RALEIGH — North Carolina has not been blessed recently with what I would consider to be sensible thinking on transportation policy.
Back in 1989, to get lawmakers from across the state to vote for a multi-billion-dollar Transportation Improvement Program, then-Gov. Jim Martin and legislative leaders had to agree to some questionable highway priorities, including the paving of rural secondary roads with only a few dozen cars traversing them each day. This promise is still costing highway users tens of millions of dollars a year that would more productively be spent alleviating major traffic snarls.
More recently, the General Assembly approved a plan from Gov. Mike Easley to redirect some bonding authority originally approved by North Carolina voters back in the 1990s. They were told the highway bonds, borrowed against the proceeds from taxes imposed by that 1989 legislation, would speed up loop highways around the state’s major cities, among other high priorities. But now, Easley is steering of some these dollars into road resurfacing and mass transit.
Speaking of the latter, the state’s three largest metropolitan areas — Charlotte, the Triangle, and eventually the Triad — are planning to devote billions of dollars among them to build and operate rail lines within communities woefully ill-suited for such 19th-century technology. Again, not sensible, however benign the motivation.
In Monday’s News & Observer of Raleigh, however, a glimmer of sense was evident. To cope with escalating traffic on the I-40 corridor through Research Triangle Park — among the busiest traffic spots in the state — state and local officials are talking about adding separate and possibly elevated high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes to encourage carpooling and bus usage. More importantly, some are even talking about making them high-occupancy-toll (HOT) lanes, which would allow commuters willing to pay a little more to use the new capacity.
For regular users, a HOT lane doesn’t have to become a quarter-pitching bottleneck. Smart cards read by sensors can debit the toll funds from the account of registered users. Robert Poole at the Reason Public Policy Institute in California has written extensively about how to use tolls and HOT lanes to make the most efficient use of roads to alleviate traffic congestion. Those whose reflex is to say “no” to the idea should poke around a little at RPPI’s website — and consider that the alternatives are likely to be political attempts to raise taxes on property, cars, or gasoline (gee, thanks, as I just spent more than $30 filling up my tank).
Roads are public goods only because it is very costly to charge users and exclude nonpayers. Until the automobile came along, very few good roads were even built, other than for military purposes, because of the collection problem. Afterwards, taxes on motor fuels offered a rough approximation of a user fee but did not eliminate problems of misallocation and cross-subsidy for city streets and unlimited-access roads. Limited-access highways, on the other hand, are well-suited to the user-pays principle. That improves efficiency, because those who use the highways more pay more for their upkeep, and is also more consistent with limited government, since tollways reduce cross-subsidies and the temptation of planning elites to try to tell the community as a whole where to live and how to travel.
Sensible thinking on transportation. Who would have thunk it?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.