Road planning from the disco era - the rest of the story

In putting together my op-ed, "Road planning from the disco era," the limitations of space and time required me to leave out some juicy tidbits. You lucky blog readers now may read the rest of the story.

I wrote that the N.C. Turnpike Authority is required by the feds to analyze impacts/effects of the very roads that the authority is, by law, expected to build. The point here is that the legislature, for example with the 1989 Highway Trust Fund, decides to build roads well in advance of any detailed and painstaking analysis of whether the damage they'll do will be worse than their benefits. Today, significant questions have been raised about both Gaston County's Garden Parkway and the Monroe Bypass – the latter having been ordered up by legislature in 1989.

Let's let politicians, not planners, choose the routes. March 17 the General Assembly passed, and the next day the governor signed, a bill that in essence requires the N.C. Turnpike Authority to consider only one route – the most sprawl-inducing one – for the proposed Triangle Expressway Southeast Extension toll road, a link of Raleigh's I-540 outer loop. The bill, sponsored by Wake Sens. Dan Blue, D, and Sen. Richard Stevens, R, appears to box the turnpike authority into such a spot that it might not be able to meet federal law. The feds require analysis of several alternatives.

"We think that they've probably backed themselves into an untenable corner," says David Farren of the Southern Environmental Law Center. He adds, "What's most outrageous is just the idea of going as far out as you possibly can, which means the road is longer, the road is more expensive and it's more sprawl-inducing." The SELC has filed two lawsuits contesting what it says are improprieties and falsifications involving the federal impact study for the Monroe Bypass.

Why spend only $15 million when you can spend $800 million? Another tidbit that didn't make the column: The SELC found a 2007 NCDOT study showing that for $15 million, traffic flows on U.S. 74 in Union County could be improved significantly by changing lights, timing and intersections. The N.C. Turnpike Authority, engaged in studying the $800 million Monroe Bypass which aims to alleviate congestion on U.S. 74, didn't even know that study existed, Farren says.

The state doesn't do land use planning. And Richard Nixon wasn't a crook and Bill Clinton never had sex with that woman. When the state plans highways, it engages in land use planning. Next time the state agrees to spend your tax dollars to build a bypass for a city that hasn't had the sense to say no to congestion-causing highway sprawl development, the state should not pony up dime one until the local government enacts unambiguous land use and zoning ordinances that will prevent said sprawl, including single-family subdivisions, from the new bypass.

The chances of that happening? About like snowballs in hell.

NCDOT chief: No more bypasses of bypasses

Don't expect the state to build your city a bypass to compensate for the existing bypass your local governments have glopped up, State Transportation Secretary Gene Conti said today. "Those days are gone," he said.

OK, he didn't say "glopped up." That's my description. Conti dropped by the Observer editorial board today in between local meetings in town – a business roundtable at UNC Charlotte, and he'll be at the 5 p.m. Charlotte City Council meeting for a discussion about recommendations for the Independence Boulevard project (also see this link, for more information).

He was being questioned about two toll road projects, the so-called Garden Parkway in Gaston County (See "Money-waster road will induce sprawl"), and the proposed Monroe Bypass. Both highways are needed, he said. That's his story and he's sticking to it, obviously. After all, the legislature has ordered them both, and Conti's job is to produce the roads he's charged with.

Neither of those highways, of course, is worth the taxpayer money that will be spent. But the Monroe bypass is at least an attempt, however uncreative, to ease a terribly unpleasant drive along U.S. 74 through Monroe and Union County.

The problem, of course, is that you can hardly go anywhere in North Carolina, or even in the country, and not find a state-taxpayer-built highway envisioned as a "bypass" that has become a traffic nightmare because the local government involved allowed extreme highway glop to be built along it. Even places as comparatively traffic free as Albemarle have clogged bypasses. Shelby wants a bypass of its bypass. They are all what former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory has referred to as "corridors of crap."

So, I asked Conti, should the state's taxpayers reward those towns with another new bypass?

His reply: "Well, no."

"All of us would benefit from a much greater collaboration on those growth issues," he said. He said the DOT is trying to work to bring local governments more into transportation discussions.
"The days of just trying to continually build bypasses of bypasses, those days are gone," he said.

So Shelby, Albemarle, Asheboro, Ramseur and all the other N.C. towns that have allowed corridors of crap along your state highways, be forewarned.

The realist in me, though, requires me to mention this: If the legislature orders a highway to be built, as it did via the Highway Trust Fund of the late 1980s, there's not much a DOT secretary can do about it.