Gathered officials call for more regional coordination.
Regional transportation officials gathered Monday to find new ways to deliver projects as budgets shrink and state government turns to decentralized planning.
The basis of the meeting was a five-month study of the Charlotte region’s five transportation planning groups and similar organizations elsewhere. Centralina Council of Governments and the N.C. Department of Transportation paid for the work.
Surveys, focus groups and interviews found widespread frustration that projects take too long to plan and build, often because of financial problems.The state’s equity formula for distributing money is “equally inequitable – nobody feels they have enough,” quipped Terry Gibson, the N.C. Department of Transportation’s state highway administrator.
Among options for the Charlotte region: merging some or all of the functions of the five planning groups, or forming a regional transportation authority.Regional planning suffers now, the study found. Policy-makers in the region rarely meet, it noted, with elected officials on a transportation coordinating group not gathering for the past 18 months.
Working collaboratively could help develop a regional rail system and tackle air pollution, study participants said. But many respondents feared that approach could further bog down projects of local, not regional, interest.Transportation groups elsewhere do regional planning more effectively than those around Charlotte and with less fear of killing local priorities, the study found. The survey questioned seven planning groups elsewhere, including Atlanta and Nashville.
Some regional bodies have struggled, including the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority in Atlanta, which has had transit-dollar problems.Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., and Nashville, however, created new, regional transportation agencies while maintaining local planning groups.”You don’t need a regional authority to tell you what to do about a local intersection,” said Scott Lane of the Louis Berger Group, the consulting firm that did the study.
By Bruce Henderson
bhenderson@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2010
