After passage in the state Senate and a floor vote pending in the House, it appears Gov. Bill Lee’s pet project, the multi-billion-dollar Transportation Modernization Act, will soon become law.

According to the governor’s office, the new initiative will ease traffic congestion and generate highway funding by creating privately built and managed express toll lanes on certain interstates and by increasing registration fees for electric and hybrid vehicles.

The additional revenue and the focus on private toll lanes in larger cities will in theory help free up money and resources for pending road projects in the state’s rural areas.

There are absolutely roadway infrastructure needs that have been neglected in this state for far too long.

Our structurally deficient bridges number in the hundreds, and even with the last attempt to address infrastructure needs, the spending-boosting IMPROVE Act in 2017, our backlog of road projects has a price tag of $26 billion. We can’t keep up.

As evidenced by the failure of the IMPROVE Act and Tennessee’s ballooning population projections, trying to pave our way out of our looming traffic catastrophe will be futile.

New, pay-for-access express lanes may momentarily help ease congestion — especially for those who can afford to use them — but relying on them solely, without taking a holistic approach to solve our travel time issues, will only lead to another bottleneck on down the road.

Notably absent from the Transportation Modernization Act are modern solutions. There’s no mention of passenger rail, public transportation, managing peak demand for roadways and encouraging denser development.

The Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations is expected to provide details of a study of the potential for rail service in July, and the state hopes to nab some of the federal government’s available grant money for passenger rail development, but neither Lee nor the state Department of Transportation have been as enthusiastic about the prospect of mass transit as they have the pave-and-save plan.

Modern traffic problems require modern traffic solutions, and, until we take a turn from the same old strategy of chucking asphalt to fill the potholes in our transportation needs, we’ll be on the road to failure.

-Johnson City Press