A 30-year regional transportation plan is usually a dense document of interest only to government officials, road builders and real estate speculators looking for where the next highway will go.
But a new plan for the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro metropolitan area defies that low expectation by making a surprising proposal. It sees a future in which the region asks the state not to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on highway expansion and construction. Instead it calls for more spending on mass transit and making it safer and easier for people to get around on foot and by bike.
The plan may be only a dream given the influence of the road construction industry and state lawmakers’ preference for highways over other transportation options.
Or it may be the sign that local governments could lead the way in breaking the fixation with ever more and wider highways in favor of alternatives that are safer, cheaper and friendlier toward the planet.
Looking back, North Carolina’s major urban areas that have seen new highways quickly become congested may wish that years ago they had taken the path laid out by this new plan.
News & Observer reporter Richard Stradling recently reported on the unusual 30-year plan approved by the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO). It is striking for what it rejects as much as for what it encourages.
For example, the long-range plan eliminates the expected widening of the Durham Freeway near Research Triangle Park, a project estimated to cost $251 million. The plan also does not support converting sections of U.S. Highways 70 and 15-501 into expressways.
Early drafts were more traditional, but the planning group’s board smartly asked for a different vision of transportation in the region 30 years from now. Hillsborough Mayor Jenn Weaver, who heads the MPO, told Stradling, “It’s a long-range plan, and we saw that in the out years we were going to have more congestion and more emissions and that this was not in alignment with our goals and values as an MPO or as a region.”
Kym Hunter, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) in Chapel Hill, said her group will encourage other MPOs to follow this lead.
“I think previously there’s been a very constrained thinking about long-range planning that is tied into what’s possible today, and it’s just a very business-as-usual approach,” she said. “And what they did here was say, ‘Wait, we have all these goals for climate and equity and safety and this plan is not helping us to get there.’”
Hunter knows better than most how hard it will be to get state and local governments to redirect highway money to support transit and pedestrians. She was part of the unsuccessful effort to block the $2.2 billion extension of the 540 Outer Loop through southern Wake County, although the group did force changes that will reduce the environmental impact of the project.
Still, the new thinking has already prompted changes in the long-range planning of neighboring Wake County. Sig Hutchinson, a Wake County commissioner and chairman of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, said it made changes in its 30-year plan after seeing the thinking on the western side of the Triangle.
“We redirected funds toward rail and pedestrians.,” Hutchinson said. “It was a direct result of hearing what Durham did.”
But Hutchinson rightly added a note of reality. Better planning isn’t only about breaking the long pattern of responding to growth with more and wider highways. It also requires investing in the options. Durham has yet to say how much it will commit to paying the $1 billion local share of a $2 billion, 37-mile commuter rail that could serve the Triangle as early as 2030.
The test of this new and laudable regional transportation vision will be not only what organizations plan, but what they plan to pay.