One of the things I learned through my seven years or so of Roadlessness is that people who want to put roads in roadless areas are few and far between. Because it costs money to do so. But what many people don’t see from their national discourse on Roadlesssness is the granular detail of “what is a road?”. And in Colorado, we even had a court case about whether a linear travelway associated with building a pipeline was a “road.”
Hopefully others who know more about the technicalities will help with this.
First are “system roads” which are supposed to be managed by the FS to certain standards. Those are probably the ones folks say “the FS already can’t keep up with maintenance.” But many other roads don’t need maintenance.. they are temporary or funded by someone else who does the maintenance. So that seems like a compelling argument on the surface, but does not take into account the reality of what kinds of roads are likely to be developed without a roadless management designation.
Second are temporary roads- in my experience, those were most commonly desired to take out large fuels from fuel treatment projects, generally those near the WUI. That’s why the Colorado Rule ended up with (Google AI)
Then there are 4WD trails, which kind of look like extremely poorly maintained roads, but apparently “car-sized” vehicles can move over them.
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But a new road, say for a mine, or oil and gas, or maintenance of powerlines (which go through roadless areas) or even for wildfire could be gated for administrative use only. Which would seem to have a major impact on issues like wildlife disturbance or wildfire ignitions.
Unless- people can drive around the gates. Which is fairly location-specific. Due to my own poor communication with the District, I once got blocked in by road closures on the Chiloquin District and simply drove around the barrier. In other steep places, though, that would simply not work.
And it does make me wonder a bit about AI, sensing, and law enforcement. Conceivably nowadays we would have ways of enforcing “using closed roads” in an era in which drones can detect and put out wildfires.
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The litigation on the Bull Mountain Pipeline, for those of you who don’t remember, was about building a gas pipeline. The idea was that if the soil was scraped off for something to be buried, that that, for that moment in time until the pipeline was reburied, was a road and shouldn’t be in a roadless area.
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So if we were to look at environmental effects, we might consider:
1. What are the road standards and maintenance.. do they adequately protect soil?
2. How long will the road be open before it is “put to bed”? How effective is “putting to bed” in a specific location?
3. How many and what kinds of vehicles will drive on the road? How often? During what seasons?
4. If a given roadless area contains wide motorized trails (4WD trails), is it really “road” less?
The last is a bit philosophical, but you see my point. One site I looked at about the Slaughterhouse Gulch trail said it was very busy during certain seasons. So conceivably if people are the problem- a motorized trail (or biking.. or hiking) trail that is busy, could have more deleterious environmental impacts than a seldom-used road.