Road to nowhere
As if to highlight how irrational our political debates have become, when federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault casually dropped the notion that the federal government wouldn't be financing any more big new highway initiatives, the reaction was close to hysteria among Conservative premiers and commentators from Ontario westward.
How will people pick up their kids from school without roads, asked Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. The demented ramblings of a Montreal downtowner who knows nothing, some said. How was an Alberta farmer going to get fertilizer from 40 km away? On foot? Is this another of those conspiracies to make everyone move to big cities? When was Trudeau going to do the right thing and get rid of this environmental extremist and his climate change shtick?
So, slowing down on new highway expansions (with some necessary exceptions, and keeping up what we've got) was the same as getting rid of all roads by some woke wizardry.
Even before talking of environment, we might note that roads are in provincial, not federal, jurisdiction; that jurisdictions everywhere are recognizing that building more highways doesn't halt congestion; that big cities are restricting downtown traffic; and that urban planners say that the only thing that actually works, at least a bit, is toll roads, or “mobility pricing,” if politicians can take the flak.
However, if we add environment something more comes up. Environmental scientists have been trying to raise the alarm about the menace of out-of-control road building for several years, without much luck. A staggering $4 trillion worth of new road building is on the books worldwide, according to Global Data, a British firm that tracks these things. This would add some 25 million km (or enough to go around the Earth 600 times) to the existing 60 million km (Canada has roughly one million of that) by 2050.
Given the carbon-spewing nature of concrete and asphalt – and that more roads mean more vehicles – this alone would largely negate the world's pledge to go carbon neutral by 2050.
Granted that most of this is happening in South America, Africa and Asia, much of it in tropical rainforests, the world’s richest ecosystems, with deforestation, mining and poaching in its train. Beyond putting species at risk and causing general ecological disaster, roads in tropical wetlands need “impossible engineering” and often don't last, say the researchers — but by then corrupt politicians and developers are gone.
The big picture, then, is as follows. Our own First World highway systems are largely “mature” – Guilbeault is right, we need to stop building more and face our environmental limits with what we’ve got. The rest of the world is now doing what we’ve done. If much of it is corrupt, then they could well have learned that from places like Nova Scotia where road building and dirty politics have gone hand in hand for most of our existence.
In fact, it reached a peak in the 1980s when public money went to chopping up the province with logging roads for the benefit of pulp companies and temporary jobs. A road dubbed the “road to nowhere” was defended by the government of the day on grounds that no matter where you build a road, industry will come and use it (even if your main intent is to give contracts to your political buddies) and the economy will be magically stimulated.
We need roads — just not the ones that are both economically and environmentally counterproductive, here as in the tropical jungle. This brings us back to Nova Scotia, where the plan is to spend some $1 billion to 2030, much of it on twinning highways out of Halifax, where people are building out of town and commuter traffic is quickly piling up according to the standard formula that more roads just bring more traffic and congestion in a neverending cycle.
Governments, of course, are under constant public pressure to do this, road-building being such an unquestionable that opposition parties not only rarely question it, but more often criticize government for not doing enough of it. You criticize the North American romance with the “freedom of the road” at your peril. But it's past time.
The government website brags up the jobs, tourism, etc. of this road-building in the timeworn political style. No inkling that as Halifax grows, perhaps doubling in size by 2050 as some projections have it, this is an unsustainable vision.
The fast-approaching future is about rising seas and other mayhem — with those vital road and rail connections below Amherst likely to be overwhelmed within decades (an extremely strong case for some federal spending here) not to mention many other vulnerable places, as the world continues to fail to deal with climate change.
At this point, it’s possible that all new roads are roads to nowhere. We'd better start thinking harder about where they're taking us and save some pennies to deal with the roadblocks ahead.