Numbers Don't Lie

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When you work on forest road policy everyday like we do, it doesn't take very long before the numbers start to lose some meaning.  For example, there are roughly 375,000 miles of roads on our national forests.  This number may not seem particularly big when it stands alone, without comparison.  But as soon as you realize that those roads could circle the Earth 11 times, or that those roads measure 8 times the length of the interstate highway system, suddenly the number seems much bigger.  The same phenomenon happens when you start to crunch some of the data contained in the Forest Service's annual Road Accomplishment Reports (RARs).  We've posted several RARs here, but have been working on some new numbers and analysis that we'd like to share.

One interesting bit of information we pulled out from the 2002-2009 RARs is the percentage of change in the road system.  As the Forest Service struggles to measure and record all of the hundreds of thousands of miles of roads on the landscapes they manage, the number of miles fluctuates with each year.  Despite the Legacy Roads and Trails Program and all of the impressive and meaningful work Wildlands CPR has done in the past decade to convince the agency that it needs to decommission more roads, the annual change is extremely small - typically well under 1% of the total mileage, and in two of the years, the road system actually grew!   For you non math folks out there, half a percent of 375,000 is only 1875 miles.  This number is relative of course, but still clearly shows just how far the agency needs to go to right-size the system.  If the agency is serious about reducing the road system by 25-40%, then we'll be long pushing daisies before it reaches its goal.  At the current rate, it will take between 50 and 80 years for the agency to reach a right-sized road system. 

Even modest reduction goals of 5 percent per year would be a vast improvement over the current situation.  With so many Americans out of work and with municipal water supplies threatened by sediment and pollution from roads, the time is ripe for the agency to increase the rate at which it decommissions roads.  Yet, the President's budget for 2011 proposes a reduction in the one secure funding mechanism for decommissioning roads - the Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative - by almost half, from $90 million in 2010, to $50 million for 2011. Click here for an explanation of the President's 2011 budget.

It is said that "numbers don't lie,"  and our recent analysis proves this old adage true again.

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