Orange Cone Headaches:
Why Construction Will Never End in Our Overpopulated and Growing Country.
By Karen I. Shragg
Key Phrases: Overpopulation, perpetual growth, never-ending construction, detours, congestion, traffic.
Everyone cringes when they see the signs that litter our roads and cities with the phrase,“ Construction Zone.” It means delays, and possible damage to one’s vehicle. If you are like most Americans, you live in a city and can go no further than a few miles before you are confronted with orange cones, warning of yet another road “improvement “project. While infrastructure repair is always a necessity, these endless construction headaches, which never seem to reach a completed stage, is symptomatic of something deeper; a fruitless scrambling to accommodate our growing numbers. More people means more cement. More cement means more traffic, more pollution, and higher demands on our resources. We build out and we build up with total disregard for the impact on our quality of life, the ability of wildlife to survive or on our ground water and surface water to keep up.
Cities throughout the US are being strangled with construction because city managers are encouraged by their councils to keep welcoming developers into their once livable neighborhoods. They still believe in the antiquated narrative that growth equals progress, when the opposite is true. We live and will continue to live in construction zones as long as we think in this outdated way. More and more people fuel the now common vistas of large cranes and bulldozers that are an integral part of every growing metropolitan city in America.
The Worn Out lies of Perpetual Road Construction
Each time a road is to be widened; taxpayers are promised an ever-eluding freedom that they will find on the roads when the project is completed. City councilmen and women may believe their transportation engineers when they show up with all of their fancy graphs and charts. With fuzzy math they demonstrate how bottlenecks of traffic will be resolved. I am not sure how they do it with a straight face because their ability to fulfill their promises is impossible. Population growth overwhelms the ability of the best transportation projects to resolve traffic issues. This leaves us all with traffic headaches, huge price tags and no congestion relief in sight.
It costs approximately 4 million dollars per mile to go from 4 to 6 lanes of highways https://blog.midwestind.com/cost-of-building-road/. Taxpayers pay the bill, the air quality goes down, traffic congestion worsens and due to population growth, the problem it is designed to solve, is never resolved.
Departments of Transportation across the country have permanent pages on their websites indicating where commuters and travelers will be inconvenienced by detours due to road construction.(http://www.dot.state.mn.us/roadwork/index.html#gsc.tab=0)
Every city, large or small begins and ends every day with a traffic report on their local news stations, and they all have a traffic information section on their websites. We just accept that traffic is a part of our lives and do our best to avoid peak times. Accidents are more likely in construction zones and can also be found daily on local news’ websites.
It really is a problem a school child could understand. Road construction takes time. If a city’s population is growing during that time, then by the time the project is completed, there will be more cars on the road and the congestion will not be relieved. Road construction woes are particularly frustrating in the southwest where population is growing the fastest. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2020/demo/fastest-growing-cities-2010-2019.html
But in the Midwest, it’s the same story. My own hometown, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, has a highway called Crosstown or Minnesota Hwy 62. It was clogged with traffic and slated for improvements. It took four years of orange cone headaches to finish the project. By the time the highway project was completed the traffic was worse. Promises of traffic relief were never experienced.
Well no wonder. That project was completed in 2010. According to a governor appointed group called the Metropolitan council, the metro population of the Twin Cities grew by 9.3% between 2010 and 2018. Percentages can be misleading, however, so in real numbers the Twin Cities, grew by 264,468 people, from 2,849,567 to 3,114,035.
So, what happens in a city with limited mass transit choices? By the thousands, these new residents get in their cars and erase the promises of highway improvements. This story of population growth in my hometown is not unique. It reflects the growth in the rest of country and the world. It is this growth which is exacerbating all issues regarding the ability to keep up with the construction of infrastructure.
Cost overruns and delays due to weather events are incredibly common in road construction projects and yet they are readily accepted as business as usual. This whole merry go round of building roads to accommodate growth is failing us yet the whole scam remains virtually unchallenged by citizens and politicians who accept these failures as a part of what they still call progress.
Density is the Wrong Medicine for Growth
Progress is supposed to make things better. High rise developers make promises to cities that their project will be a key to a better future for all. Cities in turn offer TIF (tax increment financing) which subsidizes developers by diverting a part of their taxes to be paid at some future date, as much as 25 years away! There is no full cost accounting of such developments. The projects are really meant to line the pockets of developers and the city fathers and mothers who get to smile for photo-ops at ribbon cutting ceremonies, perpetuating the myth of how they are helping to increase their city’s vitality. What they don’t account for is the increase in density which creates more traffic, more crime, and a general malaise of anonymity as people find it more difficult to connect to community. Covid 19 is revealing another downside to density, the increased possibility in the spreading of contagions. High rises block our ability to see a sun rise or enjoy a sunset. They light up the night sky with light pollution, destroying the chance to see the stars. Hundreds of units per high rise apartment building put a concentrated demand on water for showers, cooking and laundry all in one unsustainable place.
All of these developments require both fossil fuel and raw materials. The earth is a limited place, and developers treat these materials as if they had some magic wand that will keep them bubbling up from the ground forever.
It seems that sand would be something we could never run out of, but due to our insatiable demand for glass and concrete, fueled by our ever-growing population, it too is not able to meet construction demand. Marine sand is too full of salt and desert sand has crystals which have been rounded by wind, making it poor for making concrete, therefore all sand used in the making of glass and concrete construction must be mined.
“Sand and gravel represent the highest volume of raw material used on earth after water. Their use greatly exceeds their natural renewal rates” (UNEP, 2014).
These developers and their posse of growth worshippers, pretend that in the process of shipping materials and the construction of those materials, that they are not guilty of being contributors to the release of climate-altering gases.
To break the cycle of growth we must first accept the limits of the earth’s resources and the way that development pollutes the life-giving biosphere on which we all depend. This is particularly true in the developed world which is hooked on growth much like a drug user is hooked on their chosen way of feeling good in the moment. The benefits of growth, like illicit drugs, are temporary and always end up creating more damage at the end of the day.
Fueling all of the ubiquitous construction in cities across America is overpopulation. Ask the average person what the current population and growth rates of their own city, state or country and few will greet you with confident answers. They may know the current world population, but rarely how rapidly we are still growing in spite of pandemics, wildfires and hurricanes.
The basic numbers we should all have at our fingertips when dismantling the fallacies of promoting growth are these: The world has added over 5.5 billion people in the last century and continues to add over 80 million per year. The US population just hit 330 million in 2020 and is still growing by over one million per year, but passed sustainable numbers at least 150 million people ago, according to Global Footprint Network .
( www.globalfootprintnetwork.org)
The reason most Americans do not know these numbers is not because they are difficult to find on the Internet, it is because they are not discussed, or should I say they refused to be discussed by our numerous media outlets of all political stripes and our mainstream environmental groups.
Monumental death rates will certainly take care of our overpopulation problem, but in ways no one wants to experience. We would need to see unconscionable increases in deaths. It is both lazy and evil to allow nature to take its course. This course is not inevitable, not if we can start seeing the big picture and believing in our power to stop this freight train.
When one can accept that we are already seriously overpopulated relative to our resources, then growth is to be challenged no matter where it is coming from. The fact that most of our current growth in the US is due to outdated immigration policies fails to be considered due to the story that we are a nation of immigrants, so how can we limit them?
As economist, professor emeritus Herman Daly stated recently, “Global population growth is of course entirely due to natural increase, and migration would hardly be the problem that it is today if the quadrupling of human numbers within one recent lifetime had not brought the world from two to nearly eight billion people. However, in the U.S., Western Europe, and Canada, recent population growth is mainly due to net immigration and higher average fertility of immigrants. So, it is hard to evade the increasingly difficult and divisive issue of immigration in discussing the already nearly taboo subject of population policy, especially in “a country of immigrants”. (Daly, 2019 )(https://steadystate.org/a-country-of-immigrants/)
A Paradigm Shift is Required
Accommodating growth of industrialized humans and their infrastructure in our neo-capitalist, overpopulated country and world is like putting out a welcome mat for cancer, thinking you can mitigate the worst of it with chemotherapy and radiation. Breaking free from its grip is much easier said than done, but it all begins with changing our worldview. We must breakout of the trap and quit being in lockstep with the mantra of growth. We’ve been led to believe it is our savior, clearly it is just the opposite.
Thankfully there are activists and NGO’s dedicated to another path. The Overpopulation Project at Overpopulationproject.com lists 37 national and international groups that are dedicated to working on this critical issue. The thing all of these groups have in common is an understanding that we cannot continue to grow our population on a limited planet without disastrous results.
The leader of each organization must have gone through a period of soul searching to determine where growth was coming from and how best to address it. Was it important to address total fertility rate? Was it critical to address changing our growth based economic system or should they focus on the most common way we grow, our immigration policies? Between them all, they propose everything from the promotion of one-child families, to stricter immigration policies and steady state economics without a need to grow GNP.
I propose that the full truth is to be found in all of the above. We must honor all of the voices of ‘degrowth’ for this Medusa’s head has many tentacles. Growth as a goal needs to be shunned, We need to start seeing endless orange-coned construction zones as representative of not only short term headaches, but long-term migraines that will only end when we change our story.