RALEIGH – Thanks to the 2008 election cycle and the creation of a new study commission, North Carolinians are about to hear a lot of political talk on transportation issues. Much of the debate will involve claims and counterclaims about perceived inequities in local and regional highway funding.
To sort it all out, I recommend that readers begin by downloading a PDF file, “Transportation Revenue Return Rate by County,” from the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO). It depicts, both in graph and table form, the 15-year trend in transportation revenue and expenditure in each county.
What leaps right out at you is the color-coded graph, which appears to demonstrate conclusively that the counties getting the best transportation deal are located mostly in the northeast corner of North Carolina – which happens to be the domain of longtime Senate leader Marc Basnight – and in some pockets of the western mountains.
So are North Carolina’s major cities and Piedmont region being ripped off big-time by Basnight and rural interests? Hold on – the story is a bit more complicated than that.
If you look more closely at CAMPO’s analysis, what you see is that all of the counties with a huge excess of DOT spending over revenue – I’m defining “huge” as at least double the dollars spent for every dollar sent in – are sparsely populated by people but heavily populated by problematic topography. It’s much more expensive per mile to build a road through marshes, over rivers, and up mountains than it is to build in dry flatlands or rolling hills. Furthermore, many people who drive the roads in small counties such as Madison (where DOT spending was 549 percent of reported county revenue), Tyrrell (504 percent), Graham (329 percent), Alleghany (241 percent), Hyde (238 percent), and Washington (216 percent) live in more populous neighboring counties, or even further way, and so the highway revenue they generate is allocated elsewhere (where their cars are registered and they tend to buy most of their fuel).
I’m not saying that the disparities are meaningless. Indeed, I am firmly convinced that North Carolina needs to change its equity formula to take traffic flows and congestion more into account – a change that would certainly route more transportation dollars to metro areas, mostly in the Piedmont. But I would counsel caution in interpreting the data.
Even a cautious interpretation reveals the most-acute problem: insufficient investment in transportation infrastructure in fast-growing, suburbanizing counties. Of the 21 counties where expenditures were less than 60 percent of the reported gas- and car-tax revenues, three are core counties of major N.C. metro areas: Forsyth, Cumberland, and Catawba. Two others, Pitt and Nash, are core counties for smaller metro areas. And 12 are suburbanizing counties near metro cores, including Union, Johnston, Orange, Davidson, Brunswick, Gaston, Harnett, and Davie.
These are the communities – mostly but not entirely in the Piedmont – where a large share of North Carolina’s population growth is occurring. In part due to inadequate highway investment, congestion is worsening in these jurisdictions at a worrying rate. If the primary goal of state transportation policy is to move people and freight as rapidly and efficiently as possible, which it should be, then these communities ought to be receiving a significantly higher share of North Carolina’s transportation investment.
I recognize that, given differences in road-building costs and other factors, there will be an inevitable redistribution of some funds from bigger, richer places to smaller, poorer places. The transportation rates-of-return that CAMPO calculated will never approach 100 percent for each county. But the current variance is far too large. No community should be below 60 percent over a time span as long as 15 years, and indeed a reasonable goal ought to be for spending in high-traffic counties to average at least 80 percent of revenue collections over time. Mecklenburg, Wake, and Buncombe are all somewhat below that mark – and, as I noted, other urban and suburban counties are way below it.
If transportation is to be thought of as truly a statewide issue, rather than a local or regional one, that makes the case even stronger to rectify the funding inequities. I mean no offense to rural folks, but the simple fact of the matter is that traffic congestion is a greater economic and safety threat in North Carolina’s metro areas than is insufficient transportation access in rural counties.
Sound public policy requires setting firm priorities and making tough decisions. Are the governor and General Assembly up to the task?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.