roads

For over fifteen years, the Triangle Transit Authority has pursued a regional rail for North Carolina’s capital region, to no avail. At the same time traffic congestion in the Triangle has worsened, with other viable alternatives largely being ignored. Recognizing this, it is important to understand the causes of congestion in order to develop workable solutions to the problem.

RALEIGH – Light rail isn’t the solution to traffic congestion in the Triangle. The good news is that there are several immediate, common-sense, and far less costly solutions available to…

North Carolina has the second-largest state-owned road system in the US, almost 79,000 miles. A study in 2000 for the John Locke Foundation using data from 1998 showed that the system was in quite poor shape on key indicators. Clearly, North Carolina is losing the battle on road conditions. The purpose of this analysis is to update the earlier study by gathering and reporting on road conditions for each county and determining how conditions in each county have changed since 1998.

US road conditions worsened from 2001 to 2002, for the first time since the mid 1990’s, even though the federal government and the states substantially increased their dollars, according to the latest annual review of state road performance prepared by Professor David T. Hartgen at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

This study carefully reviews the growth of North Carolina’s 1551 Census tracts during the 1990s compared with the locations of major road improvements. Tract data on changes in population, demographics, prior density, and location are merged with detailed data on 312 major road projects completed during the 1990s, and the relationships between road investments and growth are determined for each of the 12 commuting regions.

RALEIGH—North Carolina should spend an additional $410 million annually over the next seven years — without raising taxes — to get back on track in maintaining and expanding the state…