Since I just wrote about the political divide between broadly-urban and broadly-rural constituencies on a national scale, it's timely to look at the same phenomenon in Virginia, where the identical tug-of-war goes on between the high-growth, most populous areas of the state and those whose population and traffic density is far less.
Because Virginia's state assembly has the same structural problems as Congress (i.e. that legislative officials representing a distinct minority of the state's population may nevertheless dominate decision-making), it's usually the urban areas that get the short end of the state funding stick.
That's true in spades in the roads and transportation budget, as the Washington Post reports today. This article points up the results of drastic budget cuts that come about as a result of the slow economy; it fails to report how the decisions are made on where the cuts fall. I don't know of anyone in the northern Virginia area who doesn't think the cuts fall disproportionately on us.
And regardless of how the cuts are made, it's easy to see how years, even decades, of short-changing from Richmond have produced inequities in the road network of the state. A simple drive to Virginia Beach or Roanoke will show roads in fine repair in the south and west, or around Richmond, with recently painted highway markings and in some areas, even those little reflectors built into the center line of the road. By contrast, driving back into the state's northern counties (say, Fairfax or Prince William), roadways are literally falling apart. (If we were to look at roads alone, the difference is like crossing the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s.)
The situation is worsened by the state's (technically, it's a "commonwealth") centralized authority structure. Far too many decisions that should be local have to be made centrally. For example, officials in Arlington County cannot decide on their own to change the traffic lights at an intersection to include (say) a left-turn arrow. Not if one of the roads involved is a "state" road. That requires state-level approval.
Tension and/or downright hostility between "downstate" legislators who dominate the Assembly, and the northern section, which includes at least 1/3 of the population and a greater proportion of the state's economic growth, is so longstanding that half-serious proposals have been made for the north to secede from Virginia and become its own state. Not such a bad idea, but politically improbable since the less urban areas will want to keep the north in thrall.
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