And the hits just keep coming.
UNCC traffic guru David Hartgen has just released a massive new study on road building in American cities which concludes we can beat congestion with more roads. If — and this is a big if with NC DOT calling the shots — those roads are built where they are needed.
In fact, a good first step in improving road building in North Carolina would be to replace NC DOT with a roomful of gibbons and a giant map of the state. Could not produce worse priorities.
Meanwhile, Hartgen makes it clear what Charlotte must do, and it ain’t build more choo-choo trains:
Charlotte has looked to light rail to help address congestion, but new road capacity would prove much more effective, Hartgen said. “About 1,070 lane-miles are needed to deal with this congestion, costing about $2.9 billion over 25 years,” he said. “That’s about half of what we want to spend on the transit lines. In other words, for half of that transit cost, we could actually reduce Charlotte’s present and predicted congestion.”
And here’s how Hartgen himself puts it in an op-ed:
Some cities, like Charlotte and San Jose, Calif., are crossing their fingers and praying that people will embrace transit. In both cities less than 3 percent of daily commuters ride transit. Yet both are spending well over 50 percent of their money on transit projects. If massive numbers of people don’t give up their cars — and there’s no evidence they will — those cities and many like them will have condemned themselves to traffic purgatory. Indeed, instead of trying to reduce congestion, most cities have resigned themselves to just slowing its growth a little.
It is not a stretch to say that we now have 10 solid years of excellent research showing us that plowing billions of dollars into mass transit instead of building roads is absolutely insane. Charlotte is on a glide path to total gridlock, which will quickly be followed by economic decline.
Charlotte’s public and semi-public leadership — that’s you Uptown crowd — must understand that unless Charlotte breaks out of the mass transit suicide pact everything they cherish — the hustle, the bustle, the growth, the rah-rah — will go away. Forever.
Let’s see if any current or prospective local office-holder embraces Hartgen’s research and demands that Charlotte start building roads. Again.
