My latest column for Carolina Journal is on Gov. Pat McCrory’s proposed overhaul of state transportation policy:

RALEIGH — In April, the McCrory administration outlined a new state transportation policy. While as always, the devil is in the details, this plan is a welcome step forward for transportation policy in North Carolina.

The last time the state seriously rethought its road policy was in 1989 with the creation of the Highway Trust Fund. The idea was that for a limited period the state would increase the gasoline tax to fund certain road projects. These fell into three categories: building urban loops around the major cities in the state, making major improvement on specified “intrastate highways,” and paving dirt roads.

If this sounds like a massive political compromise ensuring that virtually every community across the state got a piece of the action, it is. The funding formula is another massive compromise distributing money around the state for intrastate highway projects.

The Highway Trust Fund quickly proved to be a disappointment. Revenues were overestimated while the cost of building all the projects on the list wound up being much higher than originally thought. A number of the specified projects were unbuildable. And the intrastate system, based on allocating funds by state highway districts, created bizarre funding tradeoffs.

Some 15 years after the Highway Trust Fund was created, North Carolina warmed to the notion of toll roads due in part to the failings of the 1989 highway law. State lawmakers suddenly had not started spending their available free time reading Reason Foundation transportation policy papers. Rather, establishing toll roads let them get around some of the limits of the existing system, which had allowed powerful legislators pushing pricey projects of questionable worth to cut into the funding line.

The problems with the system became apparent a few years ago when the state was trying to figure out how to widen Interstate 85 over the Yadkin River. I-85 is the state’s most critical highway, connecting the Triangle and Triad to Charlotte. And the old, narrow bridge over the Yadkin was a major bottleneck.

Bridge projects are notoriously expensive, and replacing that bridge was projected to cost $200 million, more than was available for the local highway district. The state had no real answer on how to address its No. 1 transportation priority. The N.C. Department of Transportation floated the idea of using tolls to help finance the project, but that amounted to desperation more than anything else.

Ultimately, a small statewide discretionary mobility fund was created as a Band-Aid to get the I-85 Yadkin River bridge funded.

Gov. Pat McCrory’s proposal builds on that concept in a very big way. Under his plan, 40 percent of capital construction would be allocated on a statewide basis, 40 percent regionally, and highway divisions would allocate the remaining 20 percent of construction money for smaller-scale local projects.

And unlike the 1989 law, McCrory proposes to use statistical data to put the state’s scarce transportation dollars to their best possible use. State-level projects would be purely data-driven, with regional projects giving 70 percent weight to statistical measures and 30 percent weight to local project preferences. District-level projects would give equal weight to data-driven measures and local rankings of projects.

McCrory’s proposal doesn’t increase the total amount of money available for transportation projects. And at some point, that will become an issue. As cars have become more fuel efficient, the amount of money the gas tax generates has been going down over time. But you can’t ask residents to pay more, whether through higher gas tax rates, tolls, or higher fees, until the state first makes the best use of the dollars it now has at its disposal.