vantage point, then it would be completely intelligible as a cohesive object. Instead, roads exist as an abstraction upon the land, operating in our mind more as works of collective imagination than a thing that that can be quantified. We’re told that if we take a particular road, it will lead to a specific destination; we can’t typically see the destination and so we embark on roads in faith that the builders, surveyors, mapmakers and satellite images are correct – that the road actually does lead to where we need to go. In this, the road is beyond individual comprehension, much like the faith and assumption we grant to the atmosphere of the planet – we know it exists even if our understanding of it is not concrete. We know that life cannot exist without it, but we don’t think about it as a medium that we swim in all the time. A road represents an animal faith inherited from the others who’ve travelled it despite that we cannot understand its totality. Even if we travel from end to end, by the last mile, we can’t really be sure that the first mile is still there or if it has been altered in our absence to a different destination. While roads are the necessary mechanism underlying the delivery and transit of everything required for civilisations great and small, they are hardly benign. Their general invisibility and ubiquity perverts our ability to understand their consequential impact, both good and bad. Since the wilderness battles of the Clinton-era Roadless Rule in the 1990’s, we have begun to accept, if not tacitly acknowledge, that any newly-proposed road is an opening for human-led destruction. Aside from the trampled and trammeled plants, spilled chemicals, synthetic granules, asphalt, crushed rock, silica, cement, steel, suffering water quality and herbicides, the first act of modern paved road building involves a ravenous act of destruction: mass deforestation, heavy equipment, trenching, grading, ramping, culverting and terraforming to straighten nature’s contours into low-sloped smooth expanses. Paved roads drive a hole through the natural landscape and disfigure everything within several miles of their divisive fence lines and splinter roads that perpetuate yet greater human-led change. Despite a surface lifespan of only 30 years, roads appear to be a forever piece of infrastructure that necessitates perpetual reconstruction. If the recently passed bipartisan US $1 trillion infrastructure bill is any indication, enormous resources will continue to flow toward repairing every tattered piece of asphalt and cracked abutment – even if these elements served their purpose long ago. Occasionally roads get removed, it’s just difficult to recall any that were abandoned but not replaced by a larger road. In light of the outsize consequence to the environment of these carbon-intensive pieces of infrastructure, roadways offer those concerned about climate change several inspiring opportunities, but first some statistics: •The average North American city is 40% right-of-way pavement •The Hoover Dam contains 4.36 million cubic yards of concrete •An average city like Seattle contains approximately 4,000 lane
miles 2 of road and somewhere between 13-30 million cubic yards of pavement that will need replacement on a rolling basis
Annie Han and Daniel Milhayo, Lead Pencil Studio, are artists exploring spatial conditions in Seattle, Washington. https://www.leadpencilstudio.org/ Paradoxically, the overabundance of the very thing that made cities successful is also the primary cause of land scarcity, eroding both affordability and quality of life in ways that appear to be intractable. An obvious place to find enough undeveloped land to meaningfully address these issues is the road – and since these interlace the entire city, the potential is everywhere and in every neighbourhood – an elegant distribution, regardless of income or property value. All that is needed is a willing municipality to implement a demonstration project to prove a path forward is possible. p The twin problems of not enough open space and lack of affordable housing is a spatial and physical problem, and yet our approach to date has been to tap regional budgets to purchase private land. With recent increase of rents and homelessness, the issue has grown to be painfully acute. This comes at a time when nations are experiencing generationally high inflation rates and skyrocketing property values. The money needed to buy enough land to match the need of the unhoused is inherently at odds with the financial ability for the taxpayer to fund. Alternatively, if your city is like Seattle, there is at least 33 square miles of pavement to look into, a portion of which could be repurposed as a more impactful public good than the current use as a road. While this land wouldn’t be free of development costs, it would be a fraction of market price. A careful observer will find that any city contains hundreds of lane miles that are either needlessly wide or orphaned from topographic dead ends or accidental grid collisions. Many of these blocks would make excellent opportunities for reassignment as a public good — if just ten lane miles of right-of way were reassigned to public housing (average four stories tall), a city could locate space for 5,000 one-bedroom apartments or enough land for 30 parks at 30,000 ft 2 each. The civic gain of such a quantity of new open space or housing would be significant by any measure and greatly alleviate pressure to build further out into the woods. Given the untenable cost for market-rate land that cities encounter when shopping for new park space and housing sites, this proposal makes good use of a resource that is both low cost and available throughout the entire civic fabric. This is not to underestimate the difficult work required by city councils and mayors to dislodge designated right-of-way lands from their engineer-minded DOT’s and no-growth neighbours. Fortunately the formal mechanism to reassign public land is already executed regularly on behalf of developers in the form of street and alley vacations which typically occur when large institutional projects are allowed to purchase right-of-ways to combine tax lots. Other examples of infrastructure reassignment include the Rails to Trails programs (the Highline), parklets, pandemic in-street seating, NYC’s Neighborhood Plaza Partnership program, and, at a larger scale, recent western dam removals in favour of salmon habitat restoration.
2 Generally, a single lane mile is a one-mile long one-lane road, 12' wide — 63,360 ft 2 . Here, we take it to be 17' wide (half a lane of parking or sidewalk will be reassigned), thus our lane mile is 89,760 ft 2 .
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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