Sprawling development patterns have forced us to construct 525 miles of new roads over the past two decades. Road maintenance costs alone for this new infrastructure exceed $26 million per year.

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, in areas which also own a high number of newly built homes.1

When we look at the type of roads we have built, 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. 2

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.3 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.

Where are the 525 miles of new roads we have constructed since 1990?

Why this is important to moving One Region Forward

In building all of this new road infrastructure, we are forced 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?

If we intend to reduce the expensive spread of developed land, development strategies should focus on planning communities that preserve and enhance existing activity centers, agricultural areas and natural lands. Numerous provisions, policies and incentives for smart growth are already available through federal and state programs. Some options include transferring development rights, purchases of development rights, conservative zoning codes and various land use regulations which either deter development from occurring in undeveloped areas or promote investment in existing areas of development.

Tell us what you think we should do to move our region’s transportation systems forward.

Your comments and suggestions will be forwarded to the One Region Forward Transportation Working Stream and will be used to help shape the implementation strategies developed as part of that effort.



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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 http://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.

Data Notes

1. How we calculated miles of new roads since 1990: Spatial roads data for the years 1990 and 2010 was retrieved from the U.S. Census Bureau in geographic information systems (GIS) format for the Buffalo-Niagara region. Due to the Coordinate Enhancement Program of the Census Bureau enacted for the 2010 Census, significant spatial discrepancies existed between these two data sets. To account for these differences, all line segments from the 2010 roads file that fell outside 100 feet of 1990 roads were selected. These road segments, representing roads likely to have been constructed since 1990, were compared with the 1990 roads layer, on a segment by segment basis, making sure that all previously existing roads were excluded from the estimate of new roads. The aggregate length of roads constructed since 1990 within the two-county region was then calculated using ArcGIS software.

2. How we estimated the number of lane miles constructed since 1990: The feature class codes assigned to each road segment by the U.S. Census Bureau were used to determine the number of lanes in each segment of new road by making assumptions based on the descriptions assigned to each road class. For example, all roads listed as class code A31, designated as a local- or county-owned, un-separated highway, were assumed to have two lanes. Through this process, an estimate of the total number of lane-miles of local- or county-owned roads within the region was derived.

3. How we estimated the annual maintenance cost of new roads constructed since 1990: The New York State Comptroller’s Office (2011) provided the average annual maintenance cost per lane-mile for each county in New York State according to expenditure data reported by local governments to the Comptroller’s Office for the 2009 fiscal year. These maintenance costs include physical maintenance of the road surfaces, as well as costs related to snow plowing, street sweeping, street lighting, etc…