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Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads
An anonymous reader writes: During a recent Urban Land Institute talk, the director of the Iowa Department of Transportation, Paul Trombino, told an audience that the road network in Iowa was probably going to "shrink." Calling for fewer highways isn't what you'd normally expect from a government transportation official, but since per capita driving has peaked in the U.S., it might make sense for states to question whether or not to spend their transportation budgets on new roads.
The article talks about how "per-capita driving has peaked," but that's not the whole issue. It makes sense to stop building roads when the total amount of driving has peaked. For that to happen, one of several scenarios needs to occur:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In North Dakota, the road authority has an easement to use the edge of the landowner's property. When a road is closed, abandoned or not wanted, the road authority can let the landowner take over control of the easement to use for their needs. A road authority is either a Township Board, a County Highway Department, or the State Highway Department. The turnover usually has to be initiated by a petition from the landowner after the road authority has closed or stopped maintenance of the road.
Uh rail roads are far from dead. In fact many rail roads are at capacity, or are running dangerously over capacity. The problem is they've torn up so many existing lines because they weren't needed at one point, now they're needed and they don't want to lay the track for it. You also seem to have forgotten that the points where rail can be laid as a distribution point have changed. Those years you're talking about are when rail or horse traffic were the only real ways to get around.
Om, nomnomnom...
That is not what he wass talking about. The 114k miles of roads that he considers too many includes all of the city roads, the county roads. They have a total of 114k miles included in all of that. In fact if you just look at what the DOT owns, out of the 114k, is less than 8% at 8,883 miles. The vast majority include county roads at 89,824, then municipalities at 14,965, next DOT and then parks and institutions and federal agencies.
So please tell me, where do you exactly think these cuts are going to come from, the relatively small number of DOT responsible roads, of the huge number of country roads that is safe to say provides direct access to homes?
http://www.iowadot.gov/about/R...
PS whoever used comas in a URL should fired.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
That's a remnant of the WPA. Wisconsin (and to some extent, Illinois) are the same way. Class B highways every mile.
Did you ever notice that the border foliage on the edges of the roads change when you hit state borders? That's also from the WPA days, when states ran their own "beautification" (and anti-erosion) measures. I learned this during my long-distance bicycling days. When all you have to look at for miles and miles are soybeans and corn, you tend to notice little things like road foliage. I finally asked some old dude who told me the story of the road crews that came through planting the foliage.
You are welcome on my lawn.