2008-09 Forest Service Road Accomplishment Reports Now Available

For the past several years, Wildlands CPR has been posting the Forest Service’s annual Road Accomplishment Reports (RAR).  The RARs show how many miles of roads are maintained, improved, or decommissioned in any given year and on any given forest.  The RARs also show which funds were used to pay for the work.

We recently received the 2008 and 2009 RARs from the Forest Service and have just uploaded them to our website, on the same page where we have posted previous RARs.  That page also lists instructions for how to read and use these reports.  In 2007, the agency switched from sending us individual forest reports, to sending us one large file in a “pivot table” which allows you to hide and show different data at different times.  Thus we highly recommend you review the instructions before downloading the data.

The data in the RARs can be used to tease out how the entire agency, individual forests, or regions are managing their road system.  In March, Greg Peters posted a blog about some of the changes in the road system that have occurred over the years as detailed in the Road Accomplishment Reports.  His post includes a graph that illustrates how changes in the percentage of roads that have been maintained over the past 8 years and overall road mileage. 

The spreadsheets on the RAR page include many tabs, including one that just shows the final accomplishments for Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative spending on road projects (it doesn’t include trails data, which is tracked elsewhere).  That and other data is also included in our upcoming “report card” on the Legacy Roads and Trails program.  The report card will be available by next week, so stay tuned.