Most New Roads Are Logging Roads

Logging-road mileage has more than doubled on Northwest national forests since 1960, far outstripping the pace of street and highway construction in the region, a new report said Monday.

More than 325,000 miles of logging roads now crisscross public lands in British Columbia and parts of six Northwest states - enough to circle the planet 13 times, the Northwest Environment Watch said.

That’s more than the 220,000 miles of public streets and highways in the region, which grew about 25 percent over the last 35 years, according to the not-for-profit environmental research center based in Seattle.

Compared with highways, national forest roads have proliferated since 1960, more than tripling in Oregon and more than doubling in both Idaho and Washington, the report said.

The study by John C. Ryan and Chandra Shah warns of environmental damage caused by logging roads, including erosion and sedimentation in streams that harm dwindling salmon populations.

It urges a halt to logging-road construction in the Northwest United States and zero growth in British Columbia. It applauds U.S. Forest Service efforts to remove roads as a central part of watershed restoration in heavily logged national forests.

“Perhaps its most surprising finding is that roads have surpassed streams as the most dominant feature of the landscape in the region,” said Alan Durning, the center’s executive director and former researcher with Ryan at the World Watch Institute in Washington, D.C.

“Today, outside of Alaska, more of the U.S. Northwest is accessible to four-wheelers than to salmon,” he said.

The report addresses the region’s overall road network - public streets, highways and public logging roads combined - roughly 535,000 miles across British Columbia, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, northwest California, western Montana and southeast Alaska.

British Columbia has the longest combined road network, about 190,000 miles, followed by Oregon, 127,000; Washington, 95,000; Idaho, 69,000; western Montana, 29,000; northwest California, 22,000; and southeast Alaska, 5,000;

“Surprisingly, the Northwest’s extensive network of highways … has expanded relatively little since 1960,” the report said.

“During this period, regional population nearly doubled and the number of cars tripled, yet recorded highway mileage increased only 25 percent.”

That’s partly because new housing developments do not add much mileage compared with old rural roads stretching across vast distances.