How the City Council should vote on tolls
Should it stay or should it go now? If it goes there will be trouble. If it stays it will be double.
The contract to build toll lanes on I-77 must have Charlotte’s City Council and the region’s transportation planning board feeling as tortured as the protagonist in that classic from The Clash.
The council is expected to vote Monday on the plan, and the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization would vote the following week. Unfortunately, the N.C. Department of Transportation and regional leaders have created such a deep morass that there is no good answer.
As with the Clash, though, the pain of the state’s tolls contract with Spanish road developer Cintra will be double if it stays. The City Council on Monday night should direct its representative, Vi Lyles, to cast her 31 votes (of 68 total) against the state’s contract with Cintra. It is too riddled with flaws to stand.
State officials have argued that the CRTPO cannot vote only on the Cintra contract or even only on I-77 tolls. They say that to kill the I-77 tolls, the group would have to scuttle its entire long-range regionwide transportation plan and start over. CRTPO should reject that argument and target only the tumor, not the whole body.
There’s no reason that, say, future tolls on I-485 or Independence Boulevard need to be swept up in a vote against this one bad contract. Kill it, and only it, then everyone can take a deep breath and figure out next steps.
If they’re not comfortable killing the deal, Lyles and the CRTPO could briefly delay a vote and instead ask the state first to detail the costs and timetable of a more limited project: a new free lane from, say, Exit 23 to Exit 30. The state should be able to give a quick turnaround on that request, and the CRTPO would then make a more-informed decision on the Cintra deal.
Such a lane wouldn’t do much to relieve congestion in the area, not for long anyway. But it might cost a lot less than the Cintra-built lanes, even accounting for the mysteriously inflating penalty estimates, and would not tie the region’s hands for 50 years. It also does not mean that tolls should never be part of the region’s future. Done right, they can be one element in a broader transportation plan.
In the long term, the Charlotte region is growing so fast that effective mass transit will have to be a key ingredient in any serious effort to improve congestion. The primary remaining question is how bad the pain on the roads has to get before the public and policymakers are willing to spend adequate money on it.
In the meantime, the current I-77 tolls debate is complicated but boils down to a simple truth: The area doesn’t want it. Elected officials in Mecklenburg and Iredell counties, along with those in Mooresville, Davidson, Cornelius and Huntersville have passed resolutions against it. There’s no sense in force-feeding them.
This story was originally published January 9, 2016 at 10:35 AM with the headline "How the City Council should vote on tolls."