Local Govts Turn To Dirt Roads For Savings
According to a 2015 report by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, cities and counties in at least 27 states have converted 550 miles of paved roads to dirt roads, either by actively tearing up the pavement and combining it with gravel and other products or by allowing it to deteriorate to an unpaved surface on its own.
Laura Fay, a researcher at Montana State University’s Western Transportation Institute who co-authored the report, said such deconstructed roads require regular grading, dust control and other maintenance.
“There’s cost and there’s maintenance required,” she said. “No one wants to drive on an unsafe road, and no county wants people to drive on an unsafe road.”
But the roads are also generally a lot cheaper to install and maintain than paved ones. Brian Ridenour, engineer for Allamakee County, Iowa told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2011 that resurfacing a paved road cost about $100,000 per mile, while tearing up “a thinly paved road” and adding some gravel only cost about $5,000 per mile. And Thomas McArdle, public works director for Montpelier, Vermont, said converting just over a mile of that city’s paved streets was projected to cut the costs of maintaining those roads by at least half over the next 20 years.
Not everyone approves of such conversions, however. After a quarter-mile, dead-end stretch of South 113th Street in Omaha, Nebraska was converted to a dirt road early last year, unhappy residents banded together to pay half the cost of having it repaved.
Poorly maintained dirt roads in isolated, rural areas can also make them inaccessible to public vehicles.
“We get that story every now and then,” said Jason Autrey, public works director for Okaloosa County, Florida. “School buses can’t come down here, ambulance gets stuck, we can’t get services or the trash truck won’t come. Those kinds of things.”
Autrey said the county’s 200 miles of unpaved roads are mostly old private farm roads and livestock paths that have gradually been taken over by the county.
“We just can’t improve 200 miles in a year,” he said. “In fact, we can’t do 200 miles in 50 years. It just financially doesn’t work out for us.”
As Robert McFee, who heads the engineering and infrastructure department in affluent Beaufort County, South Carolina, which hasn’t converted any of its paved roads to dirt, put it, “There’s a reason you see jurisdictions going from a paved road to a gravel road.”
“It’s not because they want to do it, it’s because they have to do it,” he said. (STATELINE.ORG, STAR-TRIBUNE [MINNEAPOLIS])
