It has been a few years since I returned to my alma mater, Virginia Tech, where every year it seems a new development or campus building pops up. Over 50,000 people shuffle in and out of the campus and town every day, more so on game days. That is equivalent to the number of people who work in the Reston area every day, and yet the two look nothing alike. It is striking how little the town of Blacksburg and Virginia Tech look like the region where most of its students come from (Northern Virginia). So why with so many alumni returning to the relative ease of employment in Fairfax do they not bring with them the community ideals they are ingrained with at college, and what could we be learning from our experiences in college towns?
Part 1 – Where You Live
In Northern Virginia we spend billions on massive projects in order to move people miles away to job centers. The mode of choice has been highway spending for the past three decades, and now after years of throwing money at the problem without a master concept. Over the past few years it appears we are moving towards a multi-modal transportation, more spending will be needed to correct our highway glut, and more massive construction projects. We are putting the cart before the horse.
There are plenty of people who use cars around Virginia Tech and Blacksburg. Yes there are a significant amount that take transit or bike as well, but by just looking at mode share you ignore a far more important factor in why traffic remains relatively calm. Where are all of these trips starting from?
College campuses are really the first form of smart growth. They are almost always master planned decades, if not centuries, in advance and laid out where growth will occur, where people will live, and where people will want to go. Dormitories are extremely efficient high density developments which house students as close as possible to the classroom buildings they attend. When you pull so many people living on campus it tightens the living belt so that those who live off campus don’t live miles away, but just off campus in apartments. Taking this out another level you see town homes and single family homes within walking or biking distance within a mile from campus. You pull everyone closer while still having multiple different types of housing options. No one really lives 15 or 20 miles away because you don’t have to. Getting 2 or 3 miles away from campus you are already in bucolic farm lands.
So what is the big deal about this kind of master plan? Become a driver for a day in Blacksburg. The roads are minuscule by comparison to even the most pedestrian friendly areas of Fairfax. Four lane roads are rare and at the periphery of the town. Stop lights provide long pedestrian walk times, which would annoy drivers if it weren’t for the fact that even the longest trips are between 2 or 3 miles. The biggest trouble for drivers is finding a parking spot.
On campus the rules require EVERYONE to stop for pedestrians at all times. Cross walks are everywhere. Sidewalks are wider than the roads they are adjacent to. As a driver it takes you about the same amount of time to go around the drill field as for a pedestrian to cross it.
If this design was implemented in Northern Virginia the congestion would be unbearable and the entire area would likely be crippled. Why? Because there are no other options in this area but to drive, and drive very far (for most people well over 15 miles each way). Of course Northern Virginia is a far larger sample size than the small town of Blacksburg but when you view each of the areas of Fairfax independently there really is no difference in the population numbers. The issue is the complete lack of the main street, the lack of a center of town, and the culture that pushes people out to houses and forces them to drive in to work.
Before we start tinkering with the transportation network we have to get serious about our terrible land use policy. We need to start incorporating into our vague regional neighborhoods the idea of a downtown. A downtown doesn’t have to have high-rises and condo towers, it should be dependent on the neighborhood it is being placed in. Sometimes a good townhouse community adjacent to mixed use retail is all it takes to create a thriving business and resident community (see the case of Vienna). The idea is to stop planning for the exodus of commuters and start planning for things that the residents of that area want.
What we can learn from our time in college is the idea of a community first. Encouraging growth from within can help simplify our public infrastructure needs, benefit residents, and preserve our coffers.