It’s not your imagination. NC roads are getting trashier

People emerging from their COVID cocoons and taking to the highways more are getting upset by a different kind of plague that has spread across the winter landscape – litter.

“Lately I have been traveling on the northern part of (Interstate) 540 and have been appalled by the amount of trash on the side of the road,” Mary Schneider wrote in a recent letter to the editor, one of a flurry of litter complaints we’ve received. “As a matter of fact, this trash seems to be on quite a few other roads in town too. I have lived here for 28 years and have never seen it as bad as it is now.”

Schneider’s assessment may well be right.

“We are getting many calls saying, ‘I-40 looks bad, 540 looks bad,’ “ said Marty Homan, a communications officer for the N.C. Department of Transportation’s District 5, which covers much of the Triangle, “We’re aware of the situation.” In the Charlotte area, Jen Thompson, a communications officer for District 10, is hearing the same complaints. This week, NCDOT officials are expected to ask the Board of Transportation to shift $30 million within the department’s budget to address roadside issues, with litter being one of them.

Why litter is a bigger problem now is a combination of the pandemic and NCDOT budget troubles. Concern about COVID-19 caused the cancellation of spring and fall litter sweeps and has slowed volunteer Adopt-A-Highway program cleanups. Meanwhile, the cost of road repairs after a rash of major storms and the NCDOT payouts of claims under the MAP Act settlement forced a cutback in highway mowing and cleanups by state contractors. Thompson said cleanup crews are working on a six-week cycle, but the department hopes to get to a four-week cycle.

The real problem, though, isn’t how often the roadside trash is picked up; it’s how often it’s discarded, either intentionally or by trucks shedding debris from unsecured loads.

Homan is exasperated by the carelessness. “Some trash is inevitable in some areas,” he said, “but a lot of it is trash people are just chucking out their windows.”

Brenda Ewadinger, a former executive director of Keep NC Beautiful who lives in Sunset Beach, helped organize grassroots efforts to pick up litter, but she said keeping it under control requires the power and resources of government. “Volunteers are not the answer,” she said. “The bottom line is you are trying to change behavior and that’s hard without a strong education campaign and a strong enforcement campaign.”

Ewadinger said litter control needs recurring funding and the effort should be based in the governor’s office as a centralized program linking multiple departments. She said South Carolina’s Palmetto Pride program is an example to follow. That program coordinates anti-litter education, community pickups and enforcement and issues grants to groups that want to clean up roadsides.

As it is, North Carolina is losing the battle. State laws against littering don’t deter enough offenders. The NCDOT website encourages people to report vehicles that litter through its Swat-A-Litterbug program, but clearly many are going unswatted.

Randy Wilson, the owner of Sharky’s Place Sports Bar & Grill in Raleigh, said he has seen highway litter growing in recent months. “It’s just disheartening,” he said.

The mess so bothers him that he offers roadside panhandlers cash to clean the areas where they stand with their cardboard signs. He hands them plastic bags and comes back and pays them when the bags are full. His effort clears a spot here and there; then the trash builds again.

Wilson wishes people would stop tossing stuff.

“As beautiful as this state is, there’s no reason for it to look as it does,” he said. “Someone has got to take some pride somewhere and quit doing whatever they’re doing.”

The public can report littering by calling NCDOT Litter Management at 1-800-331-5864.

This story was originally published February 1, 2021 at 1:00 AM with the headline "It’s not your imagination. NC roads are getting trashier."