Spend much time driving on a busy North Carolina road, and you’ll realize the state has plenty of challenges in dealing with public transportation. Dr. David Hartgen, professor emeritus of transportation studies at UNC-Charlotte, president of the Hartgen Group, and adjunct scholar at the John Locke Foundation, recently discussed some of those challenges with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: There are plenty of problems with North Carolina’s transportation system. Let’s start with what you think is the No. 1 problem.
Hartgen: Well, the basic problem is the huge disconnect between the size of the system and the amount of resources we have to deal with it. It’s the second largest highway system in the country — second only to Texas, almost 80,000 miles — yet we have a very thin budget, about $3 billion, to run this system on. We have been making slow but steady progress on basic indicators regarding this system, things like pavement congestion, bridge condition, safety, and so on. But other states are making even more progress than we are, so we [rank] basically in the 30s and 40s if you look at us nationwide against the other 50 states — in terms of basic indicators of system performance. We have a huge challenge both on the transportation side of the ledger — that is the highway side of the ledger — and now, of course, also with regard to transit. Other issues there as well.
Kokai: One of the issues, I understand, is trying to find money to pay for these things based on the types of money we have flowing into the state government.
Hartgen: Yes, that’s right. The state is limited in the amount of resources that it can use for this problem. We’re basically at the top, or close to the top, with regard to the state motor vehicle tax and fuel tax. Those are both quite high relative to other states. We don’t have any large transit systems that require a great deal of funding, so we don’t get a lot of money back on the transit formulas from Washington. And we are a donor state. That is, we give more money to Washington than comes back. When you spread out this money over a very large system, it means that there’s a real challenge in maintaining a system and keeping it in good condition, and an even bigger challenge in expanding it or improving it.
Kokai: You mentioned transit. We want to get into that issue as well, because the emphasis, or overemphasis, on transit seems to be one of the problems that’s also plaguing North Carolina transportation.
Hartgen: Well, in North Carolina we have 10 medium-sized transit systems. The largest, in Charlotte, has about 20 million riders annually. That sounds like a lot, but if you look at all 10 of these systems together, together they constitute less than one quarter of 1 percent of the travel for their respective regions. So while they’re a miniscule portion of regional travel, they’re now getting somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money. … While this is happening, there’s almost no discussion in the legislature, or in the current budget discussions, about how to fund the bigger problems, which are the condition of the road system, the significant number of deficient bridges we have, and perhaps most importantly, rapidly increasing congestion.
Kokai: Congestion, I would think, would be the thing that people in Charlotte, the Triangle — probably growing in the Triad and other larger areas of North Carolina — will really notice about North Carolina’s transportation. That it’s just getting more crowded on the roads.
Hartgen: Well, North Carolina is not thought of as being a congested state, but in fact we are intensely congested. We have no very large cities, but we have quite a few cities that are medium-size, and their major arterial systems and interstate systems have mostly not been widened for 25 years. So basically we’re at the top, pretty much, with regard to the capacity of those systems. So when we look at North Carolina versus other states, we’re fifth or sixth in line in terms of the percentage of our interstate system that’s congested. That’s a very large percentage, and it’s a surprise to most people from other states. It’s no surprise, of course, to people who live in North Carolina. They know the road system here is getting congested.
Kokai: So if congestion is one of our biggest problems, are we doing the right things to address it?
Hartgen: Well, not really. Not only do we have problems with regard to the highway system, but then, within the allocation of money, we’re basically passing out the money for the highway system on the basis of geography and population, rather than on the basis of needs. So nothing in our distribution formulas relate to our basic needs such as pavement condition, congestion, traffic, or bridge condition, or accidents. All of these criteria are essentially ignored. So within the major distribution regions of the state, we simply allocate money to those regions, and then we pick projects pretty much by political pressure within the state. So we have basically not been able to drive this system with data. Instead, we’re driving it with political pressure. The result has been that we have made significant investments in some roads that are not necessary, widenings that aren’t needed, while other portions of the system languish because they don’t have enough funding to handle other, more worthy projects.
Kokai: You made a number of recommendations in a presentation to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftsbury Society. What are some of the things that we could change about the way North Carolina handles transportation now?
Hartgen: I think the fundamental problem we need to get to do is to convert our method of selecting projects from a politically driven process to a data-driven process. That means gathering information about the worthiness of various proposals and vetting them head-to-head against one another and against our needs so that we can choose the very best projects for the state over the long term. If we do that, we’ll fund good projects everywhere, and there are good projects throughout the state, in rural areas and in urban areas and in suburban areas. No one area of the state has good or bad projects. But we fear to do this because each of us fears that if we let go of the railing and release our political pressure, then we won’t have the numbers to justify our projects. I’m confident that the numbers will stand the scrutiny of vetting and that better numbers will help us select better projects.
Kokai: Speaking of numbers and whether they will help justify a project or kill it, is there any reason for North Carolina to invest more money in these rail projects that are already existing in Charlotte and still being talked about in the Triangle?
Hartgen: With regard to the Charlotte system, we’ve spent a total of about $520 million up to this point. That is the cost of construction and the operation, and we have now a situation in which the ridership on the … rail line is dropping. It has declined about 18 percent since the peak last summer, but surprisingly, the ridership on the bus system in that community has stabilized. So as people rethink the value of transit service to themselves, they are evaluating whether that service really helps them. The remaining ridership, I think, is likely to continue to fall. … So I’m expecting considerable softness in these numbers over the short term. With regard to the other projects around this state, none of the projects I’ve looked at would pass the present federal criteria for federal funding for new rail starts, and so the picture looking ahead is, I think, quite clouded to say the least, about new transit initiatives. … Even if new local transit money were to become available, it’s unlikely that significant federal money would follow that, because the competition for this money is very intense, and frankly, [North Carolina]’s regions are not dense enough or large enough to compete with other projects nationwide.