RALEIGH – Sunday’s News & Observer of Raleigh had a lengthy news analysis on North Carolina’s highway woes. An otherwise interesting piece was marred by several references to one of the most misunderstood and misleading “facts” that the political class thinks it knows about North Carolina: that we have the “second-largest” state-run highway system in the United States.

You hear this statement a lot in public policy circles. Some cite it as part of garden-variety Tar Heel boosterism (along the lines of “if only they knew this, the rest of the country wouldn’t keep forgetting us” and “we are First in Flight, we are, we really are – pay no attention to that Ohioan behind the curtain”).

Others, the Smart Growth crowd that has sprawled so much as to escape its natural bounds of Carrboro and Chapel Hill, cite North Carolina’s status as “second in highways” as part of an indictment of the gas-guzzling, suburban, transit-unfriendly nightmare in which we live (obviously the two groups, the NC-lovers and the NC-loathers, have little in common).

The statistic doesn’t mean what the N&O and everyone else thinks it means, though. North Carolina isn’t overflowing with highways. According to the most recent federal study, we rank 16th in the nation in total miles of public roads – with about 100,000 – even though we rank 11th in population. Other states of a similar size have more roadways, including Georgia (115,000 miles), Missouri (123,000), and Michigan (122,000).

North Carolina is second in the nation only in the mileage owned and maintained by the state (Texas is number one). This reflects an issue of jurisdiction, not relative investment in highways. Several sources in the N&O story try to suggest that the second-placed ranking signifies the state’s lack of attention to maintenance over new road construction, but this is just plain silly. North Carolina suffers from unsafe roadways, traffic congestion, inaccessibility to rural areas, and other transportation problems because it does not invest wisely or sufficiently in highways, transferring hundreds of millions of dollars a year from taxes paid by highway users to fund government functions other than building and maintaining the highways.

Gov. Mike Easley’s new budget would worsen the situation with another raid on the Highway Trust fund, to the tune of $210 million.

And that really is a fact.