Don’t expect the state to build your city a bypass to compensate for the existing bypass your local governments have glopped up, State Transportation Secretary Gene Conti said today. “Those days are gone,” he said.
OK, he didn’t say “glopped up.” That’s my description. Conti dropped by the Observer editorial board today in between local meetings in town – a business roundtable at UNC Charlotte, and he’ll be at the 5 p.m. Charlotte City Council meeting for a discussion about recommendations for the Independence Boulevard project (also see this link, for more information).
He was being questioned about two toll road projects, the so-called Garden Parkway in Gaston County (See “Money-waster road will induce sprawl”), and the proposed Monroe Bypass. Both highways are needed, he said. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it, obviously. After all, the legislature has ordered them both, and Conti’s job is to produce the roads he’s charged with.
Neither of those highways, of course, is worth the taxpayer money that will be spent. But the Monroe bypass is at least an attempt, however uncreative, to ease a terribly unpleasant drive along U.S. 74 through Monroe and Union County.
The problem, of course, is that you can hardly go anywhere in North Carolina, or even in the country, and not find a state-taxpayer-built highway envisioned as a “bypass” that has become a traffic nightmare because the local government involved allowed extreme highway glop to be built along it. Even places as comparatively traffic free as Albemarle have clogged bypasses. Shelby wants a bypass of its bypass. They are all what former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory has referred to as “corridors of crap.”
So, I asked Conti, should the state’s taxpayers reward those towns with another new bypass?
His reply: “Well, no.”
“All of us would benefit from a much greater collaboration on those growth issues,” he said. He said the DOT is trying to work to bring local governments more into transportation discussions.
“The days of just trying to continually build bypasses of bypasses, those days are gone,” he said.
So Shelby, Albemarle, Asheboro, Ramseur and all the other N.C. towns that have allowed corridors of crap along your state highways, be forewarned.
The realist in me, though, requires me to mention this: If the legislature orders a highway to be built, as it did via the Highway Trust Fund of the late 1980s, there’s not much a DOT secretary can do about it.