adopted a $14.4 billion, six-year highway and rail improvement plan that includes $10.7 billion of road upgrades and $758 million to expand passenger rail operations in the state.
The package of more than 3,200 transportation projects is the first multiyear slate to be developed using a scoring system intended to select the most-cost effective efforts to make best use of limited state funding, said Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne Jr.
"This is a very historic vote," Layne told commission members after the measure passed unanimously at Tuesday's meeting. "This is the first time that objective measures have been used to put the project list together. I think that's pretty cool."
House Bill 2, which was signed into law by Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2014, required the CTB to adopt a transportation project-priority ranking system no later than July 2016.
The factors considered in selecting the projects included congestion relief, economic development, and environmental quality. Projects included on the list must be fully funded and have completed all environmental reviews.
The new project selection process ensures the state gets good value from its highway funding, McAuliffe said.
"We decided there is a better way to do this, to take the politics out of it," McAuliffe told the board on Monday. "It's all data-driven. It's done by metrics."
The latest six-year plan includes 501 new projects, along with 148 projects from an earlier plan that had their funding lowered and 381 projects that received higher allocations than before.
More than 60 projects costing an estimated $416 million were removed from the six-year action plan for lack of funding or incomplete environmental information, Layne said.
"The whole purpose of HB2 is to take a project in rural Bristol and compare it to one in northern Virginia and ask, 'What's the relevant benefit to the Commonwealth?' " Layne said. "It doesn't always mean it's the one that carries the most cars."
Rail and public transit projects on the six-year list total $3.7 billion.
The more than $758 million of funding for passenger rail projects in the six-year plan is a "game changer for Virginia," said Robbyn Gayer, president of the rail advocacy group Virginians for High Speed Rail.
"The Commonwealth is a leader when it comes to investing in passenger rail and Virginians have shown that if we build it, they will ride it," Gayer said. "This plan gets us one step closer to our goal of high speed rail which will keep Virginia competitive in the economy of tomorrow."
The more than 1.6 million riders that traveled on Amtrak's Virginia lines in 2015 reduced vehicle fuel consumption by more than 6 million gallons, Gayer said The $660 million allocated to rail projects in northern Virginia will fund a multimodal transportation center in Newport News and allow the laying of multiple-track rail segments so that Amtrak can boost its service in the Richmond area.
Virginia Department of Transportation's budget for fiscal 2017 totals $5.4 billion, up slightly from fiscal 2016.
Revenues in 2017 are expected to include $1 billion of federal funding, $832 million from Virginia's sales tax on motor fuels, $878 million from the state sales tax on motor vehicles, and $784 million from VaDOT's share of the state retail sales tax.
