An issue for One Region Forward…
Even as our population has declined over the past two decades, Erie and Niagara Counties have built 525 miles of new roads adding more than $26 million in road maintenance costs every year.
Why is this new spending a concern for regional sustainability? Part of the answer is obvious: because taking care of the roads we have already strains local government budgets. We can’t afford to spend more.
Beyond that, the new roads are part of a classic “chicken-and-egg” dynamic. Do they respond to our sprawling pattern of development? Or do they cause it? It seems the answer is both, continuing the evolution of our region as one in which we drive more, burn more fossil fuel, generate more carbon emissions, and gobble up more rural farmland. [Learn More]
This is one of the issues being considered as part of the creation of a regional plan for sustainable development under the banner of One Region Forward – and one of the topics to be discussed as part of an occasional series of “data stories” in Buffalo Rising. Please visit our website.
What the data says
Since 1990, about 525 miles of new roads have been constructed within Erie and Niagara counties. The majority of these roads have been built in Erie County, primarily within suburban towns such as Clarence, Amherst and Lancaster, where many new homes have recently been built.
Based on the type of roads built – mostly residential streets – we calculate we have actually added 1,043 “lane miles” to our region’s street and road infrastructure. Lane miles, or the length of a road measured in miles multiplied by the number of lanes in that road, are a common unit of measurement used by transportation planners.
According to the New York State Comptroller’s Office,
the average annual maintenance cost for one lane mile of road in Erie County is $25,328 and $16,166 in Niagara County. Multiplying these costs by the number of lane miles constructed within each county since 1990, the total annual expense of maintaining these new roads comes out to over $26 million. This is $26 million more that local taxpayers are now forced to come up with every year just to maintain the roads built over the past two decades.
Put another way, each resident is paying, on average, $35 annually just to maintain the roadways constructed since 1990.
To make matters worse, the real cost associated with this new infrastructure is actually much greater. When we build new roads, we often need to expand our sewer, water, utility lines, etc. Those systems all require maintenance and the more expansive that infrastructure is, the more it costs our local, county and state governments.
Why this is important to moving One Region Forward
In building all this new road infrastructure, we are forcing ourselves to pay for more pavement, sidewalks, streetlights, snow plows, traffic enforcement, sewer lines, utility lines, etc. In Buffalo Niagara, where we have been slowly losing population for forty years, this new infrastructure has been created with fewer people to contribute tax dollars to pay for it.
Though new development can stimulate the economy, when it continually occurs in outlying, undeveloped areas, the ensuing public investments in infrastructure can often outweigh the economic benefits. In a slow-growth or shrinking region like Buffalo Niagara, these costs are especially burdensome to local governments and taxpayers alike.
This unsustainable approach to infrastructure development has made it difficult for us to maintain the vast network of infrastructure across our region. Each year, we pay close to $300 million to maintain all our region’s local roads, new and old. Though this expense may seem extreme, it is not even enough to keep the existing roads and bridges in top condition.
For instance, the New York State Department of Transportation in 2011 estimated that an additional $4.03 billion would be needed to bring the state system up to a state of good repair. Bearing in mind that the expense of road maintenance only represents a fraction of the total costs of sprawl, it becomes rather easy to see how burdensome this prevailing pattern of development is to our local taxpayers. Clearly, this is unsustainable in economic, environmental and social terms.
What strategies can we adopt to limit the tax burden of new development?
There are a range of possibilities for getting a handle on infrastructure development that eats up rural land and gobbles public dollars. It is possible to preserve rural land for agriculture or open space through mechanisms such as transfer of development rights, which give a developer permission to develop in priority locations in exchange for holding rural or natural lands out of development. We might look at how rural lands are assessed for taxation purposes or zoned for development. New ways of financing infrastructure development and long-term maintenance might also discourage sprawl. And policy initiatives by water and sewer districts could achieve the same ends.
Get involved
There are many ways to stay engaged and actively participate with the initiative. Help One Region Forward chart a course for our region’s future by weighing in
on our Regional Vision & Values and becoming a Working Team Contributor. Let us know where we want to go as a region and share your knowledge and expertise with our Working Team Members to inform the decision making process.
on our Regional Vision & Values and becoming a Working Team Contributor. Let us know where we want to go as a region and share your knowledge and expertise with our Working Team Members to inform the decision making process.
Lead Image: Where are the 525 miles of new roads we have constructed since 1990?
Data Sources
New York State Office of the State Comptroller. (2011, July). Local Government Snapshot: Local Government Spending on Highways. Retrieved January 23, 2013 from www.osc.state.ny.us/localgov/pubs/research/snapshot/highwayspending.pdf
U.S. Census Bureau. (1990). TIGER/Line Shapefile, New York, Roads. Retrieved courtesy of the Greater Buffalo Niagara Regional Transportation Council.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). TIGER/Line Shapefile, New York, Roads.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). State and County QuickFacts. Population Estimates, Erie and Niagara County, NY.