RALEIGH – There is a fundamental conflict of visions in the debate about North Carolina’s transportation challenges, a debate furthered Tuesday morning by a spirited NC Spin Transportation Forum in Raleigh. In honor of one of my favorite loopy sci-fi films of the 1950s, let’s call this conflict “When World Collide.”
Some activists live in a fantasy world where adding road capacity increases congestion, there is no need to set firm priorities with scarce highway dollars, and large numbers of future North Carolina families will prefer small, yard-less homes in dense, mixed-use neighborhoods near train stops to today’s suburban neighborhoods and lifestyles.
The rest of us live in the real world. In reality, adding road capacity decreases congestion (for the system as a whole, at least). In reality, highway dollars spent chasing rural economic-development schemes represent a lost opportunity to move more North Carolinians faster, imposing in effect a “congestion tax” on metro-area commuters that costs about $850 million a year in wasted time and trouble. And in reality, relatively low-density neighborhoods in suburbs of some kind will continue to be by far the dominant consumer preference (though other products will be available, and chosen by a much smaller number of most young singles, retirees, and assistant professors of sociology).
The realists aren’t necessarily making a value judgment. They are simply respecting the choices of others. There is little evidence for the proposition, for example, that transit usage will ever play a significant role in North Carolina commuting patterns (though on other grounds one could argue for the provision of a transportation safety net for those unable to own or operate their own cars).
Although there was an uptick in bus ridership last year during the gas-price shock, the longer-term trends just aren’t promising. In recent decades, transit’s share of trips has been declining, not increasing. Just from 2000 to 2006, the rate in the Triangle fell from 1.3 percent of total commutes to 0.6 percent. Imagine that somehow the transit share quadrupled in the next 15 years. That would still make it a tiny fraction of the total, only a little more than half the current rate of commutes done via telephone and computer – working at home displaced 4 percent of commutes in 2006, up from 2.8 percent in 2000, and that upward trend shows no signs of abating.
The personal automobile, usually carrying only the driver, is by far the dominant mode of travel in North Carolina today, at greater than 90 percent in every non-college town in the state. Imagine that this percentage fell a lot during the next 15 years. Would it be realistic to expect the share to fall much below 80 percent? Nope. Similarly, while there has been a noticeable spurt of condo development in Charlotte, Raleigh, and other downtowns, the several thousand units involved are a tiny fraction of the new home capacity being added year in, year out in fast-growing counties around metro areas and the coast. It will take a long, long time for high-density, transit-friendly neighborhoods to become a significant share.
By that time, perhaps some of these won’t be in downtowns but in more far-out locales. In keeping with the theme, let’s call that eventuality “Destination Moon.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.