Roads and Ice Cream

New West's community blog page features a post by George Wuerthner titled "Temporary Roads Are Like Low Fat Ice Cream," which can be found at this link

The article does a great job highlighting problems with temporary roads including the fact that their impacts match many permanent roads. Another problem is that they are only required to be revegetated within 10 years of completion of their use; oftentimes this never happens and we are left with old roads and poor accountability. Forest Service maintenance funds for system roads are not available for temporary roads, so ecological impacts become exacerbated due to deteriorating conditions. Temporary roads can remain active for upwards of 5 years as part of timber sales, and lack adequate design standards other than location and clearing width. Furthermore, temporary roads increase densities without being counted as system roads thereby skewing environemental analysis dependent on road density calculations such as that determining wildlife security habitat.

Another problem is that temporary roads offer tempting off-road vehicle opportunities for which they were never designed, and motorized proponents often push for them to be included in Travel Management Plans. In some cases, the Forest Service promotes gated temporary roads as ORV routes and will call them a trail (sometimes referred to as "Dual Classification"). This compounds the problem of trying to determine what is actually a road or a trail in the Forest Service definitions, and current loopholes are big enough to literally drive a truck through.