At the time, it made sense. Renee Stockler and her husband were expecting a baby and they wanted the suburban dream: big house, big yard, nice neighborhood.

• Angus Lamond
• Traffic congestion at Fairview and Providence in Charlotte

On a half-acre in Union County, right around the corner from a new elementary school, they built their house just the way they wanted it -- with a wrap-around porch, designer kitchen and separate deck off the master bedroom on the second floor.

It was supposed to be perfect. But Stockler says she hasn't had a chance to enjoy it.

Her commute is sapping the substance out of her life, she says. When they built the house, she worked for an Internet company from home. Now she commutes to a nine-to-five job near the center city. To pull that off, she wakes up at 5:45am, dresses her son, gets ready for work, drops him off at day care and then heads for the office. On the way home, Stockler reverses that process, and by the end of the day she's spent about two and a half hours total on her commute.

"At first I didn't really realize where the time was going," she said. "It just seemed like I didn't have any left at the end of the day. Then it dawned on me: I waste 20 hours a week sitting in traffic."

Stockler and her husband go round and round about moving, but they like their house, the lower taxes and Union County's schools. So they keep thinking about it and she keeps driving -- and wishing someone would do something about the traffic congestion.

Stockler is not alone. In a 2005 business retention survey, roads and transportation infrastructure were ranked the second-worst problem factor out of 24 factors affecting Charlotte's businesses.

It's only going to get worse. Over the next 25 years, Charlotte's population is expected to grow by about 340,000 people. That's like adding the entire population of St. Louis or Cincinnati to Charlotte without any of the additional 530 freeway and arterial miles used to get around in those cities. But in this area, it's the population just outside of the Charlotte city limits that's the killer. In 2000, 1.7 million people lived in Mecklenburg County and the surrounding counties. By 2020, nearly a million more people will move to this region and flood the roadways. Many of those newcomers will settle into the areas surrounding Mecklenburg County that are growing faster in terms of new residential development than the county itself is. Those people will want to use our roads to get where they are going, which more than likely will be to jobs inside Mecklenburg County.

The Texas Transportation Institute already ranks Charlotte the second most-congested mid-sized city in America after Austin, TX, and Charlotte is the 24th most-congested city overall. Last year, some local city council members got a nasty shock when they learned that 29 percent of Charlotte's thoroughfares and streets are ranked at a gridlocked "E" or "F" level of service, the lowest rankings that the nation's transportation planners assign to roads. Between now and 2030, Charlotte and the metro region will invest $7 billion in transit plans and supportive infrastructure. But when the city is done spending all that money, the percentage of E's or F's will be even higher: 64 percent.

David Hartgen, UNCC professor of transportation studies, measures the problem another way. Right now, he said, it takes an average of 30 percent longer to reach a destination in Charlotte during rush hour than it does at other times of the day, according to a measure commonly used by the Texas Transportation Institute. Hartgen expects that number to climb to 60 percent over the next 30 years. That's 15 to 20 percent higher than Atlanta's current congestion level, which is the fourth worst in the nation.

But the Charlotte region has a plan to deal with this, right? The answer depends on whom you ask.

A plan without a plan

In 1998 voters approved a half-cent sales tax for mass transit that will pay for $6.5 billion worth of buses, light rail and other alternatives to the car. Buses and light rail do take drivers off the road, but not enough of them to make a noticeable dent in traffic. To address the roads situation, the city now wants another $3.5 billion from taxpayers. The city council just passed something called the Transportation Action Plan (TAP), a vague policy statement that lays out a wordy strategy for land use and transportation integration in Charlotte but that provides almost no detail as to what the city will actually be doing with the $3.5 billion.

If rush hour refugees were to read the plan from end to end, they would notice something odd about it right away. Namely, that congestion is hardly mentioned at all in the 36-page document.

"Charlotte will become the premier city in the country for integrating land use and transportation choices," the plan's mission statement reads. No congestion mitigation there. Reducing congestion isn't even listed as one of TAP's five goals. But city transportation planner Dan Gallagher insists reducing congestion is actually a concern in the policy document, even if it isn't directly mentioned by name in the goals or mission statement.

Congestion comes up more frequently in a sister document, called the TAP Technical Plan, which includes a formula to prioritize road projects -- a formula that gives a roadway project the same number of points for reducing congestion as it does for supporting bus and rapid transit. It's debatable whether drivers would consider road access to a transit line as important as reducing congestion. After all, more than 90 percent of the population won't use mass transit as Charlotte offers it.

But the city council, in what appears to be an effort to avoid holding anyone accountable for a transportation decision of any kind, wasn't asked to vote on the technical document. Neither did the council directly approve the formula for deciding which road projects rank as priorities. Council members voted on the vaguely worded policy document only, so what they actually approved -- outside of a bunch of feel-good bureaubabble -- is anyone's guess.

• David Hartgen, UNCC professor of transportation studies

The only concrete part of the TAP policy document is buried in the appendix. It's a stunning piece of work called the "Major and Minor Thoroughfares Not Anticipated to be Widened Through 2030 Map." Those thoroughfares (see map on this page) include just about any route anyone who lives in the suburbs could conceivably use to get to the center of the county. Which means, of course, roads most important to suburban drivers won't get major overhauls anytime soon.

Gallagher emphasizes that this doesn't mean roadwork and improvements will never be done on those routes. The city plans to use a variety of lower-cost fixes, such as extra turn lanes, that would be funded if the city finds a way to raise the $3.5 billion. But the roads won't be widened.

Equally disturbing is a similar regional formula for prioritizing road work, which gives a project the same maximum number of points for reducing congestion as it does for providing access to a transit or freight station. Other factors that can add up to outweigh the importance of congestion include a project's impact on air quality. Whether a project will improve access to a minority community is also a factor that is considered.

Take Wilkinson Boulevard. At any time of day, drivers can cruise down Wilkinson with no problem. And yet the road is scheduled for widening. Meanwhile, people stuck in traffic on 485 between Providence Road and US 74 might be shocked to find that the widening of that part of the interstate is so far down on the list it won't even be considered for funding until after 2030.

City planners insist that while the TAP plan won't reduce congestion, it will dramatically reduce its growth. If the city gets the $3.5 billion, roads will be slightly more congested in 2030 than they are today. But Hartgen, who has studied these plans, says that while the intersection and congestion hot-spot fixes in the TAP technical document are steps in the right direction, the plan doesn't focus enough on the most congested areas of the county.

Another Way

To gain a competitive edge, cities and states across the country are beginning to make congestion reduction their top priority.

Atlanta officials chucked their old road project-ranking formulas, which were similar to those Charlotte uses today. Atlanta's new plans no longer consider congestion equally among factors like connectivity, environmental impact and transit friendliness. Congestion reduction is priority number one -- it's weighted at 70 percent while the other eight factors split the remaining 30 percent.

But transportation planners here are digging in their heels against this new trend. One local transportation planner actually laughed out loud when Creative Loafing told him about Atlanta's newly revised transportation priorities. Several local planners suggested Charlotteans would oppose a move like Atlanta's new 23-lane interstate-widening project the private sector is building on I-75. Local planners say Atlanta's congestion-reduction goal -- which actually aims at having less congestion in 20 years -- won't work.

In March Georgia Governor Sonny Purdue announced in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution a "worst first" plan, meaning the city and state would now prioritize fixing the nastiest traffic bottlenecks to eliminate congestion.

"We've tried a shotgun solution in the past, everything everywhere, and it's not been effective," Purdue told the paper.

That Atlanta's new approach is a radical idea in the transportation world would come as a shock to most Charlotte drivers, but when CL asked local transportation planners what they thought of the concept, they grumbled and sent us literature from a group opposing the new asphalt-oriented strategy.

Bob Cook, secretary of the Mecklenburg Union Metropolitan Planning Organization, which prioritizes major road projects for the region, takes issue with the new Atlanta philosophy.

"You can't build your way out of congestion at a system level," said Cook. "There isn't, I don't think, the desire on the part of the community here to do something like that on a system level. There simply isn't the money."

Meanwhile, Atlanta plunges ahead. A new Georgia law allows public/private road partnerships, in which private companies pay most or all of the cost of road building and upkeep in exchange for keeping tolls.

Billions of dollars in private road projects are in the works or proposed for roads around Atlanta and include truck-only lanes to segregate slower moving trucks from traffic, bus lanes, and toll express lanes for drivers willing to pay more to escape congestion. All of this adds up to more lane space. The vision, as described in the Journal-Constitution, is a massive, mostly privately funded expansion of the I-75/I-285 corridor that will turn this section of the interstate into a fast-moving zoom zone expanded to handle transfer traffic. Atlanta hopes its plan for a whole system of truck lanes will cement the city's reputation as "the hub of the Southeast's interstate freight network."

• The city has no plans to widen the roads highlighted in pink, which include just about any route anyone who lives in the suburbs could conceivably use to get to the center of the county; city officials say that doesn't mean roadwork and improvements will never be done in the pink zone, but the roads won't be widened in most readers' lifetimes

In the process, light rail has fallen a couple of notches down the priority list in Atlanta. MARTA, the city's rail line, has by no means been abandoned, but the political will for planned expansions is no longer there.

"MARTA is done," a September 2005 article in the Journal-Constitution declared. No more stations and no new track are planned. A long-planned rail extension is in its death throes, and MARTA has laid off more than 1,000 workers, cut services and raised fares, the paper reported.

Though bus lines and bus ways remain a critical part of the Atlanta transportation system that will receive an additional $3.5 billion in the coming years, the long-heralded vision of a multi-modal bus and train station downtown -- Charlotte has plans for a similar station -- has been "scaled back to a shadow," the Journal-Constitution reported.

Tom Weyandt, the Atlanta Regional Commission's director of planning, told the Journal-Constitution recently that it is premature to say rail is dead. But with the cost of rail at more than $100 million a mile and roads now the priority, Atlanta no longer has the resources available to build rail transit.

For well over a decade, maybe two, the reigning philosophy among traffic planners across the country has been that you can't build your way out of congestion with more asphalt and additional lanes -- and you shouldn't even try. So the focus shifted to "transportation choices" such as bus systems, light rail, HOV lanes and transit-oriented development policies, which forced or encouraged new housing to be built along transit lines near downtown centers. The logic behind those strategies was sound. It made sense to encourage people to live closer to where they worked, and to cluster housing near shopping and employment.

But planners may have gotten carried away with the whole thing.

As cities across the country raced to resurrect their nearly abandoned "urban cores" and center cities, urban planners discovered congestion could be a powerful weapon. The longer and more painful the drive from the 'burbs, the more likely people would consider moving back to a city's core.

So battling congestion slipped to the bottom of the transportation priority list -- though not completely off of it. Planners across the country developed a subtle disdain for suburban rush hour commuters.

That's one of the reasons why road capacity has increased by just 5 percent since 1980, while the population has grown by almost 30 percent and the number of vehicles on the road by 50 percent. The Texas Transportation Institute ranks 51 metro areas as severely crowded today, compared to just five in the 1980s.

Something had to give, and something has. Seventeen states are now scrambling to find innovative new funding sources and solutions to combat congestion.

Hartgen has studied the congestion problem and says if this region wanted to, it could make a serious dent in its congestion problems by building 1,070 lane miles of new highway capacity that would be spread out among sections of I-485, I-77, US-74 and other urban arterials. He believes it would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion over 25 years, about half the cost of the county's mass transit plan.

That would make Charlotte a much looser city, Hartgen claims. He says Charlotte needs to watch other cities facing up to their congestion problems and start taking notes.

"It's not transit service that is going to make a community shine economically, it's highway congestion and the ability to deal with it," said Hartgen. "That's what Atlanta and Texas cities are doing now. They are focusing in on how to deal with street congestion and they are doing that through intense plans to improve street capacity. The cities that figure that out first and deal with it, they're the ones that are going to move out sharply ahead of the pack competitively. I want Charlotte to be one of those."

Like Atlanta, other cities struggling with congestion are scrambling to follow the lead of Texas, which has also set actual congestion reduction goals. Texas has a 38-cents-per-gallon gas tax that brings in about $4.4 billion in road-building revenues a year for the entire state. But that doesn't come close to meeting the state's transportation needs. So the state got innovative, and now private companies are paying the full $6 billion cost of a toll road from Mexico to Oklahoma to relieve congestion on I-35 and an additional $1.2 billion "concession fee" to the state. That, along with a half-dozen other massive toll building projects, will pay for the North Texas regional rail system so that tax payers won't have to.

To put this in perspective, consider this: Last year's federal highway aid budget, which was split among all the states, was $34 billion. At present, Texas has $29 billion worth of toll highway projects in the works, all of them funded by the private sector. Indiana, Washington, DC, and Virginia are all plowing forward with massive toll projects while Delaware and New Jersey have entered the planning stages.

• Angus Lamond
• I-77 at Clanton Road

Ideas like these haven't exactly caught on around here. Cook, the secretary of the Mecklenburg Union Metropolitan Planning Organization, is less than enthusiastic about following Atlanta's lead.

"If we said we want to widen I-77 or to take I-85 from its current eight lanes through parts of Charlotte and double that to 16, I dare say that the reaction from the community would not be a positive one because of the impacts on the neighborhoods adjacent to those areas," Cook said.

Meanwhile, North Carolina Governor Mike Easley and other legislative leaders continue to hesitate on toll roads, despite $85 billion in transportation needs over the next 25 years. The state Board of Transportation predicts gas taxes will bring in only $55 billion over that period, a shortfall of $30 billion.

For more than three years, Virginia has been trying to partner with North Carolina on a joint I-95 toll road project that would fund $4 billion in desperately needed repairs -- and generate $65 million a year for each state. So far, NC state leaders who fear that a $5 toll would hurt tourism have managed to keep Easley and some legislators firmly in their pockets. That, and a resistance to giving local governments the authority to build toll roads and raise road money in other innovative ways, means expressway projects like those on Independence Boulevard, which have run decades behind schedule, may have to wait decades longer.

Charlottean Bill Carstarphen is co-chair of NC Go!, a coalition of people and businesses that has been fighting for five years to reduce congestion on the state's roads and pressure legislators to stop raiding the transportation budget to fund general budget needs. His goal is to change the road building status quo in the state and follow the path other states are blazing.

"North Carolina's population will grow by 4.2 million, or about 52 percent, in the next 30 years," said Carstarphen. "We are simply not keeping up with growth. Make no mistake -- the price of failing to make tough decisions now will be high. Our economy is at risk. But it's nothing compared to the cost of a quarter-century of decreased quality of life, wasted resources and countless lost economic opportunities."