THE CONTRADICTORY NATURE OF LOCAL MAINTENANCE
The view of this organization is that roadways maintained by local governments across the country are generally well maintained in some aspects and horribly maintained in others. In terms of pavement quality and ability to secure funding for roadway projects, they are effective. However, local governments are notoriously bad at managing the layout, financing, design and maintenance of roadway safety features which include traffic control devices (mainly traffic signs), roadway striping and guardrails: all which require high economies of scale and usually require a traffic engineer with a PTOE certification to properly plan, inspect and manage.
While not all local jurisdictions fail to provide proper oversight and maintenance of safety features, it is generally the view of this organization that local agencies at present are far too small and are not financially or structurally equipped to provide this service at the levels adequate to ensure consistent application subsequently making local roads extremely unsafe. In fact, in many states most counties do not even have a traffic engineer on the staff which in most cases would be the most highly paid county employee. Moreover, documents such as the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) set unrealistic goals for local agencies while subsequently lacking the enforcement mechanism necessary to ensure that these standards are met. The goal to fix this is to bridge the gap of local control deficiencies while fixing the root of the problem without requiring the draconian approach of transferring ownership of thousands of miles of roads to the state government.
In all, safety standards seem to be primarily an interest of state government and likewise enforcement is usually targeted at state and not local governments. That enforcement also only involves roads actually owned by the state absolving the states of responsibility for this work on a local level. This means that at present that most local governments in most states have carte blanche to maintain safety improvements as they see fit no matter how incorrectly since the highly political nature of local agencies makes enforcement of proper standards difficult and legal challenges to defective devices difficult to prosecute for the same reasons. While no agency is 100% compliant, states themselves have their own issues and inversely no agency is completely non-compliant, it is clear that many local agencies lack professional guidance or a professional approach to sound engineering practice in application of roadway safety features. In other words, good faith alone is applied, which unfortunately means that a local agency only does it the right way only because they want to.
Realistically, good engineering practice usually needs a degree of separation from local politics, but most state DOTs have not been willing to accept responsibility for what local agencies are failing to do on their own. A few states do have programs to help local agencies, however, so not all states have failed in this area. States like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Washington State have provided substantial resources for at least county governments that have helped unify standards beyond what other states do. Other states have few very large counties such as Arizona, Oregon and California helping to create operational efficiencies that tend to promote higher standards for local agencies with or without much state involvement. In addition, other functional consolidation strategies such as California's "Lakewood Plan" have strengthened counties to provide state-level services while subsequently freeing municipalities from providing certain municipal services such as road maintenance.
Since state DOT's have the qualified staff, training, experience and resources to assure that proper standards are met, the failure to correct local issues is a failure of not just the local government, but also state government. In many cases the state governments themselves have their own issues with proper management of safety improvements. Many states have also failed to unify their own roadway standards simply adopting federal standards so that local agencies have less knowledge and access to documentation about state-specific standards. They have also likewise failed to bring together interested parties to create uniform guidelines for local agencies. Thus, this organization also seeks to push states to clearly write their own standards for both state and local governments the way states like Virginia and Iowa have. This organization also hopes to find a way to centralize this responsibility so that this work falls under the oversight of properly trained engineers and under the jurisdiction of either state government or regional units large enough to unify and standardize local roadway practices. This organization also hopes to increase federal funding and oversight of state and local roadway practices to coerce states into adopting policies that unify local standards with both federal and state standards.
The High Risk Rural Roads Program (HRRRP) was created as a means to begin to address the high crash rate on rural roads. However, what is not clearly stated is that this crash rate has much to do with the defective nature of local roadways primarily in the area of safety improvements. For one, this block grant program would not have been needed had a proper investment been made in the first place in roadway safety features on local roads. While roadway engineering standards change frequently, it is the lack of engineering expertise at all and lack of stand and local investment that led to this program in the first place. These states recognized that there was a problem, but they did little to nothing about it prior to creation and advancement of this program. Most states will claim that they have programs to train local jurisdictions, but the truth is that these programs have not been effective when the state isn't providing dedicated funds, state mandates and staffing local agencies with state funding for that work. Likewise, without that added oversight most local governments are not interested in installing and maintaining roadway safety features correctly partly due to added costs.
What is often said to be "driver error" in many cases is actually an engineering error where, for example, a curve or turn sign was missing or incorrectly applied on a dangerous curve (usually by someone without proper training or certification), an unsafe guardrail was struck or visibility was poor due to a lack of well-maintained or designed pavement markings. While the HRRRP program has helped to address this, the application of this program is not uniform. Many roads have engineering errors that are not being corrected. Common problems include sign replacement projects where incorrectly engineered signs are being replaced "as is", a lack of interest in participation for badly needed improvements by many local governments due to long-term maintenance costs with uncertain funding, the use of periodic spot improvements instead of guaranteed long-term financing and oversight and the fact that these programs do not exist in every state or are operated in the same manner. It should also be considered that the federal grants by no means provide any assurance that they will continue in the future for that purpose with states investing little or nothing of their own resources into helping local governments with safety improvements. This is a serious problem since local roads make up approximately 81% of the road network in the US with states maintaining on average 19%.
The 19% figure is interesting, because most states have a very low level of state responsibility for roadways. The average in most states ranges from 8-12% with the figures skewed by a handful of states mostly in the East. The problem is that the federal-aid roadway network in the US: the system of roads that handles highway traffic: makes up an average of 24% of the roadway network in every state resulting in the responsibility for many major through roads falling on local agencies. This means that just because a road is local doesn't mean it really functions as a local road. That is problematic when local agencies do not maintain the roadway safety features to those same standards as state-owned federal-aid roads.
In those states that are an exception due to a larger ratio of state control (25% or more), all of these states continue to embrace a view that has unfortunately become increasingly unpopular and threatened. That view is that local agencies cannot be trusted to do as good or cost efficient of a job as the state government thus states should own a larger chunk of the roadway network. In fact, it was seeing how these states have handled this added local responsibility that led to the realization that the states not only can afford to at least provide safety improvement maintenance to local governments but also that they can do a far better and more consistent job in other areas. However, the reason these systems have been challenged is due to the unwillingness on a state level of adequately funding a larger state responsibility leading to substandard pavement and road design conditions that have nothing to do with roadway safety improvements. In addition, states see extra roads as an extra liability that they wish to remove while more populous local agencies resent the heavy and often unnecessary restrictions and bureaucracy that the state puts on local governments for roads that they own.
In the modern fiscally conservative political environment it looks better politically to dump responsibility on local agencies. For one, the tax burden appears to be lower on a state level (even if the local taxes are actually much higher to cover the difference or maintenance output drops considerably). Secondly, there is the misguided notion that local is always best and that local agencies can always do a better job at lower cost. Nowhere in that argument was it considered that local funding and local maintenance should not always be one in the same. In fact, the only states who embraced local financing without local control have long since abandoned those programs. Nowhere in that argument was it considered that population, tax base and the local political environment determines how consistent these standards are or how well maintained those roads actually are. In fact, it is seen as a reflection that these conditions are just something to expect in rural areas never minding that urbanized areas also have much of these same problems especially in incorporated areas and townships.
Since the 1980's only twelve states own 25% of more of their road network. Of these, only nine states have 30% or more under state control and only five states currently maintain more than 50% of their total road network. Four of those states ultimately placed county road responsibility directly under control of the state. That means that the 19% ratio is, in fact, heavily skewed toward these states. The result is that much of the country has embraced a regressive transportation policy where roadway quality, including safety features, tends to only meet acceptable standards in prosperous, high population areas with lower levels of local corruption such as in suburban counties of larger metropolitan areas.
In all, the goal here is not necessarily to turn county roads into state maintained secondary roads, but this organization will explore options to centralize many roadway functions and create more efficient ways to provide road maintenance so that not only safety features, but also other roadway functions can be better engineered, constructed and maintained. Creating better roadway standards should not cost significantly more if economies of scale are created and proper standards are followed. One size does not fit all, so the concepts here will explore everything including state maintenance of local roads, county maintenance of state roads, regional road systems and situations where it may be best to create more local responsibility in turn for more state involvement in establishing good roadway practices on local roads.
What must change, though, is the belief that local governments can be trusted to provide a quality and safe road system working independent of state agencies and licensed civil engineers. The hope is that interest will be created on local, state and national levels in creating a consistent and well-maintained roadways including safety features of the best standards and least cost no matter where your travels find you anywhere in the United States. State and Local Road Reform was created to lay the groundwork on how this can be done.
OTHER ISSUES
This blog is also being expanded to include other road-related issues unrelated to traffic control or maintenance. This is because not only has maintenance uniformity declined in recent years, but also planning and design of roadways. Brutal and merely functional road design coupled with confusing numbering schemes that never get corrected and traffic problems worsened by an unwillingness to properly integrate new and existing roads into the framework have made roads more unsafe and traffic congestion worse than ever before. This blog will eventually tackle these issues with an independent perspective.
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