Seeking a place in the vanguard of the battle against global warming, France last month unveiled a package of ambitious pledges that included a particularly bold proposition: An end to new highway construction.
Environmentalists cheered the development, but they are watching carefully. They want the government to publish specific measures by next March, and they also want to make sure that loopholes - such as allowing new roads to relieve congestion and promote safety - are not abused.
“Every politician in the country wants to keep the power to build small roads,” said Michel Dubromel, a transport expert with France Nature Environnement, a federation of environmental groups.
Even so, the tentative steps France is taking to slow road building are in sharp contrast with developments elsewhere in Europe and many other parts of the world. And even environmental groups concede the positive role new roads can sometimes play in promoting mass transit, for example, or easing fuel-wasting bottlenecks.
One of the biggest projects is the Asian Highway, a network of new and upgraded roads spanning 140,000 km, or about 87,000 miles, and crisscrossing 32 countries from Southeast Asia to Central Asia. Another project is a vast ring road 7,500 km-long that would snake around the Black Sea and link Armenia with Turkey and Georgia.
Further to the west, large-scale highway projects from the Balkans to the Baltic are under way to link isolated towns and villages with the rest of the European continent.
But many of these costly road projects are draining money away from environmentally friendlier transport, such as rail services, according to Anelia Stefanova, the transport co-ordinator for CEE Bankwatch Network, a group that monitors public funding in Central and Eastern Europe.
Stefanova said the European Union had budgeted about 25 billion euros, or nearly $37 billion, which is more than half of all its transport investments in the region, for new road projects for countries including Poland and Bulgaria over the next five years. She said railways in the region would only receive half that amount, undermining the EU goal of shifting more transport from trucks to less polluting trains.
Advocates for roads say that comparing funding for trains and roads is shortsighted. Roads can relieve poverty, allow access to education and health services and open up new markets - and they often accomplish these far more effectively than other forms of transport alone, said Sybille Rupprecht, the director general of the International Road Federation.
“You can't go into every village by rail or inland waterway,” said Rupprecht, whose organisation represents the world's road-building associations as well as major constructors like Colas of France and Budimex Dromex of Poland. “At some point you need roads.”
As well as playing a vital role in development, new roads can in some cases also benefit the environment by bypassing city centres and completing links between strips of highway where drivers still use circuitous routes, she said.
Without such improvements, drivers are stuck in stop-and-go traffic, burning more fuel and releasing more emissions than they would if direct routes existed, she said.
Many environmentalists acknowledge the role roads can play in pulling people out of poverty, and they concede that lower carbon alternatives like buses and bicycles also benefit from paved surfaces. But they are sceptical about expanding roads in the name of environmental protection.
“Under almost any set of plausible assumptions, widening a highway in a congested urban area will substantially increase long-term greenhouse gas emissions,” said Clark Williams-Derry, the research director for the Sightline Institute, a think-tank based in Seattle.
Williams-Derry, who wrote a report on the environmental effects of expanding highways published in October, said there may be short-term benefits from building bigger roads.
But those benefits would last only about five years before larger numbers of road users began to use the route, producing more emissions and ultimately more congestion.
For the moment, France may be the only country where a government is considering a formal moratorium on road construction. But environmentalists claim some notable victories against roads.
In 2003, Mayor Myung Bak Lee of Seoul defied local lobbies and replaced a six-kilometre elevated highway that once covered the Cheonggyecheon River in the city centre with parks, walkways and cycle routes.
Seattle voters in November rejected a package of road and mass transit measures, in part, environmentalists say, because of concerns that more highways would add to global warming.
And in Poland, the European Court of Justice is to rule on whether the Polish government's promotion of highways between Warsaw and the Finnish capital, Helsinki, ignored EU legislation on preserving important natural habitats, including some of Europe's last pristine wetlands and primeval forest.
New York Times
