Are roads the biggest driver of ecological destruction?

https://ryanblakeley.net/p/are-roads-the-biggest-driver-of-ecological

by ryanblakeley • 3 years ago

131 112 3 years ago

Road ecology is a very interesting and important field, particularly the modeling of animal interactions with road crossings - all very interesting and important.

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.

alphanumeric0• 3 years ago

"We're in the middle of this biodiversity crisis and extinction event that is human caused, with cars kind of at the center of it in a lot of ways"

tony_cannistra4• 3 years ago

I'm just not that compelled by that argument. If cars are at the center, then so are a hundred other things that are impacting biodiversity at least as much.

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.

truculent• 3 years ago

Perhaps, but...

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.

toddsiegel• 3 years ago

My understanding jibes with yours: habitat loss in all its forms.

bdf• 3 years ago

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.

pvaldes• 3 years ago

I must admit that this phrase hits different in the context of the six extinction.

pengaru2• 3 years ago

They've certainly decimated the Tortoise population in the hi-desert near JTNP where I own property. Automobiles are way too fast for those to stand a chance.

explaininjs7• 3 years ago

where I own property

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.

defrost4• 3 years ago

Yes | No.

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.

pengaru2• 3 years ago

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.

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.

a_gnostic5• 3 years ago

Come and take it.

cpursley• 3 years ago

What came first - the chicken or the egg?

Government roads effectively subsidies access to land.

woodruffw10• 3 years ago

On top of roadkill itself, there's a reasonable (IMO) argument to be made that car-centric development is a big source of our looming water problems: the US has drained or redeveloped astounding amounts of natural swamp, marsh, and wetlands to make space for car-dependent living patterns. That means less water percolating into already over-stressed aquifers.

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.

tony_cannistra4• 3 years ago

This is most definitely the case. It has also caused enormous problems for places where flooding was already a threat, by removing the natural buffering capabilities that places like wetlands have.

In fact, a whole field (stormwater engineering) exists to mitigate this.

schiffern2• 3 years ago

  > In fact, a whole field (stormwater engineering) exists to mitigate this.

I haven't checked in lately. How are they doing getting over the age-old "Drain! Drain! Drain!! Faster! Faster! Faster!" mantra?

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.

iambateman• 3 years ago

“A field exists to mitigate this” is a great way to end that comment.

Log_out_• 3 years ago

It's In huge troubles as the old models do not hold up against new realities and all incentives are aligned against acknowledging that.

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"..

explaininjs7• 3 years ago

much like we remember our grandparents for leaded gasoline and DDT

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?

woodruffw10• 3 years ago

I don’t literally associate my grandparents with leaded gasoline. It was meant to be metonymic.

Terr_2• 3 years ago

I think it's supposed to be read as "the generation that contains readers' grandparents" without literally being the specific ancestors in a personal context.

woah2• 3 years ago

It's simply not possible for many families to live in the cramped environments of a city. How am I going to pick up 12 gallons of milk on my weekly grocery shopping trip without a pickup truck? That's about 125lb of milk. Not going to be able to get that onto a fixie in the city. How am I going to park the truck without a garage? The garage needs 3 spaces, one for the truck, one for the car, and one for my garage refrigerator to hold the 12 gallons of milk. You're not going to find a house with a 3 car garage that hasn't been built on marshland.

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.

maeil• 3 years ago

The reality is that the rest of the developed world manages just fine living in houses without such garages, driving smaller cars. And having a family isn't a uniquely American concept. Of course everyone can live an eco-friendly lifestyle; for all but a tiny speck of human existence, everyone did indeed do so, and the majority of people on the earth actually still do so to a reasonable extent. It's not a "not everyone can" or "not possible", it's a "not everyone wants to".

bobthepanda3• 3 years ago

usually, when people are promoting alternatives to the car, these things need not be in exclusion to the car. In general, when a road is over a hundred feet wide, it is really not a big deal to provide an additional twelve feet for an ADA sidewalk, and maybe another twelve for a bike lane with more protection than a strip of fading paint.

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.

woodruffw10• 3 years ago

There's no shame in my statement.

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.

BirdieNZ• 3 years ago

I'm not gonna argue with your choices in life, and I might make the same ones if I had a family that goes through 12 gallons of milk a week, but it's not impossible to pull that off with fewer cars and a smaller garage.

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.

ants_everywhere2• 3 years ago

I think this may be a joke? https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/12-gallons-milk-mem...

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.

oh_sigh• 3 years ago

The problem is you're just overlaying suburban lifestyle on a city without adjusting it to suit your environment. The equivalent would be a city dweller moving to the suburbs and thinking they can just walk to Walmart, when it might be 10 miles away.

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.

frabbit4• 3 years ago

I'm glad to see someone standing up for hardworking folks like me on this elitist site. My family has found that converting one of these allows us to do the weekly shop of not just the milk, but also the charcoal for the barbeque and the tomahawk steaks for the children at the weekend: https://www.autotrader.ca/heavy-trucks/sanitation%20truck/

belorn• 3 years ago

How much of that swamp, marsh, and wetlands was drained in order to enable/improve farming and forestry? To me this has less to do with living patterns and more to do with commercial exploitation of land. I am unsure how much of a reduction in draining we would see if we remove cars and roads from the equation.

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.

woodruffw10• 3 years ago

Much, much more. Industrial-scale agriculture is by far one of the most devastating things that humans do to the environment; my focus on roads wasn't meant to imply otherwise.

(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.)

scythe• 3 years ago

A lot of farming would not be viable without roads. It's something of a blind men and the elephant question. Roads weren't originally developed for cars; the US Constitution prescribed the authority to build roads for the postal service. Roads, especially paved roads, make it possible to send fresh produce to markets in cities hundreds of miles away, to collect grains at mills, and to distribute and maintain farm equipment.

In warm regions, wetlands were also drained to control malaria, particularly in Brazil and the American South.

engineer_222• 3 years ago

USA has plentiful water resources.

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.

woodruffw10• 3 years ago

All three of "we have plentiful water resources," "we have advanced ground- and storm-water management systems," and "we are disastrously compromising our water resources" can be simultaneously true.

I'm exceedingly thankful for my high quality of life. I would like my grandchildren to share a similar quality of life.

EnigmaFlare2• 3 years ago

There's a trade-off between preserving the environment and having human development. We already remember our grandparents for the contributions they made to human development. Our lives are vastly better now because of it. Future generations will also benefit from our contributions, including the things we did using roads. They might have less aquifer water or whatever, but that's not really essential. We can always get water from other places if we pay more, and we can afford to pay more because of all the technology we're gaining.

woodruffw10• 3 years ago

They might have less aquifer water or whatever, but that's not really essential.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

DoughnutHole• 3 years ago

I don’t think vast suburban single family home housing developments, big box store parking lots and Wendys drive thrus are the drivers of technological development you’re making them out to be.

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.

sandworm101• 3 years ago

Whether it is car, bus, train, Uber or hovercar, we will still need roads. Until personal jetpacks and flying school busses are a thing, the road issue is totally divorced from the type and environmental impact of vehicles driving upon the. Some form of road will be there regardless of the means, or even the amount of traffic, so long as a connection is needed.

woodruffw10• 3 years ago

Of course we need roads. We just don't need all of the roads we currently have; many could be (and were, until very recently) eminently more sustainable forms of mass transit. Similarly, many of our roads could be narrowed and augmented to induce demand away from unsustainable development patterns.

kuhewa• 3 years ago

DDT in very particular situations has also been a net positive. It's really the widespread indiscriminate use of it in nature areas and dumping it by the ton into municipal sewers that caused the terrible ecological outcomes. Similarly, organising ourselves into sprawling suburbs (rather than higher density cities with sparse rural communities and nature areas in between) was ecologically, the less optimal deployment of roads.

dangus• 3 years ago

The thing is that we choose the amount and type of traffic and therefore the physical size and area of our roads by planning choices that induce behavior.

“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.

frabbit4• 3 years ago

Of course roads are needed.

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.

bertil• 3 years ago

I don’t think trains need as many roads as the other options in your list.

k99x55• 3 years ago

"Traffication: How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It" excellent book on ecological damage caused by traffication.

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...

frabbit4• 3 years ago

That was one of the things I actually liked about Covid lockdowns: the absence of the constant, distant noise of cars and trucks.

worldsayshi2• 3 years ago

I wonder if an AI revolution can allow us to move most of our commuting and logistics needs underground thanks to labour cost reductions...

a_gnostic5• 3 years ago

You AI bots sure love to talk about AI revolutions (o)_(o)

worldsayshi2• 3 years ago

What made you think I'm a bot?

jokethrowaway• 3 years ago

There's an argument which comes up often when talking about a society without a central government: "Who will build the roads?"

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.

galdosdi• 3 years ago

How strange. I imagine the argument is propagated by the historically illiterate. When I think of the origins of modern roads, I naturally think of English turnpikes at the dawn of the industrial age -- all privately owned toll roads.

There's an argument which comes up often when talking about a society without a central government: "Who will build the roads?"

a_gnostic5• 3 years ago

Zeppelins are way more efficient. Use water as ballast, or compress the helium you don't need.

ants_everywhere2• 3 years ago

some entrepreneur would have worked on flying cars and skipped the road altogether.

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.

roenxi• 3 years ago

I'm not sure why you've been downvoted at the time of my commenting; but you've probably upset someone who deserves to be upset. The sheer amount of space that is killed off in many cities to support roads and car parking is insane. If there wasn't that much dead space, walking around would be more than feasible.

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.

shiroiuma• 3 years ago

You can't have a walkable city, or any kind of city really, without a central government of some kind.

stby• 3 years ago

About flying cars, I don't think they are a solution to almost anything.

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.

beebeepka• 3 years ago

I have a couple of stories

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.

bamboozled• 3 years ago

The killing of insects thing is wild, one car seems to be able to create untold amounts of carnage to insect populations which would have some other function within the environment.

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.

pohuing• 3 years ago

For an awful observation on 1.: you might not have to worry about that soon. There's a common observation world wide that this phenomenon is declining, due to the horrific decline in insect populations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon

jimberlage3• 3 years ago

One thing you can do, in addition to advocating for public transit - if you have a lawn of short grass, grow native plants and let them get tall. They provide the habitats for animals that have gradually been taken away. Cut and burn the brush 1x/year and put some landscaping rocks between your house and the grass to encourage animals to stay in the landscaped areas, and you’ll be great.

jimberlage3• 3 years ago

Another benefit of this is - short grass holds almost no water because of the shallow root system, which means that during storms the water flows to low areas like your basement. Native plant gardens grow deep roots and absorb groundwater which would naturally move towards your foundation.

shmageggy• 3 years ago

"Noise is really a form of habitat loss."

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.

dukeofdoom• 3 years ago

1) Animals make use of roads too, makes it easier for them to get around just as much as humans. For example coywolfs spread along the rail lines from Algonquin Park in Ontario to as far as Downtown NY. Seems like Fences are the bigger problem. Preventing some migration routs.

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

nyc_data_geek1• 3 years ago

No, that's humans.

goda90• 3 years ago

I recall being taught that cowbirds, a brood parasite (they lay their eggs in other bird's nests), were causing more problems for other birds because they stay out of the deep forests, but roads and farm fields were fragmenting the forests.

sirmike_• 3 years ago

Unknown. But if it means higher costs for routine shit. GFY. However, you can in fact go live in the forest in your underwear if you really want.

a_gnostic5• 3 years ago

Governments build roads, so governments are.

taskforcegemini• 3 years ago

and we the people only vote for governments that take care of our roads, so we are responsible, not somebody else.

a_gnostic5• 3 years ago

Governments also are the greatest destroyers of roads; Primarily to deny their use to other governments. We the people want clean functional roads, we don't want to bomb anyone's roads, and yet the government does. Curious. Almost as if government doesn't care.

frabbit4• 3 years ago

I suspect it is a bit misleading to claim:

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.

BreadPants• 3 years ago

No. That would be monoculture farming.

Are roads the biggest driver of ecological destruction?

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