Transportation Innovation in the Carolinas
(Carolina Business Review weekly TV program, June 13, 2014)
- Joe Milazzo II, executive director of the Regional Transportation Alliance, speaks to transportation funding innovations on the weekly television show hosted by Chris William.
One of the good things that's happened in transportation lately is that the new funding formula. It affects all of North Carolina, "Strategic Transportation Initiatives", it was a proposal by the Governor, bipartisan support in the house and senate, it's created a more rational funding system for us. We went from the allocation formula, some folks called it the "equity formula", it served its purpose, but it had some fundamental limitations. One of the biggest limitations was you were penalized by completing your trunk highway system. You were given resources based on the miles to complete of the intrastate system in North Carolina, so as you would complete those roads, you would have less resources available for you.
Now we have the new funding formula, data driven, where it's the opposite, you have 40% of your resources going to projects of statewide significance, another 30% for regional significance based on population, and also primarily on data as well. So it's a new funding formula, it's a better way of doing business. It's not the whole answer, but it's a good thing.
There are definitely different views on [transportation tax revenues], but you're exactly right about the points you were making about electric vehicles and Uber and Lyft and those sort of organizations. We need to have a new way of doing business; in essence, one of the challenges right now is when you go to the gas pump, you're essentially getting almost a "road pass" to use anything you want, because you pay your gas tax, and you can use any road you want, regardless of the time of day, regardless of how much the vehicle weighs and so on.
A vehicle-miles tax or fee of some sort, would help in that, it would still have to be limited, because you wouldn't have the ability to do the time of day unless you incorporated that in as well.
Toll roads are something we haven't talked about yet. Tolls would be something that can help, in certain corridors or on certain lanes as well.