Democrats propose ‘paradigm shift’ in NC transportation spending. Rough road ahead?

The N.C. Department of Transportation spends about $5 billion a year building and maintaining a transportation system based primarily on cars and trucks.

Some lawmakers want to change the state’s priorities, giving more say to local communities that want to shift transportation dollars toward transit and projects that would benefit pedestrians and cyclists.

They’ve introduced bills in the House and Senate that they call the Transportation for the Future Act. Among other things, the bills would alter the formula NCDOT uses to allocate money, requiring that at least 20% go to non-highway projects.

“We would stop prioritizing endless expansion of highways at the expense of all other modes of transportation,” Sen. Graig Meyer of Orange County said at a press conference Wednesday. “North Carolina currently dedicates 94% of our transportation funding to highways. And this act lifts the current artificial limitations that we have in place on rail, transit, bike and pedestrian facilities.”

The state’s current system of highways and roads works best for rural and suburban areas but isn’t a good fit for urban areas that want alternatives, said Leonardo Williams, a Durham City Council member who joined Meyer and others. Williams called the bills a “paradigm shift.”

“We can no longer take a one-size-fits-all approach to transit and getting people around,” he said in an interview. “Urban areas are evolving, so our needs are evolving.”

Most of the primary sponsors of the bills, including Meyer, Sen. Natalie Murdock, Rep. Vernetta Alston and Rep. Allen Buansi, are from the Triangle. They say the proposed changes in state law reflect what transportation planners in Durham and Orange counties are trying to do locally.

Last year, the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Metropolitan Planning Organization or MPO approved a 30-year plan that eliminated some long-anticipated highway projects in favor of spending more on transit as well as bike lanes, crosswalks and sidewalks used by cyclists and pedestrians. The MPO board said the change in emphasis better supported its goals of eliminating fatal crashes, reducing carbon emissions to zero and ensuring that everyone has access to affordable transportation.

But the Transportation for the Future Act is not likely to win favor with a majority of state lawmakers. Twenty-two House members and five senators have signed on as sponsors, but all of them are Democrats in a General Assembly dominated by Republicans.

Republican House Speaker Tim Moore made it clear he favors increasing road capacity when he criticized a transportation plan drafted by Charlotte. The city proposed spending too much on light rail, buses and bike lanes and not enough on building more lanes for cars, Moore said after an appearance before a Charlotte business group in January.

“If you put more bike lanes in, that doesn’t mean more people are going to ride their bikes to work — that’s not going to happen,” Moore said, according to Charlotte NPR station WFAE. “You need to build and expand roads because we are driving cars.”

Neither Moore nor Senate Leader Phil Berger responded to a request for comment about the Transportation for the Future Act.

Sponsors will look for Republican support

Other provisions in the bills include:

▪ Changing the criteria that NCDOT uses to prioritize transportation projects. The bill would add “environmental quality” to the list and eliminate “congestion” and the width of lanes and shoulders on existing roadways.

▪ Allowing county governments to seek permission from voters to enact a sales tax of up to 1% for public transportation projects. The law currently limits the size of the local option tax for transportation to 0.25%, except in six urban counties where it’s 0.5%.

▪ Eliminate a provision that bars NCDOT from spending non-federal money on pedestrian and bicycle projects that aren’t tied to road improvements for cars.

While no Republicans have signed on to the bills, Meyer said the sponsors would meet with them behind closed doors to see if there are parts they could support in some form. He noted in particular growing support for lifting the decade-old restriction on spending for pedestrian and bicycle projects.

But Meyer acknowledged that changing how the state allocates money for transportation will take time.

“We have to provide visionary options for future consideration and start conversations,” he said. “We need to start this conversation with other planning organizations and communities all over the state and have them think about how this can benefit them. And they can talk to their local legislators and, over the course of a few years, we can get this done. It’ll just take a little while.”