Water Works 55 - 10/18/04

It’s Not Easy Being Grim

What could be more environmentally friendly than a bicycle? Using bikes instead of cars for routine transportation is so widely thought a good idea, it’s hard to imagine an objection that doesn’t seem like quibbling.

In New Jersey we have packed the highest population density of any state in the nation into relatively few square miles. Simple common sense tells us we should try to reduce the amount of pollution we produce driving back and forth across the place. It is always possible that some miracle in automotive technology will once again allow us to behave as irresponsibly as only we can. Meanwhile, as far as public investments in alternatives go, promoting bicycle use gives us one of the best returns for our collective buck.

I doubt that many people in the less populated parts of the state wake up each day worrying about how much our driving adds to atmospheric pollution. I’m more concerned about not spending half my life in a car. You learn new habits when you live out here. Your education begins the first time you turn into your driveway realizing that those essentials you forgot to pick up on your trip home are five or ten miles behind you. “Think globally, act locally” has never really taken hold with me. I have trouble imagining any impact of mine on the life of some guy in China, but it’s comforting to know I’m helping to make the world a better place for both of us in my small, selfish way.

There are other reasons for concern about the amount of driving we do. Even the oil industry recognizes that world oil production has peaked or will peak soon. The prospect of large, new reserves that the world’s best geologists have not yet discovered is very slim. The waning of the mini-epoch of human civilization that began 145 years ago in Titusville, Pennsylvania is only a few decades away.

That guy in China may do more to hasten the dawn of the next era than we will. If you are as unsure as I am about the impact your driving habits have on him, do not doubt that his energy consumption will have a big impact on you. More than ever, the world’s clothing and kitchen appliances and structural steel are made in China, India, Mexico and Brazil. With costs of production as low as theirs, they can bid up the price of dwindling oil resources and stay competitive in world markets better than we can. Take note of the price of gasoline today. You will remember it fondly sooner than you think.

I suppose we can organize a boycott of the world’s emerging industrial giants. But instead of girding our loins with the skins of beasts and cooking over open fires in caves, riding a bike occasionally seems an easier way to hang on to our beloved SUVs a bit longer. That guy in China will have an impact on more than household budgets too. Towns that plan now for alternatives to driving cars will gain a competitive advantage in real estate markets as desirable places to live, when the price of gasoline hits a record high one day and stays up there for good.

Progress follows slow and curious paths here in Franklin. We’ll argue about anything. We debated for years about whether we should have a full-time police force. When we finally got one a new fight broke out about whether traffic tickets were more progress than the town could handle. I’ve lost track of how long we’ve been expanding our school, but the latest plan seems a good one, and a good bet to survive the next referendum. Our farmland preservation program has been as aggressive and forward looking as any town’s, but not long ago we took a farm now ranked fifth in the state for preservation funding and put that through a referendum too. It won in a close vote.

So when I heard that the Hunterdon County Planning Department was proposing to widen the county roads here and add a lane dedicated only to bicycles, I expected a predictable uproar.

One part of the county’s proposal would expand the existing paved shoulder to a five-foot width on nine miles of roadway along the eastern, western and northern borders of the longest branch of the upper Lockatong watershed, near Quakertown. Unless you just joined us, you know that very area has been the focus of considerable controversy about water. (50, Map) The roads there present a few water-related problems of their own.

The first impression you get from our county roads when you ride them is how close the roadside seems. The paved shoulder averages a foot in width at best. In most places the roads run below the fields on one or both of the roadsides, with steep berms rising up to those fields from drainage ditches another foot or two from the edge of the pavement. The berms can run several feet high, topped by large, old trees here and there. Where the roads run above the grade of the fields the land by the roadside is usually very wet. The second and more memorable impression our roads make is when it rains, when you see how much water pours out of the fields and into those roadside ditches.

Extending a foot-wide shoulder on those roads another four feet sounds simple until you take a closer look. Cutting into those berms, filling the existing ditches and digging replacements will require a lot of earthwork. Quite a few trees will have to be cut down and replaced too. Stabilizing the new arrangement will add to the volume of stormwater to be managed and retained as groundwater. The amount of work it will take to install bike lanes almost makes the amount of new pavement the bike lanes will add seem insignificant. And it all has to be done while crossing several branches of C-1 streams (28) in a uniquely sensitive watershed (48, 45), in a town notoriously strict about water.

Our response when the county presented its plan was surprisingly subdued. The township committee listened, noted a few reservations and suggestions, and asked the county to get back to them when it had worked out more details. That’s indicative of the level of sensitivity to local concerns the county and its planning department have displayed in this matter. Engineering studies, if any are ever done here, are a long way off. Right now the planning department is most interested in what the township has to say. Their plan is only at its barest conceptual stage and they’ve made it clear that whatever they finally propose for us won’t proceed unless we agree.

I suspect there was another reason for Franklin’s low-key reaction: a sense that here was one more idea that would recede further from the realm of the possible the more closely we examined it. We have all heard of others, no less worthy than the county’s. They all ended up floundering on the same set of rocks – the ones we live on. (31) Groundwater recharge, stormwater runoff, impervious cover and stream encroachment severely limit our municipal ambitions. Live here long enough and you develop an instinct that tells you where certain topics of conversation invariably lead. After a while you tend not to pursue them.

If you talk to the people at Hunterdon’s planning department they will tell you that encouraging bicycle use is all about contexts, costs and benefits. In some places bicycle-only lanes have been embraced as a solution to traffic problems in need of attention for some time. In others children may soon ride bikes to their many activities or to visit friends, without their parents having to worry about their safety or having to drive them. Predicting a demand to weigh against the cost is the hard part. What is immediately seen as an indispensable amenity in one town is a speculative venture in another. In Franklin you have to build the thing to learn how many people will use it.

In our case measurable costs trump speculative benefits, but we should never have been left with a trade-off as stark as that. Despite their almost infectious enthusiasm for this initiative, our county planning department knows that widening rural roads for bicycle lanes is really a worst case scenario. The problem is there are no other scenarios available. That is certainly not the county’s fault. Even during the worst of the gasoline shortages of the 1970s, if you suggested then that we start acquiring rights-of-way for off-road bike paths that might not be needed for 30 years, you would have been called a hopeless dreamer or a crank.

Deciding whether Franklin ought to be more bike-friendly should not require the marathon deliberations that important public questions typically provoke here. I think most people will agree. We should keep our communal eye on what we’ve got – our narrow country roads, our big old trees, our creeks – and hang on for dear life.

It seems to have worked so far, but what if we’re wrong? What if we’re simply unable to envision a future that doesn’t look like yesterday? Isn’t that exactly the mistake we all made 30 years ago? Perhaps someday people will complain: “I would love to pedal down to my job in Flemington when weather permits, if it weren’t for those Druids in Franklin and their ridiculous roads.”

If our sense of the ordinary world was keen enough, George Eliot said, “it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar.” A good part of the art of living is deciding what you prefer not to think about. I receive e-mails every day telling me of people performing admirable deeds to protect our natural heritage, in matters of no small consequence. Most don’t sound like NIMBYs to me. They seem more concerned about the future. I marvel at the breadth and depth of their knowledge, at the energy and vision they bring to their work, and at their ability to remain sane.

Which is why I confine my tub-thumping to a far smaller range of environmental themes. You place your bets and you take your chances. But I have to wonder if I’ll be sitting here 30 years from now, still banging away about my roads and trees and creeks, while dedicated public servants beg me to please step outside and see for myself how some guy in China has transformed my ordinary world beyond recognition.

Ron Gutkowski