Legal or not, Monroe Bypass not a good move

The Observer's editorial for Wednesday:

A federal judge ruled that the N.C. Department of Transportation can build the $800 million Monroe bypass. That doesn’t mean it’s a smart thing to do.

In fact, it says so right there in U.S. District Judge James Dever III’s opinion. Dever had to decide whether N.C. DOT had followed all the rules in assessing the environmental impact of building the 20-mile road through Mecklenburg and Union counties. Dever concluded that DOT did not violate the National Environmental Policy Act.

But as Dever pointed out, “NEPA merely prohibits uninformed – rather than unwise – agency action.” In other words, the law makes DOT jump through hoops, but doesn’t require that the road be a wise thing to build.

It’s not. Building a bypass to bypass a bypass will lead to more congestion, not less. Monroe and Union County allowed U.S. 74 to be gummed up with strip shopping malls and other sprawl. So the road is not only ugly but congested. There’s every reason to think the new road – with interchanges every three miles or so – will suffer the same fate. The only reason it wouldn’t is if the toll the state charges scares drivers away. But then it won’t serve its purpose of relieving congestion on 74.

The DOT mismanaged the process, leading to the legal challenge from environmental groups. The N.C. Turnpike Authority was required to conduct a “build vs. no-build” study, comparing the impact of building the road with that of not building it. But the authority used data with the highway in place in its “no-build” projections. The state defended that, and Dever approved. But the whole episode raised questions about how interested the state was in doing a thorough environmental analysis.

The Charlotte region has pressing transportation problems, and they’ll only get worse as the region grows over the next couple of decades. But effective solutions will require smarter approaches than dumping $800 million laying asphalt around Monroe. It will demand better land-use decisions by local governments, more regional collaboration and a more holistic approach that includes both pavement and transit.