Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412190043
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Costner's character, derided by the local farming gentry as a looneytune, plows under his cornfields and, risking bankruptcy, brings his father's ghost to life for a moment of reconciliation. As the film ends, the headlights of thousands of cars light up the countryside, as drivers slowly make their way to Costner's diamond in the field.
In Montgomery County, in Virginia Tech's research facilities and in the governor's Richmond office, another "Field of Dreams" is being played out. Only this is real life, and it's not a field; it's a road.
If it is ever finished, "smart" road supporters say, the highway from Blacksburg to Interstate 81 will be full of cars coming - and going. Six miles of asphalt will make travel between Roanoke and Blacksburg quicker and will ease traffic woes on U.S. 460 between Tech's hometown and Christiansburg.
When one speaks to the politicians, Tech administrators or business leaders, however, the "they" in "they will come" refers not to travelers but to money, grants, industry and jobs.
The reality behind its promise - what the smart road can do for the economy of Southwest Virginia - is still to be shown. For the moment at least, it is still a "Road of Dreams."
"I can't give you a number," state Secretary of Transportation Robert Martinez said when asked how many jobs would be brought to the region if a fully operational smart road were shuttling travelers between destinations and providing researchers with a test bed to conduct experiments on futuristic cars, sensors and traffic safety equipment.
No one can provide hard numbers on what the road will bring. But hope and optimism run rampant.
"Technology is today to transportation what the auto is to the covered wagon," said Ray Pethtel, a former Virginia Department of Transportation commissioner. Hired as University Transportation Fellow by Tech and now serving as interim director of the Center for Transportation Research, he's the school's point man on the smart road.
A General Motors-led consortium won a $150 million federal grant in October to develop a prototype for an automated highway system to be used by smart cars filled with computers, video displays and sensors. Since then, Pethtel has worked to make Tech's case that it should be made the consortium's 10th general partner.
While the school, an associate member, has submitted a $20 million proposal to the group, "if we [were] a full partner ... we will know on a peer basis what our budget is going to be," he said. That means Tech would be inside the boardroom helping decide how to divvy up the $150 million to various schools and industries.
The primary number that Pethtel has used is $300 million that Southwest Virginia could attract over the next 20 years in research money. The state's pledge to build 1.7 miles of the smart road as an experimental test bed is his ace in the hole.
Pethtel said GM and the federal government haven't signed the contract that would actually turn over the grant money, so the consortium has hardly begun deciding how to split it up. For now, Tech doesn't know what it's going to get for starters.
A GM spokesman said the consortium should be organized in early 1995, when Pethtel also is trying to arrange for one of GM's main researchers to come to Tech.
Still, Pethtel, who loves to speak of the "Silica Valley" of fiber-optics companies in the New River and Roanoke valleys, has begun talking to area companies about parts they might play in testing products and materials via the smart road.
One of those firms is Force Inc., a Christiansburg maker of fiber-optic transmitters and receivers. Its president, William Neely, said his discussions with Tech have been general.
It's too early, he said, to begin thinking contracts and manufacturing and jobs. "We sell real products for real customers for real current needs," Neely said.
Of course, he hopes the smart road will be built, he said, because then firms can use it to test such products as infrared and audio sensors, to see if they might be feasible products to use - and sell. "If that happens, I think you'll see a tremendous rush into real jobs."
No one knows how the remainder of the six-mile road will be built. No money has been appropriated. Though one opponent has derided the test bed concept as a 2-mile-long "drag strip" sitting in the middle of Ellett Valley unusable by the public, Pethtel said, "It has about a 20-year window of opportunity" in which to be used for developing new technologies. He hopes to have the test bed built in 1997, construction started on the remainder of a two-lane version of the road by 2000, and a four-lane version within two decades.
Some have complained that the smart road is merely a Tech baby, usable only by the university as a means of garnering research money.
"Even if it were true, what's wrong with that?" Martinez replies. He disagrees with the assessment, and points to companies like GM, Martin Marietta and Bechtel - all consortium members - that will have an ongoing relationship with Virginia once the project gets off the ground.
Neely, though, said that, "as a taxpayer," he hopes that federally financed research proposals would be given "a very cold, fishy-eyed stare" before money goes into them. But he said that the smart road will draw a lot of attention to the area, and "money seems to follow attention in these things."
Bev Fitzpatrick Jr., whose enthusiasm in his job as director of the New Century Council has helped bring together hundreds of people in formulating a vision for much of Southwest Virginia, recently said that the smart road would bring up to 3,000 jobs to the region - high tech, high-paying jobs: "the kind of jobs you'd like to create."
"It's a pretty conservative figure based on the $500 million" that would come into the area in research funding and eventually industry, he said. But he admitted that the jobs figure was not based on proven statistics.
"It is the biggest industrial prospect ... in Virginia," he said. But in terms of what it could create in terms of economic development, "There is nobody out there that is an absolute expert."
by CNB