By The Horns is a recurring INDY column to help readers get a grip on politics and civic life in Durham.
Earlier this month, Governor Josh Stein signed a bill to temporarily suspend the state’s 41-cent gas tax until November 30. The bill is in response to rising gas prices driven by our ongoing war with Iran. Fuel providers are required by law to pass along these savings to their customers.
By halting the gas tax, the state government hopes to bring relief to North Carolinians, but that relief will be short-lived—and dropping fuel costs is the wrong incentive. Instead of dropping the price of fuel to accommodate our driving habits, the legislature should reconsider how it funds alternative transportation options like buses and bikes, and support local governments like Durham that want to offer incentives for residents to move through their communities without driving.
Funding for transportation projects in North Carolina favors driving. The gas tax exists to pay for ongoing road maintenance created by the high volume of motor vehicles on state-owned roads.
In 2013, the legislature passed the Strategic Transportation Investments law, which prohibits the state Department of Transportation from explicitly using funds on bike and pedestrian projects unless the project also helps move more motor vehicles. The state DOT spends nearly all of its $5 billion state appropriations on building new highways and expanding existing ones to accommodate population growth, especially in its urban centers. But the need for more, wider highways to alleviate congestion is a policy choice that the state DOT commits to year-over-year, when it could break from the cycle and let local governments steer funding towards the projects their communities are asking for.
In the past few years, Durham leadership has doubled down on providing alternative transportation options. In 2020, with the help of COVID-era federal funding, the City of Durham made all GoDurham public buses fare free, and has kept them fare free to-date. In 2017, Durham City Council adopted its Vision Zero plan, a commitment to reducing traffic-related deaths and injuries by changing traffic patterns and adding additional safety infrastructure like curb extensions and protected bike lanes; the state adopted its own Vision Zero plan in 2015.
But most of Durham’s major thoroughfares, like many peer cities in North Carolina, are state-owned, limiting the types of changes Durham leaders can make without state DOT signing off. The state and Durham DOT have had an up-and-down relationship, in part because of the philosophical disagreements on what types of transportation methods should be incentivized. Local transportation advocates have said repeatedly that if the state DOT wants to meet its own Vision Zero goals, the department should allow local municipalities to pursue major road reconfigurations, like the changes Durham is pursuing on the Roxboro-Mangum corridor, that de-prioritize single-occupancy motor vehicles.
By signing the STI law over a decade ago, the state legislature has arbitrarily handicapped the transportation options that the state DOT and local departments can provide to residents, and limited the incentives to push folks toward other alternatives. Lifting the gas tax only further entrenches our societal commitment to cars.
In a story for The Assembly, one of STI’s co-sponsors, Brunswick County Rep. Frank Iler, said he and his co-authors wanted to make sure North Carolina voters weren’t picking up the tab for bike lane or sidewalk projects that didn’t affect them. But we pick up the tab for motor vehicles every day, through taxes or out of our own pockets—; paying for police staff who respond to motor vehicle crashes and the subsequent healthcare costs associated with emergency room visits—not to mention through the lives of more than 1,000 North Carolinians killed by motor vehicles every year.
Proponents of waiving the gas tax also cite the savings for North Carolinians. “I am signing this bill to keep more money in people’s wallets, but this temporary relief is just one step,” Stein said in a press release. “I remain committed to continuing to work with anyone who wants to make everyday living more affordable all year long – not just during election season.”
But if the state really wanted to save itself and residents money, it could create the conditions for more folks to live like Marc Maximov, a longtime Durham resident who has been car-free for over 40 years, saving nearly half-a-million dollars in the process.
The prohibition of the gas tax may alleviate costs temporarily, but we’ve seen this movie before. If Stein and the state legislature want to make life more affordable for residents long-term, give them options, or at least do a better job of supporting local governments who want to make their communities less dependent on gas in the future.
