RALEIGH – The North Carolina Board of Transportation seems poised to approve a promising initiative to address traffic congestion in the fast-growing urban regions of the state.

Do I refer to a new choo-choo project? No, fortunately. Do I refer to a major shift in gas-tax dollars to highly traveled urban and suburban corridors where lots of those gas-tax dollars are collected? No, unfortunately. I am talking about a proposed $2 million project to improve the collection and transmission of real-time traffic information to motorists and truckers. Expected to be operational next year, the new system will rely on high-speed Internet links and microwave sensors powered by solar panels.

Improve traffic signals, motorist information, and accident management are underappreciated but indispensable elements of any rational plan to address congestion in North Carolina and across the country. In their book The Road Less Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think, and What We Can Do About It, Ted Balaker and Sam Staley from the Reason Foundation offer a top-10 list of steps that governments at all levels can take to address our transportation needs speedily and efficiently. Among the policy and design recommendations are these two items relevant to today’s topic:

Traffic Signal Optimization
Surprisingly, many cities have yet to do this, despite huge potential benefits. Traffic signal optimization can reduce stop-and-go traffic by 40 percent, cut gas consumption by 10 percent, emissions by 22 percent, and travel times by 25 percent. A study of 26 such projects in Texas found benefits outweighed costs 38 to 1.

Incident Management
For each minute that traffic is blocked by an accident, five minutes of congestion are added to a commute. In most urban areas, much more can be done to rapidly and effectively manage accidents.

North Carolina’s highway system is a complicated network of major roads, side streets, intersections, ramps, driveways, signage, information, policing, accident response, and weather response. While few of us have the expertise to know precisely how to design and operate the system – indeed, while it is a government program with an inevitable degree of centralized management, much of the relevant day-to-day information is broadly dispersed among individuals reacting to unforeseen events – we can at least broadly agree on goals and priorities. Surely chief among them should be to move people and freight as smoothly and safely as possible. Informing drivers with timely information is a critical means of accomplishing the goal, be it through broadcasting, the Internet, or smart signage.

Perhaps this all sounds wonky and snooze-inducing, but consider how many major traffic snarls you’ve been in lately that turn out to be caused way up the road by accidents, sometimes just fender-benders. Using in-car devices and messages to divert traffic to alternative routes, and ensuring that damaged vehicles can be moved out of the way quickly and safely, can significantly improve the real rate of return on the investment that motorists make in the highway system every time they fill up the tank or buy a car. By reducing idling, these policies would also further reduce harmful tailpipe emissions (I say “further reduce” because many people remain under the mistaken impression that air pollution in North Carolina is getting worse, not better).

Sexier controversies about transit, land-use regulation, and economic development attract more political and media attention, and that’s understandable. But improving the information flow, and thus the traffic flow, is such a good idea that it deserves widespread recognition. And a bright green light.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.