Posted on 12/05/2008 3:24:20 AM PST by NCDragon
Americans are driving our roads into the ground, and we can't find an easy fix. Highway maintenance lags far behind the need for it, while new roads (and transit options) linger in line for funding. Construction costs keep rising, but fuel tax revenue, which pays for most of the road work, is fading.
The result is transportation gridlock. The best way out is to break the fuel-tax deadlock.
Either we raise this tax -- which in the United States is low by industrialized-world standards -- or find another source of cash for building roads and transit.
First, consider the sorry state of fuel tax funds. The U.S. Department of Transportation says gasoline taxes paid into the federal highway trust fund have fallen by $3 billion so far in fiscal 2008. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. North Carolina adds roughly 30 cents to that. State fuel-tax revenue is down 11 percent, or $317 million, from the amount budgeted in July (those figures include revenue from what amounts to a tax on car sales, which as everyone knows are off).
Congress hasn't raised the 18-cent federal tax in 15 years. Over that span inflation has eroded the buying power of fuel tax revenue, and road construction costs have outpaced general inflation. North Carolina's state tax, which used to rise with wholesale fuel prices, was capped two years ago by legislative action following a populist-style anti-tax campaign.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsobserver.com ...
They haven’t finished 485 in Charlotte?
I moved to Charlotte in 1994 and they were building 485. I moved away in 2004 and it wasn’t finished.
Why must it take a generation to build a loop around the city? Here in Kansas, roads are built quickly.
Because I_485 is in Charlotte and the politicians are in Raleigh.
Everybody knows you can tax your way to prosperity.
If they never build the Monroe bypass, that will be fine with me.
They ought to have enough roads by now. If they are really serious (harrumph) about mass transit, they would stop expanding these monstrosities.
I only use mass transit during the State Fair. For me, it’s most convenient to park at the Cary Soccer Park, and ride the bus to the Fairgrounds. Fair traffic makes this practical.
If it were this much of a pain in the a$$ to drive to work, then buses or light rail would be economically feasible.
Consider I-40 for a few minutes.
South of Raleigh, we have just added in the new US-70 bypass, and on both sides of the road, expanded the road for approximately 2 miles. There is an area of about 2 miles from mile marker 306 to where the road widens out at 309, that is 2 lanes. Prior to 306 and after 308 (until about mm 310), it is at least 3 lanes. Every day, there is traffic congestion there, and instead of paving the extra two miles, they decided to just continue to create traffic headaches.
From the Wade Avenue split-off (mm 289), to US 1 (mm 293), I-40 is 2 lane. It goes from 4 lanes to 2 and then back to 3. Every day, they have this disaster of traffic there. Nobody thought, aparently, that traffic would come to a crawl.
From mile marker 279 to mile marker 263, they added in 16 miles of a third lane. It took nearly 5 years, and hundreds of millions of dollars. Granted, they added in extra lanes of some bridges, so that means it was going to take a while. (In Indianapolis, when I was there, they added extra lanes to the highway in months, not years, and it was a few million dollars, not hundreds of millions.) Now, to make it better, they realized they’d made mistakes (like being told by their general contractor that the concrete had ice crystals in it which would cause the road to buckle, and being told by DOT officials to go ahead and pour it anyway, they could clean it up later) and so, after they were done, they had to go back and retop nearly the entire project.
The state of NC is now announcing today that they’re laying off workers in their offices. Instead of firing the incompetent managers who make the horrible decisions, they let them keep going and have a corrupt environment continue and then complain that they’re falling short on their budget.
They started I-540 in 1989 and we now have a total of 30 miles of the 72 mile project done, and the estimated costs are in the 20-30 billion range over the course of the project while the estimated completion date is now up to 2042.
218 between Mint Hill and Polkton is already a Monroe by-pass for many of us.
True. However, it’s not an obvious route as a diversion for non-local through traffic currently using US74.
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