The trouble with roads

The following is my end-of-year newspaper column. (I write for a small daily in northeastern Pennsylvania, the old anthracite region of the state). You can read more of Reed Noss’s comments in a paper under his name that’s available through the Wildlands CPR Web site.

A hiking buddy once looked at Route 424 where it meets I-81 and concluded that the stretch of highway between Route 309 and the interstate was just the beginning.
Even a lay person looking over the intersection might easily come to the same conclusion – that the long-term objective of the Hazleton area’s economic development boosters is to extend the highway to the west of I-81.
Now we know that to be the case.
Route 424, as those of us who’ve spent any time motoring on I-81 know, is also called – in a somewhat heroic fashion – the Greater Hazleton Chamber of Commerce Beltway.
But most folks just call it the south beltway.
I once called it a boondoggle.
The chamber took me to task, issuing a statement reminding folks of just how long it had toiled to get the thing off the blueprint table.
A highway so important to an area’s economic future that it took more than a decade to get built?
Chamber leaders said the new highway would spur new job-creating development. If you looked only at Humboldt Industrial Park to the west of I-81 as the site of such development, you would be correct.
But I checked the other day and the only recent development I could find along Route 424 between 309 and the interstate is a honeycomb of all-terrain vehicle tracks cutting hither and yon across the landscape, turning vegetation into dust.
(Off-road cowboys trespassing on private property? Tell us it isn’t so!)
Before the highway was opened to regular automobiles, not motorheads, the state Game Commission put some pole-mounted bird nest boxes up along the highway. They constituted “mitigation” for the land-disturbing highway construction.
One or more have since fallen to the ground in disrepair. So much for the mitigation.
The Hazleton City Authority, we learned from recent reporting, doesn’t like the idea of a new stretch of highway crossing its watershed land, which is also, it just so happens, a pretty good stretch of wildlife habitat.
For critters like sparrows, garter snakes, maybe some salamanders, and hawk and warbler nests in the spring and summer months.
“The current authority board believes the extension of Route 424 through the authority’s Mt. Pleasant property presents the potential for a catastrophe should the watershed be disrupted or contaminated,” the HCA told PennDOT in a November letter.
Aside from its importance as a source of drinking water, this is land that communities in other states and locales would likely seek to preserve as open space and wildlife habitat, both essential parts of a successful community’s landscape.
The HCA’s board, according to earlier reporting, isn’t too happy over the way and manner in which it learned of the business boosters’ road-building plan.
Perhaps more in-depth traffic studies should have been completed before forest was cleared for the gigantic warehouses that today comprise “Humboldt Industrial Park,” which, as motorists roaring along I-81 know from a billboard, is one of our local “attractions.”
A sort of Disneyland for tractor-trailers and heavy equipment.
Let’s cut to the chase, though.
What’s wrong with roads in wildlands?
o Roads harm fish and wildlife by destroying habitat.
o Roads spread weeds, like Japanese knotweed, Japanese barberry, multiflora rose.
o Collapsing roads and blown-out culverts cause erosion and water pollution.
o Roads kill wildlife. In Pennsylvania, 26,180 deer and 90 black bears were killed on roads. And that was only the reported tally of 20 years ago! When I-75 was extended through a major deer wintering area in northern Michigan, deer roadkill increased by 500 percent.
o New roads open new areas to poachers, slob hunters, road hunters.
“Nothing is worse for sensitive wildlife than a road,” wrote Reed Noss, the Davis-Shine Endowed Professor in conservation biology at the University of Central Florida.
Noss: “Despite heightened recognition (by informed people) of the harmful effects of roads, road density continues to increase in the U.S. and other countries. Federal, state, and local transportation departments devote huge budgets to construction and upgrading of roads … The most insidious of all effects of roads is the access they provide to humans and their tools of destruction.
“Let’s face it, the vast majority of humans do not know how to behave in natural environments. Fearful of experiencing nature on its own terms, they bring along their chain saws, ATVs, guns, dogs and ghetto-blasters. They harass virtually every creature they meet, and leave their mark on every place they visit … A lot of people make a lot of money designing and building roads, and exploiting the resources to which roads lead.
“Nor can we expect the slothful, ignorant populace to give up what they see as the benefits of roads (fast transportation, easy access to recreational areas, scenery without a sweat, etc.) for the sake of bears and toads. Education of the public, the politicians, and our fellow environmentalists about the multiple and far-reaching impacts of roads is critical.”
Consider this a bit of education.

Copyright 2006 by Alan C. Gregory (c)