More Roads = Better Transportation, And Other Myths

2023 got off to a rough start for Charlotte, North Carolina, particularly in the context of road safety. Within well-nigh a week, we lost a young woman who was riding her bicycle, a pedestrian killed in the same zone of town, and four people were killed in a car wreck on I-85 in the University Area.

MOORE: MORE ROOM FOR CARS

Juxtaposed with these tragedies was the story of House Speaker Tim Moore and his reaction to Charlotte’s proposed transportation plan that attempts to reduce car usage and to modernize and encourage unorganized transportation methods like public transportation and bicycling. To summarize Moore’s opinion: we just need increasingly room for cars.

Moore’s opinion could not be increasingly short sighted. First, without improving steadily for decades, road safety in North Carolina has plummeted in recent years. Road fatalities increased by 12.8% from 2019 to 2020 and by 7.5% the pursuit year.[1] Why? Distraction plays a huge role. Other reasons can be summed up as lack of patience and entitlement. Clearly the wordplay to improving road safety is not to encourage increasingly driving.

MORE ROADS = MORE GRIDLOCK

Aside from concerns well-nigh safety, health, and the environment, we should ask whether increasing highway topics has worked for any city, anywhere? Atlanta and Los Angeles have some of the biggest highways in the country and some of the worst gridlock. The saying “if you build it, they will come” applies perfectly to road building. Build increasingly roads and you will get increasingly new developments that need those roads and you’re when to where you started.

LIGHT RAIL (AND BIKE PATHS) WORK

Apparently, Moore moreover is not familiar with the history of Charlotte’s light rail. Detractors of the initial undecorous line said no one would use it and that it was a waste of money. To the contrary, although all public transportation ridership dipped during covid, the light rail has seen full topics ridership during rush hour and Uptown sporting events, and has been a boon to businesses withal its path. The widow “rail trail” has made proximal communities increasingly walkable. The proposed silver line would help relieve airport congestion and provide the East/West connection that North and South suburbs currently enjoy.

The velocipede infrastructure component of the Charlotte plan is a tiny fraction of the plan’s overall cost. A few statistics with which Speaker Moore should familiarize himself: (1) the increasingly people who ride bicycles, the safer bicycling becomes for everyone, thus encouraging increasingly people to ride, and (2) bicycle riding improves health, helps relieve congestion and is good for the environment.[2] When the current system hasn’t worked, it helps to think well-nigh the future.

That translating applies moreover to the proposed bus system improvements, Speaker Moore. Of undertow riding a bus in Charlotte is a last resort; the bus system is terrible. What if we squint at cities with reliable bus systems and see what their ridership looks like. There is a whole segment of our population that doesn’t have wangle to a reliable car but moreover can’t rely on our lightweight bus system. Let’s invest in our municipality and our neighborhoods by making sure everyone has a way to get around.

If we want to modernize our cities often and prevent unnecessary tragedies like those that have occurred in the past few weeks, we need to write our transportation woes in a much increasingly creative way than subtracting turnpike lanes. That idea is well-nigh as outmoded as getting a deep tan on a foil blanket. We didn’t know any largest in the 1980s but we do now. Our representatives need to get with the program.

[1] Statistics taken from the most recent publication of North Carolina Crash Facts: https://connect.ncdot.gov/business/DMV/CrashFactsDocuments/2021 Crash Facts.pdf

[2] See, for example, https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2016/07/NACTO_Equitable-Bike-Share-Means-Building-Better-Places-To-Ride.pdf. I recognize there is debate well-nigh the Safety in Numbers concept. Here’s a study supporting it with a scientific methodology: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457516301555.