by Lucas Thomae, Carolina Public Press
May 20, 2025

When Tropical Storm Helene tore across North Carolina in September, it left behind more than just downed trees and flooded homes. It ripped open a hidden fault line in the state’s transportation system — one that has existed for the state’s roads, largely unquestioned, for nearly a century.

North Carolina is one of just a handful of states where counties don’t own any public roads. Instead, the state’s Department of Transportation oversees nearly three quarters of its roadways, from rural stretches to urban highways. Towns and cities do own and maintain some roads within their own boundaries, but counties aren’t even allowed to do so.

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This centralized system, born out of the Great Depression, was designed to relieve local governments of financial burdens they couldn’t shoulder. But with billions of dollars in storm damage, drawn out emergency repairs and mounting pressure on state resources, questions are resurfacing: Should counties have more control over their roads? And would they even want it?

A system unlike most

North Carolina boasts one of the largest state-maintained road systems in the United States, second only to Texas.

“State-maintained” is the key phrase there.

Although both North Carolina and Texas own and maintain just over 80,000 miles of highway, the Lone Star State has nearly triple the amount of public roads once you account for those owned by towns and counties.

That’s because North Carolina has no county roads, even though one third of its population lives in rural areas. The state is one of only eight in the United States that have no roads owned at the county level. (Five of those states are in New England, where municipal governments own most public roads.)

In fact, North Carolina is one of only four states that own a majority of their public roads. This system gives the state’s Department of Transportation a massive amount of control when it comes to planning, repairs and upkeep of roadways.

But it didn’t always used to be this way.

So how did we get here?

A brief history of NC roads

For 200 years, counties controlled the roads of North Carolina. (Although for much of that period the transportation of people and goods happened primarily on trails, waterways and, eventually, railroads.)

The emergence of the modern automobile challenged that system.

Cars greatly increased the mobility of North Carolinians, and with that desire for movement came a greater demand for better roads to handle that traffic. Many public roads in the state had fallen into disrepair during the economic turmoil brought on by the Civil War.

A nationwide call for good roads was born out of the Progressive era around the turn of the 20th century.

In 1899, the state’s first Good Roads Association was established by Asheville residents to call on Buncombe County to improve its roadways. Many other local chapters sprung up across the state, and in 1915 Gov. Locke Craig established a commission to build a state highway system that would connect all 100 counties.

Such a project would require more than just county-level planning, and in 1921 the State Highway Act certified that the highway system would be maintained exclusively by the state government.

Ten years later, the state assumed control of most other public roads as well as the Great Depression sunk county governments into a budgetary crisis. North Carolina counties have been absolved (or excluded) from owning and maintaining roadways ever since.

The state of our roads

North Carolina has sometimes referred to itself as “The Good Roads State,” a nickname born more out of the branding of the state’s Good Roads Association than any objective measure.

But does that title still stick, all these years later?

It depends on whom you ask.

The Reason Foundation – a libertarian think tank – declared North Carolina first in the nation for road condition and cost-effectiveness in its Annual Highway Report published in March. However, that methodology rewarded North Carolina for spending less money on its roads relative to other states.

A separate analysis published last month by Construction Coverage ranked North Carolina 24th among the states in terms of road quality. That study found that 49% of the state’s major roadways are in “good” condition, 41% are in “fair” condition and 10% are in “poor” condition.

Those classifications were determined using a metric called International Roughness Index, which is a measure of the “bumpiness” of roads, according to Construction Coverage lead data analyst Michael Stromberg.

Although useful for comparing roads across large geographic areas, the roughness index isn’t a perfect measurement.

“Roughness is the best measure we have, and it’s pretty good, but it’s not comprehensive,” Stromberg told Carolina Public Press.

It won’t pick up rutting and cracking of roads, for example.

The ambiguity of determining road condition can lead to vastly different conclusions about the quality of a state’s roads, as evidenced by North Carolina’s paradoxical placements in the two aforementioned studies.

It also raises questions about how much control states should exercise over their public roads and how much money they should be putting into that effort.

The five states who own a majority of their public roads rank no higher than 20th in Construction Coverage’s rankings of road condition. However, three of those states – North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia – were top five in the Reason Foundation’s rankings mostly because of their relatively low spending.

The states with the most powerful transportation departments have opted for centralized decision-making in pursuit of cost-efficiency and scale — but that hasn’t translated into smoother rides.

When disaster strikes

The question of whether counties could do a better job of maintaining their roads is an unanswered one. The current system has been in place for so long that not many officials on either the state or county levels have questioned whether it is truly working as intended.

Both the Department of Transportation and North Carolina Association of County Commissioners were reluctant to give an opinion on whether or not counties should have more autonomy in the process of road maintenance.

Although state governments have deeper pockets, the money they spend on road maintenance can quickly get stretched thin by a large road system.

County governments, having a more immediate and intimate knowledge of their jurisdiction, could potentially conduct repairs and maintenance quicker than the state and without having to rely on the General Assembly to allocate funding for those projects.

Some states, wanting to drop smaller roads from their highway network, have occasionally set up turnback programs to relinquish control of specific roads back to the towns and counties in which they are located.

Aaron Moody, a communications officer for the Department of Transportation, told CPP that North Carolina has not attempted such a program on a widespread level.

“We are occasionally petitioned to abandon roads from the state system on a case-by-case basis through a very formal and public process,” he said in an email.

That only happens at the municipal level. It would take an act by the state legislature to undo the 1931 law that abolished county roads and put them in control of the Department of Transportation.

But even if the time it takes to repair and maintain roads would be faster under county control, those local governments may not want to take on the financial burden of doing so.

The Great Depression showed that a strong state road system can be a safety net for when disaster strikes. Tropical Storm Helene is the latest example.

The September storm caused an estimated $6 billion in damage to state roads, $1.7 billion to municipal roads and $460 million to private roads and bridges.

Although FEMA’s Public Assistance program covered much of the state’s and local governments’ emergency repair bills, it won’t cover all of the longer term repairs and mitigation projects. The state legislature and the Federal Highway Administration have also allocated millions of dollars in emergency relief spending for both public and private roads.

Meanwhile, county governments continue to be sidelined when it comes to those spending decisions.

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Roads in NC mostly controlled by DOT, not typical of other states appeared first on carolinapublicpress.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This content presents a thorough and fact-based overview of North Carolina’s road ownership and maintenance system without endorsing a specific political agenda. It discusses historical context, practical implications, and different perspectives on centralized versus local control in a balanced manner. The article includes data from various sources and highlights the complexity of funding and infrastructure management, which appeals to a broad political spectrum rather than leaning left or right.