Rich Kassel's Blog
"Suburban Legend" Debunked: Road Building Does Not Reduce Global Warming
October 16, 2007
Posted by Rich Kassel in Curbing Pollution , Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming , The Media and the Environment
Grist has a great piece today about how road builders are now claiming that widening highways can reduce global warming pollution.
It's hard to believe that anybody believes this line, yet Grist points out that it's becoming a bit of a "Suburban Legend." Not exactly fodder for the "Hottest 25" urban legends over at snopes.com but perhaps a more serious issue that needs to be covered and debunked.
Here's the road builder's argument in a nutshell: stop-and-go driving reduces vehicle efficiency (tell that to Prius and other hybrid owners). This reduction in efficiency increases fuel consumption, and therefore global warming pollution. Building new roads, adding new lanes, straightening curvy roads, and otherwise pouring concrete to create more paved roadway space improves the flow of traffic, increases vehicle efficiency, and reduce global warming pollution.
This just doesn't make sense on at least three levels: first, cement production is incredibly energy-intensive; second, building roads is incredibly energy-intensive; and third, building new housing on urban fringes that are theoretically more accessible because of the new highway construction induces longer and longer commutes that are incredibly energy-intensive.
You can see this in every region of the country. New roads are built, farms and forests are converted to housing, and traffic increases.
Taking all of this into account, Clark Williams-Derry of the Sightline Institute (who also wrote the Grist post) estimates that each extra lane-mile built will increase emissions of carbon-dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, by more than 100,000 tons over 50 years. Further, he found that any short-term fuel savings from congestion relief are quickly overwhelmed by increased traffic volumes on the roadway
Check out this link in the Grist article to see more numbers on this topic than you can digest in a single sitting. Unless, that is, you are sitting in some really awful traffic.
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- Rich Kassel
- Senior Attorney and Director, Clean Fuels and Vehicles Project
- New York City
- I came to NRDC in 1991 on a three-year grant, and never left. Over the...
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