Loop’s ranking is questioned (The Winston Salem Journal)
State highway officials say it makes a lot of sense to rank urban loop projects by comparing the benefits of a project to the cost.
But officials in Winston-Salem are still wondering how a formula that was supposed to be fair put the city’s beltway wishes at the bottom of the pile — at the same time recommending more beltway construction for some cities that already have portions in place.
“I think the process has some flaws,” said Stan Polanis, the transportation director in Winston-Salem. “We have long-range transportation plans that sort of count on that road being in place. I’m not sure what happens if it is not there.”
Everyone agrees that state money is limited. There are $8 billion in unmet needs for urban loop , and that part of the highway budget gets only $150 million per year.
“We have a small amount of dollars that has to be used to fund numerous projects across the state,” said David Wasserman, an engineer at the N.C. Department of Transportation in Raleigh. “A benefit-cost formula is used to prioritize many projects. We need to get the wisest use of the dollars we have.”
Wasserman works in the DOT’s Strategic Planning Office, which used a formula to develop a ranking of 21 urban-loop projects. The DOT’s idea is to take the politics out of road building and base construction decisions on hard data.
The draft urban loop priority formula put the eastern part of the Winston-Salem beltway dead last among the urban loop projects in the state. Neither the eastern nor western beltway is scheduled for construction — or even right-of-way purchase — over the next 10 years. The eastern and western beltway sections are considered separate projects by the DOT.
The state’s formula tallies up the need for a project and its benefits by assigning a percentage weight to various factors that include everything from how the road reduces congestion to how it may boost economic development. That number is then divided by the total cost of the project to assign a final ranking.
“There are not real good, clear relationships between the cost of a project and the need for a project,” Polanis said. “They are two different things. To give cost as much weight as it gets is not quite right.”
If the DOT had used only the number that represents the needs and benefits calculation, the eastern leg of the Winston-Salem beltway would have come in at third place and the western leg at eighth place. But, as city officials complain, when the needs and benefits calculations are divided by the project costs, both beltway sections plummet.
Polanis said that some projects that rank higher than the Winston-Salem beltway are smaller portions of projects that have already gotten a start. The top of the list includes projects like a 1.7-mile extension of Wilmington’s Independence Boulevard costing $56 million, and the widening of a six-mile segment of I-485 in Charlotte at a cost of $63 million.
Winston-Salem’s eastern beltway leg, at an estimated cost of $839 million, and the western leg, at $455 million, share the cellar with other nonfunded projects like the I-26 connector in Asheville ($555 million).
Nonetheless, state officials disagree with some local officials’ position that the funding formula favors places with beltway projects that are already under way. When Winston-Salem officials were invited to comment on the formula during the planning stage, they complained that it was a “major flaw” for projects to be evaluated entirely rather than broken into segments for separate evaluation.
Wasserman said that if a section of a city’s beltway has already been built, the benefits derived from that section were excluded from the calculations. State officials say the calculations gave no credit to cities for parts of beltways that have already been built.
By Wesley Young | Journal Reporter
