Highway Crunch Ahead

Should S.C. build 1,900 new miles of road that a new study recommends?

A new national study that concludes South Carolina must build 1,900 new lane miles of highway to avert traffic congestion should be taken with a grain - make that lump - of salt. The study, made public last week, was financed by the Reason Foundation, a good outfit dedicated to "free minds and free markets."

Keeping with that theme, the study's recommendations are grounded in the premise that residents' transportation preferences alone should drive federal, state and local transportation decisions. Because most of us prefer the automobile over other forms of transportation, Reason says, transportation planners should build more roads and not worry about mass transit, which most of us don't like.

In South Carolina's case, the study concluded, the resultant economic benefit would be the saving of 19 million person hours per year. If the state doesn't soon get cracking on a massive new road building program, the study said, that time - and the dollar value it represents - would be lost to traffic congestion, especially in metro Charleston, the state's most congested city.

The study found that roads in Myrtle Beach and environs are not yet seriously congested. But over the next 25 years, it says, our communities will experience a 600 percent increase in motorist time lost to congestion unless the state builds the recommended new roads. Greater Columbia would experience a 250 percent congestion increase over the same period.

Our "needed" 1,900 lane miles would cost $4.9 billion, according to the study, or about $97 per urban resident per year. That's almost double the money the S.C. Department of Transportation collects now for road building, via the state gasoline tax.

Moreover, the study's authors caution against diverting new and existing transportation money into mass transit, asserting it would be most cost-effective to spend that money on roads. Maybe so.

But if our communities are doomed to experience 600 percent traffic growth in the next quarter century, massive new road building to accommodate that growth would be bad news for our natural resources and increase local air pollution. If leaders at all levels of government have the political will to rebuild once-thriving U.S. passenger and freight railroads while offering people-moving alternatives that cost less to use than cars, South Carolina, at least, could get away with building fewer miles of new roads - and avoid losing much more individual work time to congestion.

The Reason Foundation is right to challenge political leaders to tackle congestion now, before perpetual gridlock becomes the year-round norm. The foundation's problem is its assumption that it's government's job to help people travel however they prefer. Government's real job, on transportation as in all other issues, is to balance what people want not only against what they can afford but also against what makes the most sense environmentally.

What about the near term?

In the short term, our communities do need new roads to relieve key traffic choke points. Horry County Council soon should put its proposed 1-cent local option sales tax for roads on the Nov. 7 general election ballot. Members should allow the Horry County Board of Education's competing 1-cent local option sales tax for school construction to deter them from doing go. They'll just have to trust local voters to be smart enough to approve their proposal while rejecting the school board's.