When Charlotte opposed a multibillion-dollar highway project, the state threatened financial penalties that could cost the city nearly $70 million. Four months after rejecting the I-77 toll-lane expansion, city leaders reversed their vote and secured $300 million in community benefits. Discussing the article “City Council Votes to Back I-77 Toll Lanes,” Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with transportation researcher Tony Dutzik and urban designer Patrick Kennedy about the deal's long-term costs. Charlotte's neighborhoods may receive new investments, but the highway will still consume valuable land and leave residents dealing with the consequences of its expansion.
So what happens when the city decides, hey, we just don't want a highway expansion, but then discovers that saying no to that expansion might cost tens of millions of dollars, and what does that tell us about the way that we make transportation decisions in our communities? Welcome, folks, to Upzoned, a podcast of Strong Towns where we take items that are occurring in our communities, and we talk about them from a Strong Towns perspective. We think about trade-offs. We think about some of the challenges that we face. And today, we're going to be talking about the challenges of a highway project in Charlotte, North Carolina, that raises some pretty fundamental questions about how we spend public money and who actually gets to decide.
And I've got two great conversation partners to help us work through this. First, Tony Dutzik is a senior policy analyst and associate director at the Frontier Group, where he spent years studying transportation spending. And what I love is especially documenting highway projects and their big promises that often struggle to justify their enormous costs. And so, Tony, welcome to Upzoned. It's great to have you here.
Thanks, Norm. Glad to be here.
And joining us as well is Patrick Kennedy, planner and urban designer from Dallas, whose work has focused on the enormous economic costs of highways that run particularly through our cities. Patrick is the creator of the Atlas of Inner City Highway impacts, and this atlas looks at the land tax revenue and economic opportunity that we've sacrificed in our quest to build urban highways across the North American landscape. Patrick, welcome! I'm glad you could join us as well.
Great to be back.
And so I want to set up the story that we have from the Charlotte Ledger that we're going to be discussing and then considering the broader impacts of this as well. It's by Ashley Fahey, and it was published on September 21st. And the headline is "Breaking City Council Votes to Back I-77 Toll Lanes." And here's what happened: Charlotte had been considering a multi-billion-dollar expansion of Interstate 77 to add two toll lanes in each direction along an 11-mile stretch of highway, and so back in May, the Charlotte City Council had voted to withdraw its support for the project.
They were concerned about the impacts that it would have on surrounding neighborhoods and said, "No, we don't. We do not support this project." But then the state of North Carolina pushed back, and officials there warned that the local government could face nearly $70 million in penalties if the project didn't move forward. And at the same time, the state offered $300 million in community benefits intended to address some of the harms associated with the expansion. And so, in September, Charlotte City Council reversed its decision, voting seven to four to support the project.
Some of the councilors that had voted against it changed their votes, and as a result, two days later, the Regional Transportation Board also voted to move it forward. And this is what's fascinating in the story: that we're talking about a project that will cost billions of dollars, but the debate that ultimately changed the council's decision seems to have centered on a much smaller amount of money, a not insubstantial amount. But the city was faced with a question: what they might lose by saying no, and what its neighborhoods might gain by saying yes.
And they began to have a very different conversation. And so that raises a question about what we're actually measuring when we decide whether a major infrastructure project like this makes sense. And so, Tony, let me start with you. You've spent a lot of time studying these major highway projects and the financial assumptions that are used to justify them. When you look at what happened in Charlotte, what stands out to you?
Well, in Charlotte, you know the specific project that was being proposed was a public-private partnership toll express lane project through the city, and Charlotte had actually built a parallel version of this project north of the city, which was actually pretty controversial at the time, mostly due to how the project was implemented, and so there was, I think, very real reason to be concerned for the city of Charlotte that you would see major impacts, certainly on neighborhoods of the of the toll lane expansion and questions about whether it was going to be implemented appropriately.
It's a little bit of a different situation, I think, in some ways than a lot of the state-funded highway expansion projects that we've seen in our research. In that, usually, you were talking about states investing its own. Federal transportation dollars into in a large way into a major highway expansion project. PPPs are not that they're they're they're sort of different on the surface, but not that different ultimately. Our experience has been in looking at some of these PPP projects over the years, public private partnerships that politicians tend to view them as being equivalent to free money, but they're not free money.
They actually come with a very significant cost. You're paying for the highway one way or another. You are either paying for it in tolls or you're paying for it through federal, local, state transportation funds.
The scope of the spending required, even the fact that $70 million, the state has said, that's what they've already spent on this project. That is ostensibly the city's share. So that would ask the question: How much more had they spent on, the soft costs or all the preparation work that's required there? I would imagine some of that would have been punitive, but other layers of it would definitely have, been real money that really went out the door to the project in order for it to be make it to this stage.
Patrick, looking into the Charlotte situation and especially considering the way in which it's running through the city, so it's an inner, it's inner city or working through core neighborhoods. Do you want to share just some of your observations about this story?
Yeah. So I've got a bit of a background with this one. We you know talked with Strong Towns previously about this very story when they voted against it and the state threatened the city for about six months ago. But this was after I was asked to speak to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission after the Atlas of Inner City Highways came out, and in that talk, I was talking about the you know tolling and expansion, and are you managing demand? Those kinds of things, and also just sort of the history of highways and how they've tended to go through and next to Black and brown communities, and in Charlotte, it's particularly egregious.
And you see that when you see that there's basically no highways in the southern half of the city, which is the wealthy white side white side of the city. And it's like, okay, if highways are needed, why aren't they needed on that side of the city? And so it was just sort of that general expression. And I was frankly surprised then that not only did the city vote against the expansion and it's not the hugest expansion in the world because they basically have the elevated lanes or the express lanes, and that the MPO actually went along with the city, which is something that was really shocking to me because usually that does not happen. my experience is MPOs tend to be dominated by regional and suburban interests, and they tend not to look too favorably to what the cities want.
And so that was actually a pleasant surprise until you know you learned of the punitive nature that the state was going to take. And frankly, to me, that was fairly gross, and I would be very curious to have been a fly on the wall behind in the closed session with counsel and their attorneys on why they think that the state could actually do that to them. I don't know. I would have to get some lawyers in here to discuss that. But it, I'm surprised the city backed down. But with that said, it's it's easy to say there was effective politics by the city of Charlotte to get some concessions out of the deal, right? this was this.
When I look at this highway of 77 running through the city, it's not the worst highway in the world. it wasn't terribly displacing because it's mostly along a floodplain, but it's also not even the worst highways in Charlotte. The 277 loop. What I suggested to Charlotte was the 277 loop should probably come out because it doesn't connect to anywhere. It's not even part of a useful network, and so personally, I think they should be pushing for more concessions to not only get the various park and trail improvements that they're getting, but then also narrow the right of way on 77 because of all the various cloverleafs and stuff that are taking up land that could be better used than cloverleafs.
But then also say, why don't we just get rid of 77 or 277 while you're doing this, or start work that work, and so we can recapture that land and the billions of dollars of potential investment in tax base that they could add to the city and new housing.
The MPO situation I thought was particularly interesting in looking at this because again from the article it appears as though the MPO voting ratios in the MPO are decided by population, which is not the way that it is in every part of the country. And so, Charlotte was able through having not majority voting control on the MPO, but a significant number of votes on the MPO to exert. Its influence on how the situation transpired, and that's actually not always the way that it goes. Oftentimes, as Patrick says, voting rights on MPO boards are distributed in ways that preference lower density suburban areas and actually leave the cities relatively powerless to influence the outcome, and this is actually, in some ways, it's the state intervention is an example of this kind of dynamic going wrong.
But at the MPO level, it's actually not the worst example of how metropolitan transportation planning politics go because the city was actually able to have an influence on the outcome, which under different MPO governance structures it might not have.
I think the most fascinating thing is the two suburban or ex-urban mayors that resigned over the over the just being principled, saying that this was not a good process and we shouldn't be governed by private interests.
Yeah, that role that they took of saying, "Hey, we have made a community decision," and the idea of it being steamrolled and us reversing it really stands out. Let's do a quick little sidebar on the composition of these MPOs because they do matter. The city council is ahead of it, but when I read the story, what stands out to me in part is that so rarely does the council's vote actually matter, and in so maybe Tony, do you want to set that up in comparison of like a vote per community versus a vote for communities but weighted by population?
So where I live in Vancouver, TransLink is based on a weighted vote, and it does mean that the largest cities do have the most poll, and the smaller communities sort of have to finagle their way in. But Houston comes to mind as a city where Galveston and some of these outerlying suburbs have so much pull, and there's, I would say, very strategically a huge argument for deamalgamation. Just create a whole bunch of small little cluster communities. You get a vote. You get a vote, and we all like Oprah are really happy for a moment.
But talk about just that on a sidebar why that structure actually is a really important part of this story here.
I think I mostly want to tee up Patrick on this because I think Texas, in so many ways, is an excellent example of how not to do things in transportation planning, but certainly in recent highway expansions in Austin and Houston and in Texas cities, this dynamic of the city itself having relatively little voting power on the MPO board really comes into play because the costs to the cost to the cities of these highway expansion projects in terms of displacement, in terms of potentially lost tax base, in terms of environmental and public health impacts are really significant.
And so, to the extent that cities are willing or able to envision or implement a different way of doing transportation that addresses some of those serious concerns, having relatively little power over how federal transportation dollars are being allocated in your metropolitan area is a really big problem. But Patrick, I think you know this up close very well in Texas.
Yeah, I mean in Dallas, you know we're part of North Texas, where Dallas is 1.3 million out of 8.5 million. We've got seven votes out of 44 on the RTC, which is the governing body over the MPO. And so, the cities effectively have zero power whatsoever. you're signing a resolution, whether you're for it or against it, but the state doesn't have to pay attention to it. It all it all happens at state and regional level. But my personal theory, and whether it was intentional or unintentional, I don't know. And it doesn't even matter that in the 1962 Infrastructure Act that required MPOs and regional planning to be sort of the conduit of federal money, it was effectively an end around of local control. and my theory is that it was a way to stop local electeds from preventing the highways from being built through their neighborhoods, and whether it was intentional or not, that was the that was the end product anyway, because it was for the greater good, right?
For the region to have a highway that goes through low-income communities and displaces tens of thousands of people, and in many cases wipes off you know up to 10, 15% of a city's tax base, right off the bat. And so, looking for a place in reform. It is the structure of MPOs.
Well, and to just sing the Strong Towns gospel a little bit here, that assumption, and I think for many of your listeners will probably come at it from a similar perspective, but. The idea that is actually that the highest best thing to do in densely populated cities for the region as a whole is to expand their use as transportation corridors and as highway corridors is something that is really open to question because I think there's there's some tendency to think about to think about these issues as urban versus suburban, and that is definitely true, and there is definitely that dynamic.
But regions lose when their central cities are weakened, and that has been the historical impact of highway construction in cities across the country is that it's weakened that the economic, the social core of regional economies in a in a pretty significant way.
And regions tend to also think you know all money is good money to bring in, especially from federal and state money, that's the goal. Basically, hey, if we're bringing in dollars, that means jobs, even though it's just short-term make-work jobs for the most part. And it hits some arbitrary metric about alleviating congestion, which it never actually does, unless it destroys the city economy. Right? It's like Detroit doesn't have a congestion problem. So I think we have to get better metrics rather than just how many dollars can we bring in into the region?
Let's shift also into the you know one of the complicating sort of interesting elements of this as well is the inclusion of tolls. And when the substitute motion to deny support for the project failed on that same seven to four vote split, the article says it prompted loud boos and chants of not no more highways, but it was no more tolls, and so the tolling part of this is part of the controversy. And I was kind of hoping they would be like, no, no, like no more degradation of the land in this area, no more sort of like consuming scarce resources and using it in improper ways.
Whenever you have $300 million in community benefits to give out on a billions and billions of dollars of spending, you would think, "Wow, this is such a substantial project that, like, if I come home with you know the top of the line Festool like woodworking equipment, I'm going to tell my wife, 'Look, it's a big investment, but it will pay off with all my little hobby projects, and I'm going to do with it. So we start to like we assume if the numbers are big, it must be worth it. And now you've got a little bit of pushback from people that say, "Well, I just don't want to have to pay a toll." But that feels like it's it's sort of a confusion of the core issue of whether or not expansion really pays for itself.
But especially when you add in the toll. So, Patrick, what about for you? Like that to me is such an interesting layer of this as well.
Yeah, I'll be on the record and say that tolls are as good, if not the best way of managing congestion. Right now, with that said, you know we've gone through this in Texas has been a 20-year issue. That when you're using tolls and toll revenue simply as expansion measure, you're not actually trying to manage congestion. In my in my opinion, you know because the tolls would do that for you. Now the politics get really weird about this, just because there's a general assumption that roads should be free, even though the you know the gas taxes and the various user fees that go into it don't actually pay the full freight.
Now, with that said, it also makes for strange bedfellows when it comes to politics that you end up with red exurban areas that agree with low income inner city areas that all don't want to pay tolls, and then they end up opposing various projects, and here in Texas, the governor basically declared a moratorium on tolls, and that might just be a political stunt. But then we end up putting $12 billion into Texas' budget, and so it's got like Tony said earlier, you end up paying one way or another. Now, I would be very interested to understand the arrangement between the state and the private sector partner, who I don't know who it is or what it
Is. I don't think it's been chosen.
Yeah, I couldn't find anything on it. But where the guarantees are from that private sector partner, and who's carrying the risk if it doesn't generate the revenue to actually pay off whatever debt they're going to be taking out to build the three to $4 billion facility, and because if the state's on the hook, the city is on the hook, then good luck to them. Aren't they
Always on the hook?
Generally, yes.
Yeah. Again, sort of directly or indirectly, right? So it can it can happen where directly, in essence, there's a revenue that is being promised to the private operator in order to entice them to build the road, but it's also the case, and we found this many years ago, looking at some of the early PPP projects in places like in places like Texas, that even those that failed to. Generate the revenue that was needed to pay back the private operator, which you would think, if this is a private business, that company goes out of business and they shut down.
Nobody is letting a major infrastructure project just shut down, right? To the extent that the private operator, the private operator really has the state over a barrel. In that, the if they if they fail, then the state is going to bail them out, or someone else is going to buy them out. So again, whether the risk is technically in the contract on the city or state, or whether it's actually on the private operator, but they have this fail-safe cushion. If the project fails, either way, you wind up paying. I do think it's important to make a distinction because I think a couple of things get mixed up here.
Maybe deliberately, and in this case, the project, the way it's designed, it's sort of intended to do both things, but there are tolls as a congestion mitigation strategy and tolls as a revenue generation strategy, and the you get some pretty perverse incentives when you have tolls as a revenue generation strategy, which is what incentive if you assume as we assume here that one way or another the city or the state is going to wind up on the hook for the cost of the project in the end, if it's the case that the tolls are the means by which you raise the money to do it, what incentive do you have as a city or a state or a region to actually reduce the number of people who are driving on the road, if you are looking to ameliorate congestion in the region overall, right?
Your job is in part going to be to ensure that people drive on that road, and you know I think in Texas the Route 130 I believe project is like an excellent example of this, where you know there was a toll road that was built between was it Austin and San Antonio?
It's around Austin.
Yeah, it's around Austin, and this was built in the late 2000s, maybe early 2010s, and it was built you know to be the fast way that you could get between the two cities, but it was pretty rural, so it was kind of inconvenient. So it was inconvenient and told. And what they wound up doing was to increase the speed limit to I think it was 85 miles per hour to encourage people to use the road. So again, you're going to wind up paying for it in one way or another, and then to the extent that you're relying on tolls as a revenue generation tool for these things, you can wind up in some pretty strange places in terms of your overall transportation policy.
There's a darker side to it as well. That if you have any kind of assured revenue targets for your private operator, you actually run a real risk that operator says, "Hey, we cannot accept rival forms of transportation. So anything that would look like offloading of freight onto adjacent rail lines would actually come into conflict with the freight traffic revenues that would be expected. Anything that's commuter rail would be suspect, or even challenged, or even subtly undermined, and then what stood out to me too, I wanted to find out like on the I 77 toll lanes that connect Charlotte to Mooresville, it's about a 23 mile stretch.
In that context, in that setting, one of the things that the program allows for is rapid assistance of people that have broken down. It's complimentary roadside support. Express lane drivers receive 24-seven dedicated roadside assistance for things like flat tires and breakdowns. What a concept! Actually, that could be something that could be provided as a public service. If your question was, how do we resolve some of that congestion that emerges from vehicles pulling off to the shoulder? But there, you create the conditions in which if you travel in the free lane, you don't get that, and if you travel in the express lane, you do.
And if anyone's walked through an airport, you see this with the clear, process where the clear people are making sure all your paperwork is helped with. And it's interesting because it actually can really start to congest the rest of the system, and you begin to make that really clear distinction between where we're willing to spend our money and then where we're not willing to do even things like repairs are more likely to be occurring in those high speed zones because you're get you have an obligation to keep up the traffic flow you're going to raise your speed limits but then the nagging question is are you taking a lesser version of care of the remainder of the system, in part because you have these targets that you need to meet in one, and the targets are assumed to not actually matter, or perversely, really work against your best interest on the tolling side if congestion isn't that bad?
And so, Kelvin. We would, if we had multiple people in a car, we would take the HOV lanes, and you would sail through. But then you would also, on most times of the day, be able to sail through on the regular lanes. And so it was kind of that like, is this actually necessary? And certainly the challenge that we see talks about, the real estate building and industry coalition. The chair spoke in support of the project, saying, "We're going to get the 300 million, and this will address congestion as Charlotte continues to grow." And he says, "Opportunities for projects like this are rare." Patrick, do you want to dive into that challenge where there's, the real estate building and industry coalition says we should do it, and they have clout.
And who am I? viewing from a distance to actually contest what maybe their claims might be. And yet, I think from a Strong Towns perspective, we've written a lot about this. Don't take every claim as verified because a lot of that math doesn't stack up. And then Tony, we'll come to you on the highway boondoggles side as well, but go ahead, Patrick.
So let me just understand the question because there was a lot to unpack. There is, it's effectively why would the building and construction industry support the tolls and the and the project in general?
Yeah, let's start with that. Yeah.
Okay. Well, generally they don't want to get involved in politics and they don't want to rock boats, right? Because at the end of the day, they don't want retribution like the state was threatening to the city, right? And so everybody just wants to play nice outwardly, and maybe individually, some people would oppose the project, but they're not going to speak out on it. that's part of it. But I think we need a broader understanding of the negative impact and downsides of putting highways in the wrong location, where they will all fail one way or another.
Right? They're either failing cities economically by emptying out tax base, incentivizing sprawl, incentivizing people to move further away, or they're failing as transportation. And we see that in most of the inner loops in Dallas, Austin, and Houston, where the 3545, et cetera, are moving 10 to 15 miles an hour for 12 hours a day or 14 hours a day. And so, I think there needs to be a broader understanding of what is actually good for the region, and that our, to Tony's earlier point, our downtowns need to be much stronger because they need to subsidize the rest of the municipality effectively because they can produce so much tax base and tax revenue, and I frankly just don't think that's well understood on a regional level from the you know the chambers of commerce types, and that it's it would be much better for business if we were driving more value into the land in and around the city.
So we're building bigger buildings, right, more profitable buildings, rather than further and further away out into the countryside.
100%. and the project requires that homes be razed and demolished, and there's going to be sort of that knockover sort of consequence. And I was trying to do some basic back of the envelope math, and even over five years, you could recoup that 70 million that they would be fined or penalized. You would recoup that through not depressing your property tax base. And so there is already a highway going through there. But if you double the size of it, make it much more substantial, and with toll lanes, you really do complicate things because you need separate exits and separate entrances.
They do have some weave zones in some places, but in other areas, they are do they're throwing in extra spaghetti noodles that make for really complicated interchanges. And so, Tony, one of the things that your group has put out is the Highway Boondoggles report, and sort of in the cast of characters, where does this sort of land, and what are some of the ways in which, when you say there are common traits that these boondoggles tend to have, one of them would be a real estate and industry coalition boosting it.
That's a pretty common tell. They might have very good reasons to want this, absolutely, but it is not inconsequential that they are often present at the table each time a project like this is put forward, and sort of willingly just saying like, hey, we're not being partisan. We just know that this is a good thing. Let's consider that. Is this undoubtedly a good thing.
Yeah, I well, you mentioned cast of characters, and it's it's definitely a cast of characters of boondoggles, and I think that the highway, as you said, that they have certain characteristics that are in common, but there's also a lot of variance amongst both the types of projects and the rationales that are being used to justify them, and the most common, the most common is congestion and regional mobility. But you also see some of these projects being pitched as a mechanism for economic development and economic growth. in this case, I think this also hits up against something that we've been seeing in.
Paying attention to a little bit more in the last couple of years, which is how cities and states are dealing with the strains on legacy infrastructure. So stuff that we built in the 50s, 60s, 70s, sometimes going back to the 30s and 40s, and whether we are considering whether we need those pieces of infrastructure anymore, whether they're actually beneficial or actually doubling down on a vision of cities and transportation that was emerged out of mid-century, right? So you see this in a lot of places that are that are coming up to decision points about whether they need to rebuild infrastructure.
So in New York City, for example, Brooklyn Queens Expressway, there's been a lot of controversy about whether that should just be torn down. The previous mayor, I believe had proposed expanding it. There have been some pretty contentious debates over rebuilds on the New Jersey Turnpike. So these questions about when we look at these pieces of infrastructure, do we allow ourselves to become so locked in by the decisions that we made decades ago that we fail to take the opportunities to rethink things in a different way. And I can't speak really very clearly to the to the specific issue in Charlotte, but this is certainly a thing that we've seen across the country, and which is going to become increasingly important as more and more of that infrastructure.
Chuck Marohn wrote the Mission Accomplished report. We went through a highway building frenzy in the United States from the 1950s through the 1980s, and a lot of that infrastructure is going to be nearing the end of its useful life very soon. So we do have more broadly a set of decisions to make about whether we want to continue to accept and double down on those decisions, or whether we want to choose to do something different. It
Does feel there's that turning point here, and you know this is one of the approaches is require it. dangle community benefits. There's sort of you know different layers to it, but in the article it talks about Sean Langley of the McCrory Heights Neighborhood Association, Rebecca Taff of the Wilmore Neighborhood Association. They spoke out against it. But I would love to just take a few minutes to talk about like what are some of the tools that we have, the efforts that we can make to continue to in cases of poor projects, continue to advocate for best interests, or even try to like reverse it.
Or my go to mantra is always try to do a little less harm. What does that look like? And if you were to provide some advice or some guidance for Sean and Rebecca and some of the others that are at this work, Patrick, as you've documented many of these inner city sort of highway projects and the ones that are still to come, there probably are some traits of more or less successful opposition, or maybe it's not just opposed, but also having an alternative vision. And do you want to share just some of the guidance that you might offer for them?
When I've seen the most successful oppositions, there's usually either fractured or you're getting the business community on your side. The residents, the neighborhoods, usually just get steamrolled, and so you have to have a broad coalition, and you have to get the power brokers essentially involved, and that's not easy. But you have to make that case of why what they're doing and just attracting federal and state money or any kind of outside investment is not necessarily have a long term return on investment for your community and for the local economy. I think that's key, and I think you know we have to combine the not just less harm, but also with how do we get more good?
And I think you know with the design that's there and having spent 70 million in soft costs already, which is mind boggling, that they should spend a little bit more design time and effort in how to offload some of the land, like I mentioned earlier, how to improve some of the interchanges and whatnot to tighten them up, to narrow them, to open up some land for the city. Basically, it should be. if I was king of North Carolina, I would want to be offering an olive branch back to say, we're going to give you some land back so you can do stuff with it, so you can have some economic development component to it.
But of course, from the city. I should be thinking about how do we actually build a better overall transportation network, and I would say part of that is also removing some of the stubs and inner loops that are not necessary, and frankly, even complicate, and probably make 270 or probably make 77 even less. Functional because of the interchanges that it's adding.
Yeah, I think that's really powerful, and it reminds me of Joe Minicozzi's efforts in Asheville, where he tried to say if we can just reroute this section of the freeway project that's proposed, it would free up all of this additional land, and then just did back of the math or back of the envelope calculations as to how much development potential in the heart of the of Asheville existed, and so this is not farm fields. This is some of your most developable land. The things that we tell the commercial realtors we don't have very much of, and then the highway says, "Oh, I could give you a little bit of that," return it back to you, and you're like, "Wow, we've got gifts from the gods here, and all that it took was a more you know efficient route lineup, making sure that some of the kinks got worked out, or making sure that you know that the quest to make it sweeping through your community doesn't actually have to be.
We have drivers that are able to navigate slightly sharper turns, and then or not turns even, but sweeping curves and make it through. Tony, what about for you? If you're like, all right, I and I believe that you do try to connect your work with each community that is impacted, and sometimes there are things that you can provide as guidance to them to help them in their efforts. Do advise.
Yeah, I think as Patrick had mentioned, building a broad coalition is essential. There have been communities that we've that we've looked at who I think have been able to just make the pure. This is going to impact our community in a severe way. You please re please reroute or please slow down. So there are examples where that has worked, but the idea of bringing other players and other concerns into the discussion is really important. I think the other one that is coming up that I think you're going to hear, and it because it's a public private partnership program, it's maybe slightly less relevant to the current conversation in Charlotte.
But the other argument that I think has worked well on a on a larger like on a statewide level is we are spending a tremendous amount of money on mega projects at a time when, in many cases, basic maintenance is not being held to a high standard, and at a moment when the future of federal funding is very much open, and at a moment when a lot of state departments of transportation are facing accumulated debt burden from expansion projects of years past, right? So Oregon is an example of where the state has committed to multiple highway mega projects and essentially has no way to pay for them, and will not have any. not only doesn't have any way to pay for them, but can't build consensus on how it is going to raise transportation money, or even if it will raise transportation money.
So we've seen in the past, and there was a good example of this in Wisconsin 10 or 12 years ago, of where if you can hitch what is being spent to build these projects with what is being given up in order to fund them? Maybe it is the highway maintenance in a rural area. Maybe it is the highway maintenance in a city. Maybe it's investment in streets that more people use to convey a sense that this isn't just federal money that's raining down from the heavens that you just get to use without consequence, but that there are real choices that are being made.
There are real financial obligations, and that to the extent that folks can connect their local fight over some of these boondoggles with the larger challenge of just how are we going to pay for transportation in a real way that can actually get traction.
And I would add two more requirements. You generally want to get the mayor on board because the mayor can whip votes and be the flag bearer, right? Because they got elected, right? So they've got a constituency behind them too, and so it helps to have both sort of a top down and a bottom up from the grassroots as well, because grassroots can easily get mowed down. But you also probably need to have a healthy working relationship with the state DOTs, and it doesn't sound like North Carolina in general has a good working relationship between the state DOT and the local communities.
I would actually say TxDOT is quite good about working with locals. They definitely, have their goals and what they're trying to get accomplished. But my in my experience, they've generally been quite good about trying. To do the right thing, but while they're doing their own thing, so I would I would suggest there has to be some mending offenses, however that happens.
Yeah.
And one of the things, just if I can add one more thing quickly, one of the dynamics in the in the Charlotte case that you mentioned, Norm, is this the idea of providing a large amount of community benefits, which, in one ways, in some senses, can feel obviously really attractive to locals, particularly those who have been experiencing the burdens of some of these projects. The problem with that as an approach, and I think you see state DOTs, or at least we've seen in our work, many of them be very generous and forward and proactive in spending a lot of money on things that are you know build as community benefits.
Is that all adds to the cost of the project? And so there is a catch 22 between local organizations advocating completely justifiably for compensation and funding for repair of the damage that has been created, but then adding to some of these larger transportation financing dynamics, which are ultimately really problematic.
Yeah, yeah. We shouldn't need to receive those extra lanes in order to get a bike lane. it's like we could actually just provide for that. And your thoughts. this is a little bit more out there. But if I were a state official tasked with moving transportation, transported goods and people through my state, I would actually do the exact opposite, which is impose tolls on locals. I know I would immediately lose my job, but if you impose tolls on locals, what it actually means is your highways are freed up for that interstate travel.
And the flip side of it is you would use your existing assets in of your streets and your road systems much more effectively, and you would not need to do anything more to address the congestion on your freeways because the people that were on those freeways, you would see the sudden shift in behavior. And I'm very confident it would be the one of the biggest changes to the development pressures in your community if all of a sudden to use the freeway to get to your destination, if it was within 15 miles of where you are resulted in a toll.
You'd be like, "Oh, I'm I'm going to use other options." Now that is in the world of fantasy, and so that is not yet going to be reality. But it would be one of those interesting things because I saw it in my city as well. We have a tunnel that is constrained, and as a result, the mayor was proposing on one of the sides said, "All right, let's ban trucks from six in the morning until 10 o'clock in the morning, and then again from two in the afternoon until seven at night.
And I said that's insane because those are the ones that are actually making money for us. Those are the trucks and the vital things. They don't have choices. All the commuter cars do, and so that it just has been my bugaboo that I'm like, we've got to find a way to actually impose the costs on the person that is straining the system when they have alternatives, and that's the key thing. if everybody uses an emergency room instead of those that can using their primary doctor for the needs that they have, we see the impacts that has, and I think the same thing, incidentally, has occurred with our highways when we begin to create all of this highway-oriented development.
That it presumes that greater access is just down the road at a small price tag to the community, and despite the preferences of many of the people within that community. So, I know that's a little bit of fantasy, so that actually maybe sets up us for the up zone, me, or for the down zone of our discussion. I would love to know what are you taking in, whether that's fantasy or something else that has been of interest to you, Tony. Why don't we start with you?
Well, yeah, it's not not fantasy nearly as much as as I would like to, but we've been paying. So for those who might be coming to Frontier Group for the first time, we're a research and policy organization that works to build a healthier, more sustainable America. So we work on transportation issues, but we work on a whole bunch of other issues. And one of those issues that is one development that is really important to a lot of the things that we care about is the federal quote unquote permitting reform proposal, which is which is up in the Senate, which does have a transportation connection to it in that one of the one of the smaller provisions relates to when environmental review it becomes unnecessary, and so one of those conditions is that environmental review no longer becomes necessary if there's an expansion in the general vicinity of the existing infrastructure that adds no more than 20% of capacity.
To the original thing. Now, there's a specific exemption from that from that opening for road and bridge through lane projects. But one of the concerns that I have, and I think some other folks in the transportation world have, is that oftentimes in this day and age, when DOTs are proposing expansions, particularly of urban highways, many times they're being billed as quote unquote auxiliary lanes. And so, one of the questions that I have in my mind is, to what extent does that provide a loophole for DOTs to walk through in terms of expansion, but in general, I've been paying a lot of attention to that debate because it's extremely consequential for a whole set of environmental and public health reasons, and will really shape the kind of infrastructure that we build and how we build it for a very long time to come.
So, been spending a lot of time reading about the reading about the permitting reform talk.
Yeah, tagging that and hoping that you can also squeeze in some fiction for sure at some point. But Patrick, what about for you?
Well, I teach a master's of sustainable development course at SMU in Thursday evenings, and so I was in my class last night, and I showed them the picture that popped up on social media of Kate Middleton riding the tube in London. So Queen of England with her daughter riding the tube, and I contrasted that to the students with quotes from Elon Musk talking about how public transit is terrible and there could be serial killers on it, yada yada, and showed them contrasted Kate Middleton riding the train with the boring tunnel in Las Vegas and flying cars and all this other stuff.
And I just had a discussion with them about class disparity and how we build infrastructure and for whom, and are we building for people to come together or people stay apart. And I don't know if people know this, but we're in an election in this country right now that's fairly significant, particularly because we have no infrastructure bill. And if there is a change in Congress, particularly because the last infrastructure bill had a quite a good one that came out of the House, which ended up turning into a conventional one from the Senate, but I think there's a real opportunity to do what we need to do, which is stop doing the continuation of the interstate highway bill and that we've overbuilt thoroughly, and we need to go in a new direction.
And I believe that part of that new direction is replacing a lot of these dysfunctional inner city highways with transit investments and housing investments back into our cities.
Yeah, I appreciate that. That's really powerful, and I, we'll be watching the outcomes a lot. And I've always appreciated Chuck's article that he wrote. I think around the 2020 election, where you said, there is massive importance in participating at the national and state level, and for everything that you care about nationally or internationally or even at the state level, there's a local analog that is also requiring your attention, and there's a great opportunity to certainly help in that way. So, I think that's a way of holding our heads high, even in the midst of times where we might be discouraged, my item just is the Strong Towns Commons.
Someone is it's our member hub. It's our place for ongoing conversations together. And I love what Chris Palmer said. He said I was skeptical when it was announced because I thought, man, it's just another thing. Who knows? But he said it's actually been reasonably. What did he say? Reasonably lively. And if there's anything I want to put etched on my tombstone, it's Norm was reasonably lively. I just feel like that is a perfect assessment. And so, if you are a Strong Towns member and listening, come join us in the Strong Towns Commons.
It's really easy to get to commons.strongtowns.org. That's that's my quick little pitch, but it's also my sandbox. It's the place that I get to hang out, connect with Strong Towns members, and it's been really cool. And that's where we also frequently will have pre-discussions of the articles that are discussed during our sessions here. And so do join us for that if you're able to. That brings us to our time. Tony and Patrick, thank you both for coming on Upzoned today.
Thank you, Norry.
All right, I think we are pro highways, so let's go. I think more crucially in the discussion, we've we've said there are times where highways are absolutely necessary, but counting the cost and truly considering the longer term impacts on how do we go about building lasting prosperity, not just creating the short-term sugar high of $300 million in community benefits, or the construction jobs that might be present and accounted for in a brief period of time, or even that nefarious tactic of saying how much time will you save, as if you would make no other choices except for hop.
On a congested freeway, we actually believe in a lot of big choices, and I think that will be a key part of building stronger communities. So, with that, take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.