Weekly Briefing

New transportation reform coalition tells General Assembly: Now's the time to get ahead of the state's population boom

It's been said more than once of late, but it's a remarkable fact, so it bears repeating. By the year 2030, more than 12 million people will call North Carolina home. It will be as if the entire population of South Carolina picked up and moved to North Carolina during the first three decades of the 21^st Century. 

According to some, this is no particular cause for alarm or any noteworthy change of plans. All we need to do is root out some of the corruption in the state Department of Transportation, let the "free market" work its magic, and North Carolina can simply keep on keeping on - building an almost endless web of inner loops, outer loops, bypasses, private toll ways, strip malls and suburban cul de sacs.

Look out Atlanta and Houston, the Metrolina, Triangle and Triad regions are hot on your heels! Carbon emissions and global warming? Heck, there's nothing we can do, so just roll up your windows and turn down the A/C.

The emergence of a responsible new voice

Happily, this kind of "Crisis? What crisis?" attitude seems to be on the defensive in state public policy circles these days. Indeed, there are encouraging signs that a fast growing number of North Carolinians are calling on state policymakers to pursue a smarter and greener path - especially when it comes to transportation policy and planning for growth.     

One of the best and most recent expressions of this new and progressive movement was on display yesterday at the General Assembly when a new reform group known as North Carolinians for Transportation Reform and Modernization (NC TRAM) made its initial public appearance. The occasion for the unveiling was the latest meeting of the legislature's most prominent transportation policy study group, the 21^st Century Transportation Committee.

NC TRAM is a coalition of a dozen social justice and environmental nonprofits that came together earlier this year. Its mission is to convince state leaders to fashion new and intentional solutions to the enormous challenges posed to North Carolina by several critical transportation challenges, including:

• Explosive population growth,
• Crumbling infrastructure,
• Soaring energy and construction costs,
• An inadequate and outdated revenue system,
• A Department of Transportation badly in need of reform, and
• An increasingly fragile environment.

To address these daunting problems, the group has developed five rather "wonkish" but on-the-money guiding principles that it urged committee members to make their own:

"1. Project prioritization.  Resources will always be limited. Projects should be prioritized to receive funding using established, objective criteria that reflect statewide needs - not, as they too often are today, by political patronage exercised behind closed doors. The prioritization process should be transparent and allow for meaningful public participation.

2. Fix it First.  The first priority for limited resources should be to protect the investments we've already made, but our current practices heavily favor new construction. A better approach is to balance maintenance and new construction to ensure we can keep our existing transportation infrastructure safe and operating at peak efficiency.

3. Multi-modal Alternatives. North Carolina should significantly increase spending to provide accessible and affordable transportation options to meet the growing needs of communities, including rail, bus, para-transit, and bike and pedestrian alternatives.

4. Linking Land Use and Transportation. As our transportation needs change, spending should be coordinated with land use planning to promote long-term congestion relief; transit-oriented and mixed use development; affordable housing options; access to jobs and services; improved public health; and air, water and land conservation.

5. Funding Fairness.  New revenue sources for transportation should be chosen with attention to fairness, equity, and sustainability - not raiding health, education and human service budgets, or pursuing privatization schemes that would transfer public infrastructure to the private sector."

Binding these principles together is the NC TRAM members' belief that:

"These recommendations reflect the view that transportation infrastructure should serve all segments of society; promote sound economic development; and contribute to a high quality of life for North Carolina's residents. Any increase in funding from the NC General Assembly to NC DOT should be conditioned on the incorporation of these policies and independent verification that "best practices," including necessary structural changes, have been adopted and internalized at the staff and board levels.

A better road

On Monday, two NC TRAM spokespersons, Bill Wilson of AARP North Carolina and David Farren of the Southern Environmental Law Center described the group, its principles and its recommendations to the study committee. Their basic message was simple: North Carolina transportation policy cannot continue along the same old crumbling road. The state must pursue a new anti-sprawl, pro-planning, pro-public transportation agenda. You can view their slide presentation here.

To bolster their argument, Wilson and Farren highlighted several powerful facts, including:

• In addition to growing by leaps and bounds North Carolina's population includes a rapidly growing number of people who are, because of age or disability, unable to drive. For instance, the number of persons 65 or older will grow from 969,000 in 2000 to 2.145 million in 2030. As many as 21% of North Carolinians have a disability and as many as a third of this group do not have adequate transportation.
• On the environmental front, North Carolina's open space is being paved over at a furious rate. In the Triangle, for instance, land development is proceeding at a pace that is four times the rate of population growth. When this number is combined with explosive growth in per capita vehicle miles traveled, it's no surprise that North Carolina's air and water are suffering. As Farren noted, several North Carolina metro areas are already in violation of federal smog standards and mobile sources (i.e. cars) are the biggest single contributor to smog and U.S. carbon emissions.

Happily, according to Wilson and Farren, there are feasible, even potentially popular, solutions to the state's transportation challenges. At the top any such list is public transportation. At present, only 3% of the state DOT budget is devoted to public transportation. As the NC TRAM presentation noted, however, there is broad-based public support for changing this equation.

According to a very recent Elon University poll of North Carolinians, "public transportation" is, after rising gas prices, the second most important transportation issue facing the state. According to the same poll, "Improve public transportation services" was identified by more than 80% of poll respondents as the most favored "best option" to address congestion. Recent experience in Charlotte confirms the public's support (and willingness to pay) for public transit options. 

The bottom line

Given the fact that North Carolinians are already struggling with the effects of sprawl, congestion and environmental degradation, the notion that the state would do anything other than aggressively confront its transportation challenges seems almost preposterous. Still, stranger things have happened. Though ordinarily at odds with each other, the ideological right could join forces with, for a lack of a better term, the "good ol' boy network" within the transportation establishment to torpedo real and progressive reform.

In the coming months and years it will be incumbent upon North Carolinians who care about the state's future to monitor and support the work of advocates like the ones at NC TRAM. Let's hope this week's coming out party was just the beginning of a long and productive effort.  

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Weekly Briefing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.