You can add something new to the perennial rivalry between North Carolina’s three largest metropolitan areas – Charlotte, the Triangle, and the Triad. It turns out that the latter two are envious of Charlotte’s higher tax burden.

Yes, you read that right. Politicians and “community leaders” in the Triangle and Triad are looking longingly at Charlotte’s extra half-cent sales tax, which kicks Mecklenburg County’s combined sales tax up to 7.5 percent. The extra tax generates millions that Charlotte-Mecklenburg leaders are using to build a new rail system and to expand and upgrade its bus system.

The tax was enacted in 1998 after a referendum authorized by the General Assembly. Believing that their transportation needs are at least as deserving of higher taxes as Charlotte’s, groups in the other metros are now preparing to push their legislative delegations for additional taxing authority.

In the Triangle, the scope of the proposal came to light over the weekend in this News & Observer story. In brief, the mayors of Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill are asking for permission to double vehicle registration fees and a new 5 percent sales tax on motor fuels. The resulting $52 million a year would go to speed up highway projects and build out the farcical Triangle Transit Authority’s proposed rail system.

In the Triad, leaders in Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, and surrounding communities aren’t as far along in their railroad dreaming as the Triangle and Charlotte are – just give them some time – but they already have a regional entity, the Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation (PART), which is using a legislature-authorized tax on rental cars to run regional buses. Improbably, they cite the Triangle Transit Authority’s nearly empty regional buses as an inspiration, and thus illustrate little in the way of common sense. Various groups throughout the Triad are talking about the next step: bus service to cities as disparate as Reidsville and Lexington, and a rail line between Greensboro and Winston-Salem. They want more taxing authority to pull this off.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this entire political movement is nuts. There are few viable markets for mass transit in the United States west and south of the Hudson River. None of these markets can be found in North Carolina, where urban freedom (my preferred term for “sprawl”) and suburban living prevail over claustrophobic and high-cost density.

Yes, we do need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more each year on effective transportation investment in North Carolina. But that means building and improving highways. And we don’t need new state or local taxes to do the job. As my Locke Foundation colleagues have explained in two recent papers — Road & Track and On the Road Again – we simply need to spend our existing highway revenues more effectively.

And Charlotte needs a tax cut.