Long-Range Transportation Planning: NVTA is responsible for developing Northern Virginia’s long-range transportation plan, called TransAction, updated every five years. The current version of TransAction can be found here. The long-range transportation plan takes into account other state, regional, local and transit agency planning efforts. To be eligible for funding using the NVTA’s Regional Revenue Funds, candidate projects must first be included in current version of TransAction.

Programming: Periodically, jurisdictions and agencies will be invited to submit projects for funding consideration through the NVTA’s ‘Call for Projects.’ The submitted projects will be subject to the HB 599 Evaluation and Rating process .The HB 599 process assigns a numerical rating to each project submitted by the NVTA, which provides an indication of the relative level of congestion relief attributable to each submitted project. To be eligible for funding using the NVTA’s Regional Revenue Funds, candidate projects must have an HB 599 rating.

The ‘NVTA Project Selection Process’ takes into account each project’s HB 599 rating, among other quantitative and qualitative criteria reflecting the Authority’s priorities, to determine which projects will be considered for inclusion in the Six Year Program. The Six Year Program will list the projects that the Authority intends to fund using its Regional Revenue Funds. While the Six Year Program covers a six-year timespan, it is updated every two years. 

The diagram below provides an overview of the NVTA’s processes: the long-range transportation planning (top half of diagram) and programming (lower half of diagram). Each of these processes is summarized below.

Funding: Projects included in the Six Year Program are funded using the NVTA’s Regional Revenue Funds. The amount of Regional Revenue Funds available each year depends on the performance of three specific revenue streams – Retail Sales & Use Tax, Grantors Tax and Transient Occupancy Tax.

Projects selected for funding may have additional funding sources however, including the NVTA’s Local Distribution Funds (allocated at the sole discretion of the sponsoring jurisdiction.) Other non-NVTA funding sources include Federal (i.e. CMAQ/RSTP allocations), State (subject to prioritization using the new statewide HB 2 process), Local and Agency funds.

Regional Revenue Funds can be directly used to fund projects (PayGo) or to finance bonds that have been issued specifically to fund projects included in the Six Year Program.