RALEIGH – North Carolina’s transportation woes are dire enough to justify a slight rewrite to an old saying: it’s time for state officials to lead, follow, and get out of the way.

Two news stories last week reinforced the point. The Triangle Business Journal reported that the Triangle region alone contained about 300 bridges that are either structurally deficit or functionally obsolete. Statewide, about 41 percent of all bridges are in one of these two states of disrepair. It’s not just small, narrow bridges across rural streams that don’t make the grade. Of the 10 most-traveled bridges in the state, three of them are deficient or obsolete, all along I-40 (one in Durham and two in Guilford).

What’s worse, the state hasn’t been complying with federal law in conducting adequate inspections to generate these bridge assessments. It’s possible that the problem is worse than reported.

The second troubling story came upon the release of David Hartgen’s 17th annual nationwide study of state highway systems. Hartgen, a professor emeritus at UNC-Charlotte, originated the research project there. Later, the John Locke Foundation published Hartgen’s annual rankings, which use cost and performance data to assess the effectiveness of each state’s highway program. Now, the study is housed at the California-based Reason Foundation, one of the leading think tanks in transportation and mobility studies.

North Carolina originally fared well in Hartgen’s ratings. Later, the state sank into the bottom half of states, the result of years of poor management, inadequate investment, and flawed priorities. Now, our state ranks just above the median at 23rd, an improvement from 31st the previous year. Unfortunately, most of our neighbors outperform us in highway performance (sound familiar?) with South Carolina at 6th, Georgia 10th, and Virginia at 16th.

There are also specific categories of performance where North Carolina looks truly horrible. More than 70 percent of our urban interstates are congested, ranking us 48th. We rank 41st in deficient bridges (see above) and 40th in the pavement conditions of rural interstates. North Carolina looks a little better on safety (29th) and pavement quality of urban interstates (25th), the latter likely a result of the recent opening of several brand-new urban loops.

Our state is far from alone in facing major transportation challenges. Most states have failed to invest, failed to set priorities, and failed to make sufficient use of innovative techniques for financing, surfacing, and maintaining roadways. That’s why North Carolina can rank in the middle and still need billions of dollars in new investment – and new ways of doing things.

I think the next steps for North Carolina can be grouped into three categories:

• Lead: State officials need to talk about transportation rationally, avoiding unrealistic promises to the Left or simplistic rhetoric about gas taxes to the Right. They need to embrace public-private partnerships, direct pricing of limited-access highways, and other innovations. And they need to reform the Department of Transportation to remove the inefficiency, redundancy, and excessive politics that prevent excellent performance.

• Follow: North Carolina’s transportation dollars need to follow clearly evident patterns of congestion, development, and consumer demand. Traffic counts must play a larger role in divvying up construction dollars, a policy that will inevitably send more dollars to fast-growing suburbs and fewer dollars to rural climes. State officials need to explain why such a policy is in the best interest of North Carolina as a whole (see “Lead” above).

• Get Out Of The Way: It has become far too costly to build, expand, and maintain our roads. Policymakers need to clear out the regulatory underbrush so that we see more tractors and hardhats, rather than piles of paper and bureaucrats.

I’m glad to see that transportation has become a major issue in the Beverly Perdue-Pat McCrory race for governor, as well as in some legislative contests. Here’s hoping that we don’t have to see another round of negative headlines before North Carolina has a comprehensive, data-driven, market-friendly agenda for transportation reform underway.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.