Joe Milazzo, Executive Director, Regional Transportation Alliance (RTA)

In an interview with Invest:, Joe Milazzo, executive director of the Regional Transportation Alliance, the voice of the regional business community on transportation, discussed the Triangle’s mobility needs, the importance of regional collaboration, and the infrastructure projects shaping long-term competitiveness. “Mobility needs to be a foundational support structure for regional success,” Milazzo said.

What transportation and mobility trends are having the greatest impact on the Triangle’s economy, and how have they evolved over the past year?

The Regional Transportation Alliance is the voice of the regional business community on transportation issues. We work with partners in government, including the North Carolina Department of Transportation, transit agencies such as GoRaleigh, GoDurham, GoCary, Chapel Hill Transit, and GoTriangle, as well as the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority, metropolitan transportation planning agencies, airlines serving RDU International Airport, and many others.

Our job as a business organization is to leverage the strength of the regional business community to ensure that vital infrastructure projects move forward. As we say, we want to make transportation projects take “less forever”. They may still take a long time, but when we all work together and there is strong business leadership and focus, those projects can move forward more quickly.

I have been in this role for over 20 years. Our organization has championed projects including the Triangle Expressway, which is our region’s first toll road. NC 540 is around 40 miles long now, with another 10 miles under construction. It is a vital piece of infrastructure for this market and pays dividends for growth and quality of life every day.

We also have a fantastic international airport. RDU is approaching almost 100 nonstop destinations. It is the second-largest airport in North Carolina and the largest non-hub airport in the state. It has been a successful economic engine and driver for our region for decades.

A key trend is that transportation infrastructure initiatives are taking longer than ever to plan, develop, fund, and bring to fruition. Some projects, like the turnpike, do move fast, and that is good. But other projects are taking a long time. When you are in a high-growth, fast-growing, attractive market, you cannot afford to have projects take too long. Our mobility infrastructure needs to grow with the market.

The Research Triangle Region, or the Triangle for short, is a polycentric market. It is different from other growing peer markets, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Austin, which have a single primary central core. Here we have Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, and Research Triangle Park. The Triangle is named after a shape, and people are going back and forth across our market all day, so it is essential to get mobility right for our region’s continued success. There will never be a point at which we say “everything has been built and now we have all we need”. In a growing market, you are always building, refining, enhancing, and expanding.

How is continued population growth changing the way regional leaders approach transportation planning, investment, and economic development?

Ongoing population growth creates a sense of focus, purpose, and urgency. The RTA business leadership group would not need to exist if we were a slow-growth market. If we did not have population growth, attractiveness, and mobility needs, the business community would not have created this group. 

The business community is laser-focused on making sure mobility is an asset rather than a liability, and that means mobility in all its facets. Take RDU airport, for example. Our focus is airport infrastructure, accessibility to the airport, and the destinations you can reach from RDU.  If the “flowers” you want are new destinations from RDU, then the seeds you must plant are the airport infrastructure you need to serve them efficiently. 

That is true for everything. One person may work in one part of the region and another in a different part. If the system does not work for them, then we may lose that talent to another market. Mobility needs to be a foundational support structure for regional success.

Which transportation projects or infrastructure investments will have the greatest impact on the Triangle’s long-term growth and competitiveness?

Everything associated with the airport will have that impact because there is only one international airport. Anything that makes RDU successful makes this region successful.

A second example is our enhanced regional transit system. Raleigh’s transit system has the most mileage of frequent service in the Carolinas and the third most miles in the entire southeastern United States. We have made a great commitment as a community and as a region to do that. Other frequent transit services across the market complement this.

The advanced regional transit system, including the deployment of a regionwide bus rapid transit system, or BRT, is going to have an impact across our market. The business community says BRT also stands for “buses resembling trains”. We are going to have 10 BRT corridors being built. One is under construction now, and at least one more will start construction by the end of next year, hopefully more.

RTA is advocating for several of these projects to be built simultaneously across our market in order to advance a network of enhanced transit options as soon as possible.

A third example is the 540 toll road, which allows for high-speed, reliable connectivity across the region. It gives people confidence that they can get from point A to point B when they need to. There will likely be other toll examples over time to provide faster and more reliable options for automobile, truck, and transit travel.

How can the region balance investments in roads, transit, rail, and airport infrastructure to support both business needs and quality of life?

If you are supporting business needs, you are supporting quality of life. They are not at cross purposes. It is not like one constituency wants to make traffic better and another wants to make it worse. We all want the same thing. We all want to be able to get around this region more easily and access healthcare, education, jobs, and all aspects of civic life.

It is more about making sure we have a great airport, a great transit network, and a great freeway system. 

How important is regional collaboration among the business community, transportation agencies, local governments, and educational institutions?

Regional collaboration is essential for any market. It is especially critical for markets that are polycentric. Raleigh-Durham is the name of our airport, and people sometimes refer to the region that way since those are our two principal cities. By definition, you need collaboration between Raleigh and Durham and other communities for the region as a whole to be successful.

If the region is going to continue to be greater than the sum of its individual parts, then ongoing, effective collaboration needs to be there. Collaboration does not mean that we have to do everything together at the same time. It means that we work together, listen well, support each other, and recognize that sometimes parts of the region move faster or slower than others because their needs are different or the timing of those needs is different.

Our region voted to invest in itself for an enhanced transit system. We have a dedicated sales tax on purchases that is useful for transit, and Wake County, Durham County, and Orange County do that. But we did not all vote on the same day or even in the same year. Durham voted first, Orange voted a year later, and Wake County voted five years after Durham County.

Each county voted when it was ready, and now we have a great funding source that we are collectively using to provide more frequent bus service in all of those counties and to create the capital resources available to build a regionwide BRT network, some of which is under construction now.