Goals

The primary objective of this plan is to increase awareness both by unifying professional organizations and related transportation interest groups dedicated to this purpose with the intent to push the legislative bodies to rewrite the laws so that road networks across the United States are safer, easier to understand and become more uniform in construction and maintenance standards.  While the primary goal is to create uniform standards in safety improvements, the other ideas presented here will help achieve that goal far more easily, cheaply and effectively than just placing a mandate on the states or local governments to do it correctly.

The main goals of this organization are to do whatever is needed to not only bring local governments in line with MUTCD standards and other sound engineering practices but also to find a way to bring states into the process of making this happen.  Neither states nor local governments are going far enough to assure that safe and uniform traffic safety standards are being followed resulting in unsafe and unpredictable driving conditions on local roadways in many parts of the US, and status quo is not an acceptable solution.

The specific goals are as follows:

1. Encourage states to take over financing, engineering oversight and in most cases maintenance of safety improvements including all traffic signs, guardrails and pavement marking on all roads currently owned and maintained by counties, cities, towns and townships.
• In this strategy, local roads become partially state controlled but only for this specific function.  
• Local agencies can be contracted to install and maintain traffic signs and guardrails under state direction, but they must follow state standards
• Annual contracts could be given to private state approved vendors to supply each local jurisdiction in lieu of work being done in-house
• Place specific items that are above the scope or interest of local agencies directly under state responsibility such as the planning, design and furnishing and, if necessary, installation of guide and route signs including trail blazers, county route signs, directional and distance signs and other guide signs along local roadways regardless of jurisdiction
2. If states do not want to take over this responsibility, then regional traffic engineering districts possibly contracted to private firms should be set up who oversee multiple jurisdictions.  They would work independently of counties and cities but work for the state DOT.
• Regional traffic engineering districts would be based on population quotas with at least two engineers assigned to equal populations of 100,000-200,000 residents who would have oversight of all local agencies within that district
• If privatized, the private firm would be a contractor working for the state working on an annual or semi-annual basis
• If in-house, the traffic engineering districts would need to become a special state division working just for local agencies
3. Encourage states to invest more in local maintenance including specifically dedicating a fund just for the installation and maintenance of safety improvements on roadways not owned by state agencies.
• Research should be conducted to find out the actual cost annually spent in states who have all county roads under state control such as North Carolina, Virginia and Delaware to determine the adequate amount needed annually to finance installation and maintenance of safety improvements on local roads
• States should develop protocols on how to best apply those standards based on roadway functional classification, traffic counts, crash rates, local population and available funding based on a funding formula
• Funding formulas provided to each jurisdiction should be based on population and roadway mileage
• All state-funded safety improvements should be required to meet state standards, federal standards and must be overseen and approved by their respective state agencies regardless of whether the local agency has an engineer on staff
• The funds would be specifically dedicated to all traffic signs (including guide signs), pavement markings and installation/repair/maintenance of guardrails and bridge rails
4. Encourage states, counties, cities and townships [and all other local jurisdictions] to pursue functional consolidation measures including but not limited to shared services, "captive county" arrangements, voluntary state takeover of local road systems, local maintenance of state highways and regional service delivery.
• Shared services include counties sharing some or all roadway functions with cities within the county, adjacent counties, multiple counties or the state
• Captive County arrangements mean that the local agency continues to own their own road networks but contracts (pays) the state to engineer maintain their roads for them in lieu of using local forces meaning "locally owned, state maintained"
• Voluntary state takeover of local road systems means a transfer of road responsibility in a specific jurisdiction to the state; this would mean not only maintenance but also financial responsibility would transfer to the state meaning that the state would need to assume a local funding source such as their portion of the gas tax, sales tax receipts or a percentage of local property taxes agreed on by the local agency; this would have to be offered as a statewide program with even terms
• Local maintenance of state highways is used primarily in two states: Wisconsin and Michigan.  This involves the local agency assuming maintenance responsibility both the local roads and state owned roads within their jurisdiction.  This plan would be best applied in high population urbanized counties.
• Regional service delivery is a largely untested strategy where instead of having single local jurisdictions or the state handle local roadways independent regional units are set up.  They would need to have fluid boundaries based on ideal population ratios and could range from simply being engineering districts with equipment pools for multiple jurisdictions to full range DOT's offering a "state within a state" type of service delivery.  They would be responsible for at minimum major local roadways across their defined region and at maximum complete control of all local roadways within their defined region.  Their primary purpose would be to replace county road agencies
5. Rearrange state road networks to better line up with need and function
• State road networks often are lined up based on political goals rather than actual need.  By improving local roadway standards based on the ideas above, unnecessary state roadways can be transferred to a more appropriate local level and major roadways of regional importance can be transferred to the state that are currently under local control
• State highway or state primary routes should generally have a ratio between 8-12%.  Other roadways of lesser importance should transfer to a state secondary, regional or county level so that adequate funding is available for the local level of roadways 
• A level of state control that includes at least 1/3 of the states's total roadway system is strongly encouraged as a means to keep local roads truly local
• Secondary state road networks should involve the complete takeover of county road networks if the statewide state-owned mileage ratio exceeds 40% under state control and no township roads are present
• Township road maintenance should be dissolved and consolidated either into larger county road systems (including town owned, county maintained), regional road systems or state maintained secondary road systems
• Cities and towns below a population of at least 20,000 should rely on the state, county or regional agency to oversee and maintain their roads
6. Treat local agencies as a division of state government who are held to the same standards as the state is required to follow.
• Local agencies should no longer be allowed to work completely independent of the state.  The state should be granted supervisory authority to audit local networks for substandard engineering and maintenance practices and to offer guidance 
• Penalties for willful non-compliance should include fines and loss of funding and in extreme cases dissolution of the local road agency, termination of the county engineer and state takeover of road networks in local jurisdictions who do not follow proper state and federal engineering standards
• Township road networks should be dissolved and consolidated either into county road systems or fall under state supervision
• If county engineers are used, they should have their salaries paid for by the state to make sure that they are meeting statewide goals and they should be working as a state employee for the local agencies instead of as a county employee who answers only to the county administrators
• County engineers should have oversight of road networks in both the county and municipalities within that county
7. Encourage states with large-scale state-maintained secondary road networks that exist in a few states such as in the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Delaware to not only keep those systems but to propose alternative funding sources for these road systems so they are not lost to devolution movements.
• Currently the road networks in the Carolinas, Virginia, Louisiana, Missouri and Texas are embattled due to insufficient funding sources and an inexplicable push for greater local control from a state level
• Counties are not wanting maintenance responsibility for the roads that the state governments are trying to force on them
• The public should be educated that local road systems are inefficient and that they only have one additional funding source that the state doesn't otherwise provide to them directly or indirectely which is local property taxes
• Indirect state-provided local funding includes sales taxes and local option gas taxes which can be used just as easily used by the state to construct and maintain local roads and streets
• Discussion should be made to have counties use property taxes for state-owned roads as well as expanding the use of alternative funding sources such as sales taxes, mileage-based fees (based on annual odometer readings, not GPS), flat fees, casino fees, "sin taxes" and higher wholesale gas taxes as a means of driving more revenue into these systems so that they are able to keep pace with modern traffic demands
• Permit local financing of road projects as long as they meet state standards and guarantee that state funding levels are not reduced due to local investment
• Remove the threat of devolution so that local agencies feel safer working with the state
8. Unify county and secondary highway numbering systems so that they are logical and useful to the traveling public
• County highway designations should be required on federal-aid roads that are not otherwise maintained by the states with the states required to furnish and maintain route, destination, distance and other guide signs along these roads
• For local residential roads, substandard roads and roads that serve no purpose to the traveling public, these roads should not have any prominent route number posted and become known by their local name only
• For state owned or maintained residential roads, local road numbers should not be posted in a way that they can be confused with a county highway
• County road numbers should be set up as a highway system based on logical beginning and end points similar to how state highway systems are set up
• County road numbering systems should follow a uniform statewide lettering, numbering or letter/number combination system and maintain the same road designation over jurisdictional boundaries [e.g. County Road 2, A2 or A]
• Renumber or redesignate county or secondary roads where systems already exist to fix these discrepancies
• A signed county highway that enters municipal boundaries should also be signed and marked within municipal boundaries unless that city or town is independent of a county which in that case an alternate type of sign should be used; this is needed to prevent road numbers from disappearing prior to a logical junction just because they enter a corporate boundary

The goals presented here are designed to correct the numerous errors and deficiencies in maintenance present across all local road systems.  It is hoped that through a more engineer-driven approach coupled with greater state involvement that the day will come that roadway standards will no longer be blindly trusted to the whims of too many sparsely populated, inefficient and highly political local government agencies for road maintenance activities.  While local government has its place, its functions should be based on strengths and weaknesses not jurisdictional boundaries.  Local governments across the US by and large are not based on any model of efficient service delivery but instead are based on both long ago political realities and modern power struggles.  While these issues are present in all areas of government, road maintenance tends to suffer the worst from a costly and ineffective model of managing a roadway network.