Devolution nationwide continues to gain steam as the political environment favors increased local control. Almost no state has added any new highway mileage in decades, cities and towns are taking roads from counties, and the number of local governments continues to increase creating less and less accountability for how roads are maintained. The purported benefits of this are debatable, but the reality is that placing more and more authority for roads on a high number of small counties, cities and towns amounts to being a very popular bad idea. It creates a bigger structural problem to solve a smaller cost problem, which is that states lack the resources with current tax rates to manage larger state road systems.
All states and most territories have at least some locally maintained roads. Just because they are common does not mean they really work all that well. It is common knowledge that local governments are just not going to produce the same results as the state does in terms of standards and frequency of maintenance, and the real reason that states hand off roads to counties is that they want them to be responsible for the cost of construction, including minor resurfacing. That doesn't mean that they are also prepared to take on technical operations like traffic engineering nor do they have the resources to perform traffic studies or maintain roadway safety features as often as the state. They do not have the economies of scale, and a small jurisdiction cannot justify an expensive cost for equipment, materials, and storage for larger roadway operations making them inefficient by default. Unfortunately, increasing local control in terms of service delivery has very mixed results with no real alternative being offered at present. It should be noted that there are success stories are rare and usually in the case of:
- Wealthier cities breaking off of very high population counties (usually with a population of around 25,000-45,000)
- Very large population, mostly consolidated counties regaining control of their own roads
- Consolidated city-counties (popular primarily in the South)
- Counties and larger cities who contract with the state to maintain state routes
In these examples, note the following: the wealthier cities have a large tax base for a small geographic area and are depriving the larger region the economies of scale and better standards. They also still have the issue of having "the foxes guarding the henhouse" in that oversight is low to non-existent. As to large population counties with broad powers, these are relatively rare. Most high population counties are carved up into numerous cities and towns that cut into their landlocked tax base, and counties like Los Angeles County where the county provides road maintenance on behalf of most cities are also uncommon. Counties as large as states that can act as states in this manner. Less than 50 counties in the entire nation have populations exceeding a million residents, and of those the amount that have the purchasing power and responsibility of states can be counted on one hand. Fairfax County in Virginia doesn't even operate a county road system relying on VDOT for maintenance although they assist heavily in planning and funding construction projects. Consolidated city-counties, while they do provide better efficiency and lower costs, are still just a larger city and still have many of the same problems of larger cities. Because of their status, they are unlikely to contract with neighboring jurisdictions in the suburbs due to the fear that those jurisdictions might be annexed into the city. While Davidson County, merged with Nashville, has very high standards for its roads, those benefits do not stretch to neighboring counties or municipalities in greater Nashville. They stop cold at the county line in every direction. Other consolidated city-counties are not as effective, and their populations/tax bases are far below Nashville.
Noting these exceptions, it is still important to point out that counties, townships and municipalities by their very nature almost always both duplicate services and raise basic costs. The only way they avoid this is by cutting corners. The easiest way to cut corners is by maintaining roads below regulation, deferring maintenance on anything deemed "non-essential", avoiding any traffic studies on their roads that might increase liability, and not having any engineers hired as either staff or consultants to oversee their roads. This is unethical, but in many states it is legal. This way, nobody can be held accountable for shoddy workmanship or substandard roadway conditions since technically no engineering was involved. Wealthier jurisdictions ultimately cannot avoid liability and do begin to move away from this practice, but not always! This is amplified not only because the state operates a separate system within the same county but also when other counties and cities are in close proximity spreading the available tax base very thin.
It is important to note that counties cannot grow to assume more responsibility to enhance their tax base nor services. While cities can grow, it is not often that a city is capable of growing large enough to provide even county-level services. The average city or town usually has a population of between 1,000 and 5,000 residents, so the comparison to a major city such as New York, Atlanta or Dallas would be disingenuous. What if this barrier was removed for cities, counties and townships to provide certain services? What if these geographically constricted cities, counties and towns could turn to their neighbors and start shaking hands to combine resources in such a way to provide higher standard, more cost-efficient and better maintained roads than they currently can within the confines of their geography while still maintaining their local autonomy? The regional roads plan is how that can be done.
Moreover, it is not at all beneficial when the responsibility for roads transfers from the state to a low population county, city or town: especially when state-level financing must be divided across a very large number of jurisdictions. The stated benefits of local control are simply not realized when a technocratic state agency reverts that responsibility to a large number of small political entities with the funding pie too small to assure that the purchasing power, financial flexibility or technical expertise is in place to provide an equivalent service to what the state is otherwise able to provide. LTAP (Local Technical Assistance Program) is also not working, because it provides no actual supervision, does not guarantee access to engineering services, and it is not raising the standards high enough under the current structure nor promoting uniformity across all jurisdictions. More oversight is needed. If the state is not going to relieve counties and small municipalities of what they are unable to do well, another way is needed.
First, it should be noted that state populations and their subsequent road networks are significantly larger than they used to be. When the Brookings Institute proposed consolidating entire county road networks under state control in the 1930's, the nation's public highway system was still in its infancy and the US population was far lower. There were very few multi-lane highways, most roads were still unpaved, numerous bridges and road segments were private toll roads, and state highway systems nationwide were not even a decade old. North Carolina was the first state to adopt this plan. While the North Carolina plan has been successful, the system has not been free of problems. The reality is that the states that embraced the North Carolina plan have either abandoned it (such as Maryland) or are struggling to balance modern transportation demands with the maintenance and improvement of smaller local roads (such as Virginia). Inter-regional conflicts for road funding further endanger such systems with accusations that the entire road network in one region is being cheated out of road funding in favor of another in lieu of a few major routes. State DOT's are frustrated that they have to maintain local roads when it means less money to cover large-scale construction projects. Today, only four states fully adopted the North Carolina plan and only 20% of states have adopted a system that fully relieves counties and low population municipalities of maintenance of federal-aid eligible roadways. With shrinking federal-aid, high inflation, state governments leery of raising taxes, and rising construction costs, every one of these larger state road systems are just one election away from a sudden move to dump all of these roads back onto local governments. What the local agencies need is a counter proposal and backup plan if they don't want to end up like 80% of states with a huge responsibility for both streets and highways without the resources to maintain them right.
On top of that, two of the four states that have adopted this special state-controlled county road system either partially or in whole have seen a huge increase in population from when the systems were established. North Carolina had 3 million residents in 1931. Today that population is approaching 11 million. Virginia, who established the similar Byrd Road Act in 1932, had a population of 2.5 million when the system was created. Today, that population has exploded to 8.7 million. However, despite both states having more than tripled in population, that population tends to be clustered in a few major metropolitan areas. Rural areas in both states have been growing slowly or losing population in favor of these larger metropolitan areas thus leaving these counties, cities and towns increasingly strapped for funds. This means that rural areas need to be looking beyond their boundaries to create efficiency, offer a full scope of services, and provide high quality public roads. Even urban areas by and large are likewise being very constrained by balancing local needs with the needs of the entire state: especially when metropolitan counties are carved up into many smaller municipalities.
The paradox of the urban areas is that the push for self-governance increases with the population, so the economies of scale needed for good roads often do not materialize. The Virginia and North Carolina systems also excluded larger cities meaning that cities that actually do need the benefits of centralization are unable to join the secondary road system. Obviously, the state does not want to be responsible for 100% of the roads, but let's not forget that in both systems the state both owns and maintains these roads in contrast with Puerto Rico where the territory maintains 100% of the roads but only actually owns around a quarter of that meaning that they rely on local funding for other roads that they simply expand state-level services onto. That division between jurisdiction and maintenance is an essential component of a regional roads plan where consolidated efforts do not require ownership or a shift in funding to a whole other level of government.
It is also no surprise that the North Carolina plan states are also increasingly upset by the lack of funding and action on a state level for their congested, outmoded roads. It should be pointed out, however, that one of the four North Carolina Plan states is not having the difficulties that Virginia and North Carolina are having. Delaware, one of the smallest states in the nation, is made up of only three counties. Functioning on a compact level, Delaware has been able to maintain tremendous efficiency by keeping state control of both major roads and county roads partly because it is still close enough to the center of government to be manageable. With no competing regions or large swaths of rural area far from the state capital, it is probably the most successful example of the North Carolina plan. It obviously helps that the entire state of Delaware is in effect one region. The only difference between Delaware's road system and a regional system is that the DelDOT maintains both highways and county roads vs. a regional system where the three counties would operate a statewide joint operation separate from DelDOT that could include contracting with cities and towns but would not include highways.
Local control advocates in their defense of devolution cite examples of larger population jurisdictions that do a good job while ignoring the fact that the majority of local governments are very low in population and are never going to measure up. It is disingenuous to compare Nashville-Davidson County in Tennessee to a rural county in the state like Bledsoe. It is apples and oranges. With a population of over 700,000 residents, the agency functions like a state within a state as it should while Bledsoe with less than 15,000 residents is never going to see the results of Nashville unless the county grows by almost 5000% and it is consolidated with its only city, Pikeville. Naturally, this is something that is not likely to happen anytime soon, if ever, even though it is a growing county. Even though statewide funding is more than adequate overall, the 95 counties that make up Tennessee are far too numerous to provide the quality and consistency that residents of Nashville-Davidson County enjoy. What if the benefits that Nashville-Davidson enjoys were expanded into the entire metropolitan region of Nashville or beyond?
Local control advocates will go further to state that this is simply an urban-rural divide where it should just be accepted that rural areas have less money and that things will improve as the population catches up, but how much population does it take? A county with 11,000 resident is not likely to bloom into a county with 100,000 residents any time soon, and that is usually the threshold necessary for a county to be effective at creating a road maintenance that is capable of meeting professional engineering standards unless such a county is able to normalize its costs through contracting with a state or other outside jurisdictions. Major road safety deficiencies can also be found on the local roads in much higher population counties such as those surrounding Nashville as is demonstrated by the photo above. Regardless, Tennessee DOT is not interested in assuming local responsibility for roads even if the counties and cities paid them for the privilege. In fact, local agencies being able to voluntarily pay state agencies to provide routine maintenance services on locally-owned roads and streets has rarely ever been successful. The few times such programs were enacted they were typically short-lived. It was always a good idea, but the states themselves saw no benefit in stretching their resources to cover lower classification roads, and they were able to successfully convince people that "too many roads" was a bad thing as if those roads were just garbage that could all just be thrown in a dumpster. In terms of how some local agencies have kept them up over the years, they essentially did become garbage.
Instead of waiting for perfect circumstances, action needs to be taken. Public safety should not be jeopardized with local accountability suppressed just to divide road responsibility based on an inefficient and archaic government structure laid out in the days of horse and buggy. The conditions present in the 1930's with smaller local governments that led to the North Carolina Plan are still present today, but the increase in population has made it a major factor in fewer areas than the 1930's or even the 1980's. Nevertheless, weak accountability and local political whims continue to make locally-maintained roads a sketchy proposition. What has changed since the 1930's the most, however, are the increasingly powerful metropolitan areas competing with rural areas far from those cities for transportation funding while the revenue sources on a state level continue to decline. While these issues might justify more local control, that does not mean that local control should necessarily shift all the way to a county or municipal level. Instead, this suggests that a state's local road responsibility should be divided into regions that rest above a county level but below a state level as a means of tackling transportation issues related to smaller areas that couple nearby rural areas with approximate larger urban areas. Nashville doesn't need to worry about Memphis, but they should be there to help their neighboring counties and cities in greater Nashville have access to the resources that they currently enjoy.
Another issue is the structure of counties: primary those east of the Mississippi River. Rural county roads in many Western states typically have much higher road standards despite a sparser population due to the presence of a small number of very large counties. In observing these large counties, it is clear that road funding distribution from the state is at far higher levels with far greater efficiency even in counties that have a very low population. In other words, if the state has $250 million a year to spend on local services, that $250 million would stretch much further in a state with 40 counties than the same state with 100 counties. If each county got the same amount, 40 counties would get $6.25 million a year to cover all basic services while the same county in a state with 100 counties would receive $2.5 million. Guess which one is more likely to spend some of that money to hire professional staff and develop a traffic operations unit?
The example above shows how a county with 2,000 residents in Washington State or California is in far better shape than the same in Georgia, Texas, or Tennessee. Especially important is that professional engineering standards are more consistently followed when a state has far fewer local jurisdictions fighting for a piece of the pie simply because the state can more easily finance state-aid funds for local engineering programs as was shown. If the state personally financed one traffic engineer and one PTOE at $200,000 a piece, the cost for the state with 40 counties would be $8 million while the same in the state with 100 counties would be $20,000,000. Needless to say, the state with more counties is less likely to finance something like that. The result is that it is much more possible for counties to establish a proper organizational structure when state funding on the local level is not spread thin over a very large number of jurisdictions. It is clear that these same goals are not being met in all but a handful of states east of the Mississippi River because state-local cooperation is weaker, average rural county populations are lower, and fragmentation of government is much higher. In other words, you do not necessarily need the state to take over county roads and municipal streets to bring local roads to proper levels, but the best results come when a state has fewer political subdivisions covering much larger areas with equivalently larger populations and tax bases. Merging counties and cities is unlikely, but doing this on a specific-service level is possible.
Comparing states that generally lack major engineering issues along roads maintained by local governments and those that have them typically, a pattern emerged. That pattern is that both the land area per county and population per county needs to be above a certain threshold to provide an adequate level of service per county. The other observed factors that could affect local road quality include
- A very high level of devolution where ratios of local control exceed 90% (such as in Iowa) with a focus on farm-to-market roads.
- States where there is less competition for funding between urban and rural areas (such as an Iowa and Montana).
- States with fewer counties (Arizona) and/or more stringent controls on municipal formation and annexation (Maryland/Virginia).
- Counties that are contracted to maintain state-owned roads (such as in Wisconsin, Florida, and Michigan)
- Service exchanges where the state provides technical services in exchange for non-technical services from local governments (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin)
- States where county responsibility is limited to only regionally important roads due to the presence of townships (such as in New Jersey and New York)
- Lastly, a greater percentage of state funding is directed more to a local level.
It should also be noted that townships present a complicated issue. In states that allow townships to contract with counties, better results are noted vs. states who have separate township road systems AND states with counties who do not have townships. Townships oddly provide protection to counties against city encroachment as counties are not competing with municipalities, and counties operate on a different level in that they maintain roads and streets within cities and towns. In contrast, counties in states that do not have townships must transfer jurisdiction to the city or town when a city/town is formed or annexes land unless the county has a formal agreement with the city to provide all road maintenance on behalf of the city. Those agreements are rare outside of very small population municipalities. Perhaps county roads would be better in those states if state law allowed counties to "punch through" cities on roadways deemed to be of regional importance allowing cities and towns only to maintain minor streets.
Nevertheless, good results with this strategy have primarily been consistently noticed in only a few Midwestern states and are not reliable enough to be an acceptable variable. It should also be noted that not all state DOT's are well-run and have numerous problems that affect road quality and do not promote a good roads culture: especially in very high population states with aging infrastructure such as California. It should also be pointed out that in those Midwestern states (Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin specifically) that the state is a strong partner to counties, which has much to do with a certain political culture within the state. This is why neither these Midwestern states nor states with township road systems are being used as examples when factoring in average county size and population. The factors shown here relate primarily to states that lack such a culture with local governments that work largely independent of each other. In other words, an environment that fosters good roads requires not only greater economies of scale, but also a good roads culture. North Carolina is an example of where a good roads culture has helped promote better standards across the board along with state control of county roads.
Land area and population in relation to the number of local jurisdictions are both major factors in local road quality. The importance of land area is that the presence of fewer jurisdictions mean that larger overall funding is available for each jurisdiction even if the jurisdiction has an otherwise very low population. Similarly a higher population threshold is needed to create a coordinated effort among local agencies statewide to adopt higher standards by removing financial limitations as an excuse for both inaction and lack of intergovernmental cooperation. Having these factors in place also makes it easier for a state to retrofit a local jurisdiction to handle its own needs such as financing a county engineer. While it is no guarantee of best results, both the land area should exceed 1,500 square miles and average unincorporated county population should exceed 100,000 with the average population preferably exceeding 200,000 residents to be able to achieve even adequate engineering standards and economies of scale. This is the only way that costs can be kept down while standards can remain sufficiently high. Looking at 12 states in the West and Southeast shown in the charts below, only four exceeded the land area threshold and only two exceeded the 200,000 average population threshold. Four states fell below the necessary 100,000 per county threshold and three had a land area under 500 square miles. Clearly those states with the lowest numbers respectively have the most problems running an effective highway agency below a state level.
The classic remedy to this problem is local government consolidation. However, the political realities are that a top down mandate to consolidate many counties into far fewer counties and municipalities has been very unpopular and has had almost no cases of happening since the 1930's. The public may support consolidating some services, but the situation turns nasty when you start talking merging of police, fire and school districts into some mega-county while erasing local identities. The idea of completely eliminating even one county usually requires a financial crisis sufficient that a county is forced to consolidate with another, but federal-aid programs to impoverished counties since the depression have mostly prevented this. What makes financial sense does not make political sense, but the current system is broken. With little incentive to change that system, the only other option besides the state level is to create a new functional layer of government that exists below the state level but higher than the county or municipal level. In other words, local maintenance of roads based on county and municipal boundaries should be replaced with a regional structure that creates a "state within a state". In part 2, the details and structure of a "Regional Road System" will be discussed.
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