Good news paving contractors! A new "report" by an "expert" at the John Locke Foundation says the answer to the Triangle's long-range traffic problems is . . . you guessed it:

Build more roads!

Go read the silly "report" by ex-Puppet Christopher Goff and see for yourself what myopic, short-term, simplistic "thinking" looks like.

A new website has popped up to fight the making of I-540 toll (and to promote a candidate for NC Senate) called stop540toll.com. Gerry Bowles (D) is trying to unseat first term Republican senator Neal Hunt by jumping on the toll issue. As I have posted before, I hate the idea of toll roads for mainly local traffic, unless you are talking about a crowded downtown area.

However, Crosstown Traffic at the N&O has noted that Bowles does not even live in the area that would become tolled. Also, despite the fact that I support Bowles' cause regardless of where he lives, I do not know that the running for NC senate would be the forum that would best address it; there are many other transportantion and planning boards that could be a more effective outlet for this issue.

Here is a letter I wrote to the editor of the clt observer, but it was not published, so I figured I'd post it here

The NCDOT website says that there are only two policies being
considered on the topic of traffic between Charlotte and Gastonia. The
first option is leaving I-85 corridor as it is. The second studied
option is by building a new road connecting Gastonia to Charlotte's
loop highway (I485) with a projected cost of $600,000,000. The DOT
ignores a third option of building a commuter rail line that would
connect Gastonia to Charlotte.
The state could build a commuter rail line that would connect

The Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) has a short piece on their site addressing the question of who should own toll roads. Given NC's recent attraction to the idea, it's worth a read:

Allowing some private investment in building infrastructure is not the problem – that's common in countries around the world. The corrupt aspect of many of these new state projects are the extreme long-term leases that undermine democratic control of our transportation infrastructure for multiple generations. And in both Indiana and Texas, not only will private companies control the roads they lease, they will have "noncompete" contracts that allow them to block any new roads in the same area that future governments might decide to build.