Are roads the biggest driver of ecological destruction?
ryanblakeley.net
ryanblakeley.net
It's a trite thing to say, but our grandchildren are going to remember us for this, much like we remember our grandparents for leaded gasoline and DDT.
In fact, a whole field (stormwater engineering) exists to mitigate this.
> In fact, a whole field (stormwater engineering) exists to mitigate this.
This ethic of course only contributes to the problems of flash flooding, lack of buffer, lack of aquifer recharge, and (ultimately) alternating drought/flood cycles.
Village Homes in Davis has an interesting distributed stormwater system, which was specifically designed to maximize infiltration.
I can think of some spots where four or five adjacent suburban developments will all have their own pond/catchment tucked away, although their appearance and attractiveness varies.
Um, what? you say.
So here in the hill country of Texas housing developments/cities need to build so many feet of storage retention ponds per house built and impermeable roadway laid. Depending on the size of the development these are decently sizes structures and an off the cuff guess on costs is between 500k and a few million (+lost land to build more houses on) so it's a sizeable expense of developing. Cities themselves don't want to pay for and maintain these structures so they instead farm it off to a MUD/PUD.
https://services.austintexas.gov/edims/document.cfm?id=22701...
The MUD wraps up the expense of the roads, things like this water settlement area, and pools and puts the expenses on an HOA.
Usually among the most costly line items of construction.
Whether this is tree/vegetation cover or beavers (despite being in the middle of surburban sprawl, Ealing have secured funding for beavers as a potentially cheaper solution than hard infrastructure for flood mitigation and a significant amount of the beaver costs were the fencing to keep them in despite England having some wild beavers).
Similarly I've seen the Pennine Way in the South Pennines turn into a fast flowing stream during one period of wet weather due to the inability of the land to hold all the water and houses there get flooded as well.
Obviously the clash here is between the human and natural ways of doing things, building static houses on floodplains doesn't fit with more chaotic natural solutions in a dynamicly changing landscape with increasingly erratic weather patterns...
DC is building one, London is building one, Paris is building one to make the Seine swimmable for the Olympics, etc.
:)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/13/floods-then-an...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65632655
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/07/europe/greece-floods-stor...
https://www.climatechangepost.com/austria/river-floods/
The again, neither insurance nor building pricing wants to reflect the new reality. A whole generation has invested "safe" in buildings and companies along "virtual flash flood funels" and embracing truth is like accepting your life's saving burning away.
One wonders when the first realistic model based tax write off ahead of time goes to court and pokes a hole into that reality. As in "I pay no taxes for what is most likely destroyed over the next ten years and will repay if it doesn't happen"..
What? I associate DDT and leaded gasoline with my grandparents not-at-all. Is anyone here really holding their grandparents feet to the fire over these?
So yes, that generation is remembered for it. I don't think anyone is saying their grandparents deserved it or are to blame.
Sites like this one like to browbeat hardworking Americans, but the reality is that not everyone can live an eco-friendly lifestyle. I'm not sure what the solution is but shaming people isn't it.
the American car dependent lifestyle has mostly happened by making other lifestyles impossible. In other places you don't buy your milk for the whole week in one go, there are convenient supermarkets where you can walk in and out on your way to and from work on foot or public transport, so stopping in more frequently is a lot easier if you're not driving 15-20 minutes on arterial roads to the big box store. In most of America, it is illegal to open even slightly smaller grocery stores in areas outside big box arterial roads.
The US isn't the only country in the world with big families; there's seemingly nothing exceptional about us (in that regard) that requires the pickup truck and 3-space garage where other countries get along fine. Part of the reason they get along fine is because they allow grocery stores to be built on residential corners, so that you buy 3 gallons of milk every other night on your way home rather than driving X miles to load up weekly.
Scenario 1: dense urban living, somehow you can afford an apartment big enough for everyone. No car, just good transit (e.g. Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo). Grocery store is <3 minutes walk from the front door of your apartment, so you get 2 gallons every day. With a family that big, you're probably picking several items up, but you'd use a trolley (like this: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8653909?clickPR=plp:4:6 or bigger: https://www.kmart.co.nz/product/foldable-beach-trolley-42365...)
Scenario 2: big terraced/row/town-house (shared walls on two sides), has a 1-2 car garage. Suburban-ish living, car dependent, but definitely not rural or outskirts of a city. You own a van, which you'd need anyway if your family is big enough to need 12 gallons of milk a week, and then you have your big chest freezer in the garage and you go once a week to the grocery store and get 12 gallons of milk.
But anyway, we go through a lot of milk (significantly less than 12 gallons) and have it delivered. Same thing applies to anything large that I'd rather not rent a truck for.
If you live in a city you can just pick up milk at a convenience store as you walk by, when you need it. There will probably be one within a 5 minute walk of your house.
I would also like to know more about this milk consumption. Median consumed by US milk drinkers is 1/3rd gallon per week - your family is drinking as much milk as 36 people do every week.
Looking at Sweden, there was a major movement in the last century to drain wetlands in order to improve timber production. This forestry policy is argued to currently produce about 1/4 of all green house gases released in this region, and a major cause to lower ecological diversity.
(The larger observation is that, while we use more land for agriculture than we need, there is at least a prima facie argument that industrial agriculture feeds our planet. Whereas a 6 lane highway through a drained wetland to a low-density suburb does very little for our planet.)
In warm regions, wetlands were also drained to control malaria, particularly in Brazil and the American South.
Engineering practices in new development and redevelopment have adapted to prioritize retention of stormwater. We have some of the finest and most sophisticated hydraulic engineering in the history of the world, be happy for what you've got.
I'm exceedingly thankful for my high quality of life. I would like my grandchildren to share a similar quality of life.
I think most of the Great Plains disagrees[1].
I'm pro-technology and pro-development. But I don't think we should kid ourselves about what we have, and about the limits of our ability to geo-engineer ourselves into global homeostasis, versus out of it.
The overwhelming majority of environmental degradation is not being caused by cutting edge technological development. Wasteful and destructive development patterns are not what’s driving technological growth.
“We will still need roads” is true, but the amount and size of those roads are important details. Not all roads are created equal - just ask your local bike path how many animals were killed in collisions.
But there are at least two problems with such a deceptively simple statement:
1) Road construction is constantly expanding. They create their own demand by diverting resources away from many things including affordable housing -- the number of people I know that commute for over an hour because they cannot afford to live near their work is non-negligible. At some point this becomes a planning/resource issue and at the moment the decision is to carry on as usual with a system that is causing major problems.
2) The amount of traffic makes a huge difference. It is well documented that roads create ecological bubbles affecting animal populations negatively. The speed and frequencey of the traffic (type of vehicle) makes a difference.
Some insights:
* traffic noise (soundscape pollution) is actually suspected to be the biggest ecological destructor affecting all levels of life from insects, to birds, to mammals.
* Traffic-related noise accounts for over 1 million healthy years of life lost annually to ill health, disability or early death in the western countries in the WHO European Region. (a)
a) https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/30-03-2011-new-evidence...
1. Last Easter my wife and I were travelling across the country. We drive reasonably slow, mostly about 100km/h. I guess it was a special time of the year because we must've killed at least several thousand insects in the first two hours alone. It was non stop. One car out of thousands on the road. Made us feel pretty bad.
2. Second story is about four years old. Travelling on a brand new highway around Easter. I guess wildlife was not used to the road because the asphalt was - i kid you not - littered with squashed snakes and birds. I couldn't believe what I was seeing - several kilometres of straight road covered with untold amount of bodies. One of ugliest things I have seen.
Roads are absolutely horrible and I very much hate travelling because of stuff like this. I think some countries don't have such problems problems because they barely have any wildlife left.
It's a tragedy and barely anyone I know cares enough to even consider what we are doing.
Where I live, there are frogs everywhere at certain times of the year after rain, people literally drive over hundreds of baby frogs per hour. I avoid driving after rain now.
But yeah, nice to hear from someone who has similar feelings about driving. I hate it for the damage it does. Tyre dust is another one.
I was recently doing a renovation and would only drive to the store unless absolutely necessary. I'd batch my shopping jobs. For me it's about emissions, I have a real problem with burning fossil fuels.
The rhetorical title is absurd, however, and I'd argue even Ben Goldfarb would agree with that.
Habitat loss is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss, as a result of many, many drivers. You've heard of all of them. The presence and proliferation of roads is, of course, one of those drivers.
I'm really not trying to be a car stan here, I don't really care about cars. But focusing on cars is kindof a dumb distraction, in my opinion.
In the US at least, this is pretty clear: when you design new areas and cities around cars as the primary or even only way to get around, this hurts the environment a lot more than denser, multi-modal style of developments. It results in more total space needed per person, and it results in higher energy expenditures.
If you look at vehicle miles traveled per capita, the US is around 2x that of major Western European countries, and nearly 4x that of Japan: https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02...
I wouldn't call it car centric, more like everyone-gets-to-have-a-lawn-and-2000-sq-ft-home centric.
Herein lies the crux of the problem, not in the mode of transportation. Americans are used to such huge spaces per inhabitant that driving appears to be the only option.
We have districts with detached houses where I live and to me they were always sort of a dead zone. No shops, no restaurants, not even a way to get across, as every square metre is someone's property, so at times you'll have to take a huge detour on the way to your destination.
Do the people living there drive everywhere? Apparently not all of them and instead they accept that they have to walk a significant distance to get to the next bus stop. All because they're used to having a lot of space and will never sacrifice it for an apartment in a place where everything is closer.
Nothing. The police will not help you, as noise ordinance is not enforced. Your apartment manager won’t do anything because none of them do anything.
Other fun apartment specific happenings: constant clouds of marijuana smoke, curry spice smell seeping through the walls and sticking to everything, and constant thuds from anyone walking above you.
Without rigorous enforcement of rules, apartments suck. And there is no enforcement.
Nothing. The police will not help you, as noise ordinance either doesn’t exist or is not enforced. Your HOA, if you have one, won’t do anything because none of them do anything.
(Yes, this is tongue-in-cheek, but it is also rooted in real experience. Yes, I’m aware electric lawn equipment exists and somewhat improves some of the above when used. Nevertheless, city apartment living for me has been quieter than suburbia.)
Animal control will eventually come for dogs left outside, but it takes some effort. The more property you own, the less this matters. And some HOAs DO enforce where apartments will not. HOAs aren’t in the business of making anyone happy, unlike apartments. They exist to do the opposite, in fact.
That's one and the same when it comes to the states.
You do know that the population density of the US is a fraction of that of the countries that you're comparing it to, right?
Edit: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/food-deserts#locations-...
Concentration of the poor, and segregation are identified as the primary causes there. Not cars.
[1]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190805181637.h...
1. Roads being inextricably linked with car-dependence and urban development is clearly part of the implication
2. It is a pun!
It seems a bit needlessly nitpick to call it absurd, in my book.
This really resonates. It's kind of obvious once it's stated, but the aural environment is part of the habitat. I bet the examples they give, such as owls listening for the sound of mice, are only a tiny subset of the ecological disruption caused by the noise of civilization, which is primarily road noise. Hopefully there will be more studies in the future like the phantom road noise experiment they mention.
You hit the nail on the head workout realizing it. The real problem is mass property ownership in remote areas. The huge uptick in car travelers and according roads are a result of that.
The classic "road trueism" is If you build them, they will fill.
Four lane highways with occassional gridlock when expanded become six lane highways with occassional gridlock.
The connection corollary that follows is roads | train lines built to connect A and B will often be followed by small townsites along the way and the spread of "off the grid" living at blocks T junctioning dirt road access from the new A <--> B route.
The moment you introduce tolls onto major roads, often they don't meet financial projections, have to be bailed out, etc.
That's only when new roads satisfy pre-existing demand.
The fact that someone can't do something doesn't imply that they don't want to do it.
We fill roads in cities because the population wants/needs to travel. If we would instead build trains those would fill instead. Trains are a lot more cost effective in cities, but no city (not even transit cities like Paris) builds enough of them to make trains a better alternative than cars.
Note that by the time anyone realizes roads are full and they need "one more lane" the road has 6 times more cars on it than it can safely handle - people just give up their safe following distance. One more reason to build trains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
My point was that road access introduced through previously road vehicle inaccessable regions often (not always) leads to more human activity and dwelling in the vicinity of that road.
It's not always the case that people appearing from ships, airdrops, or walking in results in roads following them.
When my own family first settled in Australia it took 80+ years on the European side for roads to reach them (they used flat bottomed boats on tidal flats to transit goods and livestock), and some 70K years or so on the non European side.
Consider: would a road nobody traveled on be any issue for the tortoises? Clearly not.
To join a port to an inland mine site.
Once you have a road where once there was no road and no easy access to the land within then people can follow.
> But nobody builds a road to nowhere.
See: Gunbarrel Highway - a road system from a launch point out into "nowhere" in order to retrieve test missiles.
And see my point here about “linear” roads (connecting point to point) vs space-filling ones (providing access to an entire grid of houses). In short, an animal can exist very easily in the proximity of a single highway, but existing surrounded by development is a much harder task.
I'm at a loss as to why you even bought it up. My intial comment here:
roads | train lines built to connect A and B will often be followed by small townsites along the way and the spread of "off the grid" living at blocks T junctioning dirt road access from the new A <--> B route.
That it doesn't exist in rural areas improves that it isn't induced it is already there.
JTNP draws massive numbers of tourists. Plus the main road through my neck of the Mojave (62 and Amboy Rd.) is a popular alternate route linking LA and Las Vegas. You wouldn't believe how much traffic blasts through on weekends and holidays, most without even stopping. It's a lot of city folks driving like they're passing through an uninhabitable wasteland where speed limits don't exist.
The actual number of owners/residents like me out by my hood is on the order of hundreds, and most drive exceptionally slow in the hood because those roads are unpaved washboard insanity.
Airbnb/VHRs becoming a thing there and catering to the national park has made things much worse in terms of local vehicle traffic even on the dirt roads... but the Tortoises were already gone long before Airbnb even existed.
TL;DR: Tourism by automobile is the main problem, exacerbated by the draw of a popular national park. But even without it there's too much thanks to LA<->Vegas traffic.
Wouldn’t we all like to believe so much.
But in reality the roads taking folks all over JT and to/from Vegas cut the land into ~6 massive lattice cells. Those roads have basically 0 impact on turtle populations because their linear nature makes them effectively insignificant at the scale of the desert. On the other hand, the land ownership grid gives rise to a space-filling-curve of road that dominates the affected landscape and an effectively infinite number of microscopic lattice cells that are too small to support any population, and thus force the animals to migrate over roads constantly.
Government roads effectively subsidies access to land.
Besides the simple idea of neighbours building and maintaining small roads, I argue that I wouldn't want the highway.
Between the ecological damage, the noise, air pollution, increased reliance on shipping things from far away vs buying local - are we really sure building the massive road network in the US was the best option? Consumerism may be good for the economy, but I argue it's not in our best interest.
Sure, I love the freedom to drive fast anywhere but at what cost?
And who knows, maybe if we didn't have a central entity redistributing resources in an arbitrary way and shaping the market, some entrepreneur would have worked on flying cars and skipped the road altogether.
> There's an argument which comes up often when talking about a society without a central government: "Who will build the roads?"
In practice, a society without a government is just a collection of local warlords depleting all the resources in a violent struggle for power.
For example, consider the history of Somalia or the general concept of a power vacuum.
So I'd think the chances of such an environment supporting an entrepreneur working on flying cars to be near zero.
Car-centric design sits in competition with pedestrian-centric design, and the bias towards road over-construction has ruined a lot of urban spaces. At the very least, rolling back government involvement in road construction would be helpful.
First of all, they'd always need more energy because staying in the air doesn't come free. Lifting a whole car for the usual 1.2 people in it seems wasteful.
Secondly, the noise problem would be huge. I don't see how flying cars could ever be more quiet than road-using cars (again, more power needed to overcome the drag that's generated by the lift, and propellers, jet engines or whatever aren't exactly quiet on their own). They'd also produce their noise up in the air where it can spread over a much larger area compared to land-based transportation, where even a small line of greenery reduces noise levels quite nicely.
Finally, even perfectly self flying cars (and obviously, I wouldn't want to have the average car driver handle a 3 ton flying machine over my head) would need a big amount of space around them in all directions. I doubt that there's enough air space to handle the amount of car traffic that even smaller cities currently have.
There's a reason we only see helicopters used in a small niche, and I don't think flying cars or the currently worked on drones are ultimately that different from helicopters.
And the desire for recreation. The explosion of cars isn't necessarily that cars are so useful. Certainly they did have utility. But really they were kind of liberating. In the late 19th century, nobody ever heard of a vacation
We can see examples of other places where railways were the "liberating" technology that allowed people to go on holiday. For example:
Up to about forty or fifty years ago travelling was a solemn act, not to be enterprised nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly,’ so writes the Belfast News-Letter in September 1888. But all of this had changed; from the inception of the railways ‘day excursions’ had become ‘entirely modern pleasures,’ the British seaside and countryside opened up to visitors who could travel there easily by train.
https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2021/08/12/how-th...
The "cars are liberating, what a shame they destroy the wild place I went to meditate in" schtick seems like a deep-seated cultural echo of all the automobile advertising that has been consumed for about a century.
2) Animals are relatively quick to adapt. It might take a few generations but they will. There are street dogs in India that live their entire life on the busiest streets and manage avoid getting hit. Kangaroo's, Deer, and squirrels learned to avoid roads too for the most part.
3) While human development is bad for some species. Others thrive around humans. More Deer live now than ever before, for example.
4) Not really convinced that we have a net negative on the total biomass of animals on the planet. Lots of evidence that CO2 promotes plant growth. Greening the planet. More trees, would equate to more forrest habitat for larger animals.
5) Do spoons make you fat? ... Kent Brockman reporting