NC Moves Public Survey

9outof10mms

Enginerding, good coffee, and factual opinions.
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https://www.publicinput.com/ncmoves

If you want to be a small fraction of a percent of the guiding voice of how NCDOT allocates your transportation dollars over the next 30 years, take two minutes and chime in on this survey.

While you won't single-handedly steer the direction, nor will a snarky comment get through to a politician and reduce your taxes, your input will be recorded and accounted for when they tally the votes. The degree of the NCDOT leadership using the public input is the real wildcard.

My biggest gripe about NCDOT projects is the wasted time and money on useless reports and studies to appease federal mandates. They'll never shuck all of them, but it's worth a serious review of cost-benefit in an effort to speed up project delivery.

I also commented on the technology part to tap the brake and not spend our tax money on being frontline with intelligent vehicles. Let's have the technology prove itself a little longer, then be ready to rapidly deploy solutions where needed. Last thing I want to see is a bunch of infrastructure installed that is either obsolete before the project is done, or abandoned as a whole in the near future.
 
My biggest gripe about NCDOT projects is the wasted time and money on useless reports and studies to appease federal mandates. They'll never shuck all of them, but it's worth a serious review of cost-benefit in an effort to speed up project delivery.

There are a ton of reports that have to be written, that may seem useless, until they are not done correctly and lawyers get their hands on it and lock down your whole project. The federal mandates definitely control a lot of that and there's nothing NCDOT can do about it.
 
There are a ton of reports that have to be written, that may seem useless, until they are not done correctly and lawyers get their hands on it and lock down your whole project. The federal mandates definitely control a lot of that and there's nothing NCDOT can do about it.
Oh I know--been there, done that. The Feds like to hold hostage a state's funding if the state doesn't dance exactly how the Feds want them too. It's their defacto way of running a transportation network without being allowed to "run" or own a transportation network.

That doesn't mean the conversation can't be had.
 
I took the survey, I hate surveys.....lol.
 
Thank you for posting this . I wish there was more of this sort of thing for folks to let their opinions be heard.
 
Thank you for posting this . I wish there was more of this sort of thing for folks to let their opinions be heard.
At the statewide level, not so much. At the project-level, there are always public meetings to voice opinions. But you have to live adjacent to them or be otherwise in their zone of influence to find out about them. At least, for NCDOT this is true.
 
I want them to stop spraying that gravel/tar crap on the rutted up roads around here. It doesn't fix the potholes or cracks, it just increases the chance you'll get a busted windshield for the first couple weeks after they put it down.
 
I want them to stop spraying that gravel/tar crap on the rutted up roads around here. It doesn't fix the potholes or cracks, it just increases the chance you'll get a busted windshield for the first couple weeks after they put it down.
Chip seal. Lot’s of agencies believe it to be a cheap solution to get some more life out of a road that is just weathered and not structurally failed. I don’t like it for the main reason of what you just said, plus a few others.

Maintenance of infrastructure is not a popular subject in any agency; be it a state DOT or a local municipality, there is NEVER enough money to maintain what is on/in the ground. That especially goes for roads. The rule of thumb is about $1M per 100 miles of roadway. Many agencies that I know of are in the 30-50% range of that funding. That means those in charge of managing those assets are forced to find creative ways of stretching maintenance dollars further, and unfortunately, some managers drink the snake oil. I would consider chip sealing (as a surface treatment—it’s used underneath an asphalt surface many times and that’s OK) to be such snake oil.

The reason it’s used is cost. Repaving is somewhere around $8-$12 per square yard. Chip sealing is $1-$3 per square yard. Most people focus in on that math and go all in rather than asking the question of “is it apples to apples?”
 
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