New funding for bus and rail agencies will preserve existing service and encourage innovations.

Motorists aren’t the only winners under the transportation package passed this year by the General Assembly. Those who ride the bus to work, medical appointments and the grocery store also stand to benefit.

The additional transit funding arrives just in time to avert deep cuts to bus systems serving rural areas, while offering transit agencies of all shapes and sizes the opportunity to compete for incentives aimed at encouraging new innovations and efficiencies.

Continue reading this editorial.

Taking cellphones and the scientific process on the road.

What driver, himself able to negotiate city traffic and winding rural roadways flawlessly while reading and writing text messages, has not seen how dangerously inattentive fellow motorists are while doing same?

“O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.”

Continue reading this editorial.

By Jeremy Holmes

In its April 11 editorial piece (“VDOT has a plan for Elm; so should you”), The Roanoke Times offered some suggestions to commuters preparing to face the ordeal of traffic jams, long delays and potential near-misses as the infamous Elm Avenue interchange goes under construction this summer.

While the paper’s recommendations for commuters to reconsider their routes — or at least to accept the construction snarls with patience — are sound, it missed an opportunity for possibly the most helpful suggestion: Avoid driving altogether.

Continue reading.

Holmes is program director for RIDE Solutions and Save-a-Ton. He is also a regular bike commuter.

Speaker Howell is having to play defense against his own team.

Gov. Bob McDonnell may be getting all the glory for this year’s transportation bill, but it was House Speaker Bill Howell who handled much of the grunt work necessary to secure votes for the first significant investment in Virginia roads and bridges in a quarter century.

Now that Howell has saved the commonwealth’s motorists from a plague of potholes, he’s taking on an even more daunting challenge: to save his party from itself.

Continue reading this editorial.

Members of Congress can’t blame the FAA for the sequester. They have the power to end this nonsense.

It’s one thing for the sequester to bar 4-year-olds from the Head Start door. The pre-schoolers won’t grow into their political voice for at least another 14 years. But it’s quite another thing for the sequester to make traveling Americans cool their heels in airport lounges or, worse, squeeze into tiny seats in a stuffy plane waiting and waiting and waiting for their flight’s clearance to take off.

Those Americans are capable of pounding out emails, texts and tweets to their congressperson during the moment of their discomfort.

And those Congress people, especially the Republican ones, want it to stop. As the nation enters Day 4 of the Federal Aviation Administration’s rolling furloughs of air traffic controllers, Republicans demand the FAA quit playing politics with air travel. But the FAA isn’t. It’s simply complying with a previous demand by members of Congress, especially Republican ones, to make foolish across-the-board spending reductions.

Continue reading this editorial.

Sherri Blevins

I am writing in hopes of promoting awareness of the safety concerns and threats to our children, teachers and staff at Falling Branch Elementary.

Additionally, I hope to gain the support of leaders and citizens for the relocation of the park and ride off Interstate 81’s Exit 118A.

Read more.

Blevins is a small business owner. Her children attend Montgomery County Schools.

There are ways for drivers to avoid Elm Avenue. Find them. Start at today’s open house.

The Virginia Department of Transportation will hold an open house today to share with drivers its plan to manage chaos during the reconstruction of Roanoke’s most challenging intersection with Interstate 581.

The Elm Avenue intersection with its many and confusing connecting streets is already the bane of commuters. At any given hour, cars and trucks are stuck between signals — their drivers prepared to jump across lanes — because the central knot of Roanoke’s otherwise tangle-free system of streets is an unavoidable jumble.

That’s why the $20 million project is so essential to clot-bust the congestion.

Native Roanokers, and those who have been here more than a month, already have committed to memory two central commands: Avoid Elm Avenue during morning and evening commutes. If nearing the interchange while on Interstate 581, give it wide berth. Failure to heed this rule may result in a rear-end collision.

Continue reading this editorial

Sen. Bill Stanley criticizes VDOT for not spending money that he doesn’t think it should have.

A day after three people died in Sunday’s massive pileup on fog-shrouded Fancy Gap Mountain, state Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, complained that the Virginia Department of Transportation should move more quickly on projects such as variable speed limits to enhance safety on the stretch of Interstate 77 in Carroll County.

“Something like that is long overdue, and I’m a little bothered by the fact that VDOT has not moved forward on this,” Stanley told The Roanoke Times’ Laurence Hammack.

Continue reading this editorial.

Wikimedia Commons

Two transportation projects – one by road, the other by rail – will have a large impact on Roanoke. The city must prepare.

Roanoke received confirmation last week that two hoped-for transportation projects will soon leap from dreams to reality. Once completed, the projects have the potential to change Roanoke as dramatically as Carilion’s Riverside Center transformed the city during the last decade.

The first confirmation came when the Virginia Department of Transportation awarded a $38.4 million design-build contract to Lane Construction Corp. to complete the Interstate 581 interchange with Valley View Boulevard. This will prime for development 130 acres of fallow land adjacent to Southwest Virginia’s premier retail and commercial district.

Continue reading this editorial.