Are roads the biggest driver of ecological destruction?

On top of roadkill itself, there&#x27;s a reasonable (IMO) argument to be made that car-centric development is a big source of our looming water problems: the US has drained or redeveloped astounding amounts of natural swamp, marsh, and wetlands to make space for car-dependent living patterns. That means less water percolating into already over-stressed aquifers.<p>It&#x27;s a trite thing to say, but our grandchildren are going to remember us for this, much like we remember our grandparents for leaded gasoline and DDT.

I have a couple of stories<p>1. Last Easter my wife and I were travelling across the country. We drive reasonably slow, mostly about 100km&#x2F;h. I guess it was a special time of the year because we must&#x27;ve killed at least several thousand insects in the first two hours alone. It was non stop. One car out of thousands on the road. Made us feel pretty bad.<p>2. Second story is about four years old. Travelling on a brand new highway around Easter. I guess wildlife was not used to the road because the asphalt was - i kid you not - littered with squashed snakes and birds. I couldn&#x27;t believe what I was seeing - several kilometres of straight road covered with untold amount of bodies. One of ugliest things I have seen.<p>Roads are absolutely horrible and I very much hate travelling because of stuff like this. I think some countries don&#x27;t have such problems problems because they barely have any wildlife left.<p>It&#x27;s a tragedy and barely anyone I know cares enough to even consider what we are doing.

Road ecology is a very interesting and important field, particularly the modeling of animal interactions with road crossings - all very interesting and important.<p>The rhetorical title is absurd, however, and I&#x27;d argue even Ben Goldfarb would agree with that.<p>Habitat loss is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss, as a result of many, many drivers. You&#x27;ve heard of all of them. The presence and proliferation of roads is, of course, one of those drivers.

One thing you can do, in addition to advocating for public transit - if you have a lawn of short grass, grow native plants and let them get tall. They provide the habitats for animals that have gradually been taken away. Cut and burn the brush 1x&#x2F;year and put some landscaping rocks between your house and the grass to encourage animals to stay in the landscaped areas, and you’ll be great.

<i>&quot;Noise is really a form of habitat loss.&quot;</i><p>This really resonates. It&#x27;s kind of obvious once it&#x27;s stated, but the aural environment is part of the habitat. I bet the examples they give, such as owls listening for the sound of mice, are only a tiny subset of the ecological disruption caused by the noise of civilization, which is primarily road noise. Hopefully there will be more studies in the future like the phantom road noise experiment they mention.

I recall being taught that cowbirds, a brood parasite (they lay their eggs in other bird&#x27;s nests), were causing more problems for other birds because they stay out of the deep forests, but roads and farm fields were fragmenting the forests.

They&#x27;ve certainly decimated the Tortoise population in the hi-desert near JTNP where I own property. Automobiles are way too fast for those to stand a chance.

There&#x27;s an argument which comes up often when talking about a society without a central government: &quot;Who will build the roads?&quot;<p>Besides the simple idea of neighbours building and maintaining small roads, I argue that I wouldn&#x27;t want the highway.<p>Between the ecological damage, the noise, air pollution, increased reliance on shipping things from far away vs buying local - are we really sure building the massive road network in the US was the best option? Consumerism may be good for the economy, but I argue it&#x27;s not in our best interest.<p>Sure, I love the freedom to drive fast anywhere but at what cost?<p>And who knows, maybe if we didn&#x27;t have a central entity redistributing resources in an arbitrary way and shaping the market, some entrepreneur would have worked on flying cars and skipped the road altogether.

I suspect it is a bit misleading to claim:<p><i>And the desire for recreation. The explosion of cars isn&#x27;t necessarily that cars are so useful. Certainly they did have utility. But really they were kind of liberating. In the late 19th century, nobody ever heard of a vacation</i><p>We can see examples of other places where railways were the &quot;liberating&quot; technology that allowed people to go on holiday. For example:<p><i>Up to about forty or fifty years ago travelling was a solemn act, not to be enterprised nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly,’ so writes the Belfast News-Letter in September 1888. But all of this had changed; from the inception of the railways ‘day excursions’ had become ‘entirely modern pleasures,’ the British seaside and countryside opened up to visitors who could travel there easily by train.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;12&#x2F;how-the-railway-revolutionised-the-british-seaside&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;12&#x2F;how-th...</a><p>The &quot;cars are liberating, what a shame they destroy the wild place I went to meditate in&quot; schtick seems like a deep-seated cultural echo of all the automobile advertising that has been consumed for about a century.

Unknown. But if it means higher costs for routine shit. GFY. However, you can in fact go live in the forest in your underwear if you really want.

Governments build roads, so governments are.

No. That would be monoculture farming.

I wonder if an AI revolution can allow us to move most of our commuting and logistics needs underground thanks to labour cost reductions...

No, that&#x27;s humans.

Roads? Where we&#x27;re going, we don&#x27;t need roads.

1) Animals make use of roads too, makes it easier for them to get around just as much as humans. For example coywolfs spread along the rail lines from Algonquin Park in Ontario to as far as Downtown NY. Seems like Fences are the bigger problem. Preventing some migration routs.<p>2) Animals are relatively quick to adapt. It might take a few generations but they will. There are street dogs in India that live their entire life on the busiest streets and manage avoid getting hit. Kangaroo&#x27;s, Deer, and squirrels learned to avoid roads too for the most part.<p>3) While human development is bad for some species. Others thrive around humans. More Deer live now than ever before, for example.<p>4) Not really convinced that we have a net negative on the total biomass of animals on the planet. Lots of evidence that CO2 promotes plant growth. Greening the planet. More trees, would equate to more forrest habitat for larger animals.<p>5) Do spoons make you fat? ... Kent Brockman reporting