The Charlotte Chamber of Commerce has officially noticed that Charlotte needs more spending on roads. The Charlotte region is billions short in needed road construction money a new Chamber-touted study finds:
“The state of North Carolina is just not building the roads to keep up with the population,” said Chamber of Commerce Public Policy Vice-President Natalie English. “We could decide tomorrow not to invite anybody else into our community and we still don’t have adequate road infrastructure.”
Yes, yes exactly. The John Locke Foundation has pointed this out repeatedly, as has UNCC’s David Hartgen in his research. Charlotte faces a traffic congestion timebomb and official city, county, and state policy is to do nothing about it.
Actually, that is not quite true. The official policy is to build $9 billion worth of trains while letting the roads back up to such an extent that commuters are forced out of their cars and into the trains. Of course, this plan has been tried elsewhere in America and it never, ever works. Instead, quality of life suffers, time and money is wasted and communities are left poorer.
Now that the Chamber officially sees the problem, it would be great to have the Chamber’s help in actually working towards a solution instead of protecting the status quo policy in Charlotte.