- Traffic Control and Maintenance Cooperatives
- Other Maintenance Strategies
- Road and Bridge Standards - A Return To The Past
- Planning Problems - A Better Long-Term Strategy
- Getting Lost - A Need for Significant Route Numbering Changes Across the U.S.
TRAFFIC CONTROL AND MAINTENANCE COOPERATIVES:
State and Local Road Reform details several major plans that are designed to eliminate most or all road safety deficiencies on local roadways while subsequently reducing costs and improving standards for both the states and local agencies involved involved. The proposals describe new approaches to local road maintenance that range from regional traffic control cooperatives to entire regional highway systems. The strategy differs from the past in that the goal is to create these cooperatives without any involvement or control by the state DOT. State DOT's nationwide have made it clear they want out of the farm-to-market road business, but sending an entire road maintenance operation from the state level to the county or municipal level is a terrible strategy that currently has no alternative. These plans create a sound alternative that provides the benefits of both types of systems.
1. Regional Engineering Districts and Highway Systems (Regional Roads)
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Spotlights: New Jersey, Fulton County (GA),
This plan proposes horizontal consolidation where counties, cities and towns effectively consolidate their traffic engineering and street departments for the express purpose of providing road maintenance jointly. It essentially reduces or eliminates the direct role of counties, cities and towns providing road maintenance by transferring engineering and routine maintenance operations to a regional level. The regions ultimately are designed to evolve into large, special road districts designated across a state that ultimately line up with the existing regional planning districts though some districts will need to be combined if the population is inadequate. Ranging from a population of 300,000-500,000 with some superregions of 1,000,000 plus they are designed to create a "state within a state" to promote efficiency and high standards that local governments cannot provide at the least cost without requiring the state DOT have any involvement with local roads.
Further Reading:
Regional Road Maintenance: Answers to Questions and Customization for Local Needs (currently unavailable)
The Steps to Creating a Regional Road System
2. The Traffic Control Cooperative Plan
Spotlights: forthcoming
This plan is similar to the regional engineering districts and highway maintenance plan except that the full maintenance aspect is stripped away allowing all local agencies to continue to maintain their own road networks with only traffic control centralized. With that, this allows the consolidated agency to hire at least one PTOE to handle this consolidated responsibility. The primary issue with local control of roads is the inconsistent and often substandard maintenance that local governments provide when given primary responsibility for traffic control and safety improvements, and this is much to do with the lack of adequate resources or ability to hire qualified personnel to handle this responsibility. This plan eliminates this problem by using either horizontal consolidation (joining of multiple counties and cities) or vertical consolidation (the state DOT provides this service to specific location agencies in return for a fee paid by the local agency to the state DOT). Since an operations fee is required, the plan also explores potential funding sources that could help waive the fee so that local agencies will not have to increase their budgets to participate. By developing a statewide funding source and/or functioning as a cooperative partner with local agencies, either the state DOT or a special state traffic control authority separate from the state DOT could assume this responsibility bringing consistent, high standards to roads otherwise owned and maintained by local governments. While counties and cities are generally favored for road construction and maintenance, this is an area that is weak for most. Removing just this duty from local governments will most likely solve this discrepancy balancing state control and local control into a win-win situation that will result in excellent maintenance and standards regardless of who actually maintains the roads.
Further Reading:
A Critique of Georgia's Off-System Safety Improvement Program & Tennessee's Spot Safety Improvement Program
Curve Warning Signs: A Need for Better Federal Guidelines
Major Changes to MUTCD Needed to Improve Uniformity of Traffic Control Devices
3. A Combination Strategy
Spotlights: forthcoming
This plan adopts elements of each plan considered and throws in a request for new federal regulations that require that state governments instead of local governments must fund, engineer and maintain safety improvements. This strategy also includes new limitations to local authority including population thresholds and restrictions that allow only larger jurisdictions including states, counties and larger cities and towns to maintain roads meaning that low population jurisdictions become mostly captive to county and state agencies for routine road maintenance. In addition, this strategy pretty much requires that routine maintenance is handled by the state on federal-aid eligible roads, overall engineering services are restricted to state agencies and service swapping is seen as a routine method of maintaining state and local roads. This plan also proposes regional strategies as a means to downsize state responsibility in lieu of a return to local control among counties and municipalities. Lastly, it includes a change in local funding options granted by states that funding must be targeted specifically to roads. Overall, this plan is designed to make division of responsibility far less flexible while combining more functions to assure that uniform standards apply to all roads instead of just roadways maintained by states and higher population local governments.
OTHER MAINTENANCE STRATEGIES:
It is clear that the U.S. has had a crisis for decades in terms of infrastructure, but what is never considered is the fact that infrastructure passes through far too many hands to make it cost-efficient and effective. The vast majority of roads are maintained by over 3,000 counties and the majority of over 19,000 municipal and 16,500 township governments. How is this a sound transportation policy? We have 50 states and planning regions in most states are in the double digits, but this means that the average state has 60 county road departments, 380 municipal street departments and 825 townships divided among the 20 states that use them.
It is also important to note that the amount of counties, municipalities and townships are much higher east of the Mississippi River meaning the averages in those states are actually much higher. This also does not even count the special road districts found in some states. In terms of maintenance, it is consistently worse the smaller the size (in either land area or population) of government that is responsible. While devolution to these smaller units of government has been a popular trend for decades, the results of devolution have always been higher costs and lower overall standards even if response times are otherwise faster. Funds are always limited, so local control means limited funds do not stretch far enough. The creation of new state-controlled consolidated road systems is not likely, but this plan lays out other solutions that operate within the existing framework and in many cases avoid using state DOT's directly. However, if the views of state DOT's change along with state capitals in that small local governments should have the state to turn to when their resources are inadequate for planning and maintenance, then this should most certainly return to those states.
1. The Statewide Contracting Plan
Public Option | Private Option
Spotlights: Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama
The Statewide Contracting Plan is a means of transferring routine road maintenance of county roads and municipal streets from the local level to a statewide cooperative. It differs significantly from the old method of contracting local roads with the state in that the state DOT is not typically involved in local road maintenance. Instead, two approaches are considered: the first is the creation of a separate state agency that specifically handles local road maintenance for local agencies, primarily rural. The second is an interagency cooperative agency created from a collective of multiple counties and/or municipalities whose sole purpose is to combine many local highway departments into a single agency to be adopted as a statewide agency. However, in all of these plans construction and planning is typically retained on a local level unless the agency specifically gives that responsibility to the cooperative. The way this program is designed is to raise standards and streamline costs for local road maintenance without taking away local ownership by combining responsibility into a statewide agency that covers as many local agencies as possible. In general, these agencies depend on a high level of participation meaning that rural jurisdictions should typically be obligated to join the cooperative. In addition, cooperatives are not at all part of the state DOT, and it is discussed why using the state DOT as a contractor for local agencies may be problematic. It is different, however, from the Regional Roads Plan in that it is a statewide program covering any county within the state but allowing high population jurisdictions to typically opt out and would be developed as a top-down program by the state legeislature. In all, it is an extremely different approach to shared services that has far more flexibility than the older method of using state DOT forces.
Further Reading: Lessons Learned from Alabama's Captive County Fiasco: Advice for Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina
2. Farm-To-Market Cooperative Highway System Plan
Spotlights: Georgia
The Farm-To-Market Cooperative Highway System Plan is a plan where the state DOT or another statewide agency cooperates with local governments on a farm-to-market highway system by providing routine maintenance while local governments retain planning and construction authority. The system is defined as cooperative also because it forms a collective. Three options are presented for administering the farm-to-market plan including direct administration by the state DOT, the creation of a separate state agency to handle farm-to-market roads and a local collective of all cities and counties in a state pooling resources to run the same type of system on their own. This plan differs from the State Contracting Plan in that all local agencies are involved, but only a portion of the road system is provided this level of state-aid. The farm-to-market system will not address local deficiencies off this system, but the general plan is to transfer enough county and municipal roads to this system so that the total state maintenance responsibility is between 25 and 45% of the entire road network. The idea is to bring state-level efficiency and expertise to a far higher number of local roads without completely eliminating local control or local financing thus balancing the strengths of both local control and functional consolidation. It is a means of expanding state control for maintenance only while keeping the larger financial responsibility with the local governments.
3. Two-Way Consolidated Road Maintenance Plan
The Two-Way Consolidated Maintenance Plan is an update of the concept used in many states where local forces maintain state highways. This plan is inspired by the road system that is used in the state of Wisconsin. While it is a good plan, it needs to be stricter on how it functions with some quality controls. This plan is designed with the idea that local governments of sufficient population and funding may be entrusted with the maintenance of state-owned roads as a condition of retaining local authority to maintain their own roads. The idea is that if local agencies can maintain state highways to adequate levels then they also have resources adequate to maintain their own roads. While local agencies will be able to maintain their own road systems, they will be required to meet state and federal standards as a condition of doing so. Local agencies who fail to meet those obligations will lose not only the authority to maintain state-owned roads, but also their own system thus will be required to surrender road maintenance authority to the state. Thus, full functional consolidation is achieved. While no local agency is independent of the state, the system will be divided into counties and municipalities who maintain state-owned roads and other counties and municipalities where only state forces are authorized to maintain roads (including both state highways and local roads). This plan creates operational efficiency without forcing the state to be responsible for local road maintenance in higher population counties and cities.
4. The Local Exchange Plan
The Local Exchange Plan is an adaption of the Agility Program that was created in 1997 by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation as a means to share services at a net cost of zero to both parties involved. Unlike these other plans where formal agreements are made and money must be exchanged, this plan is essentially an informal, service-oriented strategy where a local agency performs routine maintenance activities on state-owned roads and is reimbursed an equivalent amount for the work on roads owned by the local agency. In Pennsylvania, this usually means that a town, borough or village provides snow plowing, summer mowing or other activities for the state in turn for lower cost improvements such as traffic signs, traffic studies, road striping and equipment purchases for the towns. One major advantage of this plan was that PennDOT was able to finally mandate state and MUTCD standards for traffic control devices and safety improvements while also largely funding that work for the municipalities. Pennsylvania's local governments are very small. If applied on a larger county level, this would mean that a county could provide a substantial amount of work for the state in turn for a substantial amount of local aid. If the state supervised engineering of traffic control devices and required counties to follow state standards as PennDOT does, then this would allow counties to follow those standards without any additional revenue sources. Since safety improvements are the lowest cost activity aside from equipment, labor and traffic studies, agility would allow counties to substantially fund safety improvements that they would not be able to budget otherwise.
Further Reading:
Devolution: NOT the Solution
Rethinking Local Maintenance: Returning to a Larger State Role is the Best Strategy
It is undeniable that while our roads are safer than in the past, they lack the charm or character of yesteryear. While functionality and safety are important, beauty and history have been paved over in the name of safety and liability. Historic bridges of unique designs are being closed and/or replaced with boring concrete bridges with plain railing and ugly designs. Roads are being overbuilt in relation to actual traffic demands destroying the bucolic views in the countryside. Too many roads are being widened that do not need it. In all, America is becoming boring and unattractive to drive across and more efforts need to be made to create variety and excitement when traveling the nation's by-ways even if the cost is nominally more expensive in new construction and narrow, winding roads that remain are a bit more dangerous.
When completed, this proposal details that problem and lays out a need to beautify and simplify the nation's roads to restore character to infrastructure.
PLANNING PROBLEMS: A BETTER LONG-TERM STRATEGY
This plan recommends moving away from expanding capacity and moving toward a road system that improves connectivity and provides sound alternatives so that instead of slamming all traffic onto a few major roads, traffic has many options to choose from. It is a view that the completion of missing links, improvements to intersections on existing roads, building more grade-separated intersections and realigning roads, building new roads based on existing traffic volumes (such as new two-lane roads) for smoother movements is a better plan than widening existing roads and building new interstates to solve traffic congestion problems.
GETTING LOST: A NEED FOR SIGNIFICANT ROUTE NUMBERING CHANGES ACROSS THE US
This plan involves both suggestions for new highway numberings and the reform of confusing numbering systems on mostly state and local road systems. U.S., state roads and local roads especially are in dire need of renumbering to become more simple, informative useful to the traveling public as well as to highlight the importance of significant corridors so that the roadways are improved to reflect the traffic patterns of those who use them. In terms of state road systems, this involves giving up the idea that state road numbers should align only with maintenance and historical numbering thus improving highway number systems so that they are logical, consistent and easier to understand by the traveling public. This lays out the desperate need to align state and local road systems with functional classification and to make numbers and alphanumeric designations cross county lines. In many cases, this will require creating two classes of county routes in states that lack a township subdivision. In states with townships, this means that further efforts should be made to align county routes with functional needs instead of mileage-limited and politically motivated locations for county routes. Considering that nationally most states have very small state road systems, many of these county route numbering systems are in violation of the MUTCD and need to be transitioned to their intended purpose of providing highway routes to roads not otherwise maintained by the states.
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