It's hard to know what to make of the silence that greeted the recent release of a traffic impact analysis of the Carolina North satellite campus.

The study projected that Carolina North would put tens of thousands of additional vehicles on the roads around it every day. Traffic would double on thoroughfares including Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Estes Drive and Homestead Road within the next 15 years. Virtually every intersection in northwest Chapel Hill will carry loads well over capacity, and the ripple effect will burden roads all the way out to Calvander and beyond.

If you think it's a drag sitting in rush hour traffic waiting for the light to change at MLK and Estes Drive now, imagine yourself at the back of a line twice as long. And that's just the situation projected by 2025, when less than half of Carolina North's proposed 8 million square feet of building will be done.

You might think that the public might have something to say about such a dystopian vision.

But there's been barely a peep. Only a few residents attended last week's public hearing. We get a lot of letters and OrangeChat blog comments, but we've had almost none about this.

We hope folks will pay attention, though, before it's too late. Current plans and the traffic study paint an unacceptable picture.

Plans call for nearly 6,000 parking spaces at Carolina North by 2025, based on the assumption that 60 percent of people will drive there in single-passenger vehicles, while only 20 percent take the bus.

We can do a lot better than that. Dramatically reduce the number of parking spaces and establish as an integral part of the plan a progressive transit system -- park and ride, rapid transit, bike paths ... who knows, by the time Carolina North is done maybe we'll have the hovercraft and jet packs we've been waiting for since we were kids.

Carolina North, a 21st-century institution, can't be built with a 20th-century transportation system.