Another hidden cost of sprawl as road salt contaminates streams

Most of us are just starting to face the cost of reparing our sprawling infrastructure, but dozens of other costs still are not widely acknowledged.

From The Pittsburgh Tribune Review

Leftover salt has unsavory outcome for municipalities

"If we brought (the salt) out here, we'd have to cover it with tarps. No matter how well we stored it, we'd probably have less salt by the time next winter rolls around because of water runoff," Getz said, adding that presents environmental concerns because a stream is nearby.

In July, a water-main break beneath a storage area in South Park washed tons of salt into adjacent Peters Creek and killed hundreds of fish.

The township's storage area is an old Pennsylvania Railroad tunnel, about 175 feet long and 20 feet high. Today, it holds about 2,000 tons of salt, which piles to the ceiling through much of the tunnel.

From The Columbus Dispatch:

Road salt is polluting Ohio drinking water

Since 2009, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has found rainwater runoff from road-salt piles fouling public and private wells in five Ohio communities. Though not considered a health threat, the salty taste of drinking water grew so bad that the village of Camden in Preble County had to abandon its wells.

“After you get to a certain level, you can certainly tell there is a change in the taste,” said Melissa Williams, the Preble County health commissioner. “It will corrode your plumbing fixtures, also.”

The issue has Ohio EPA officials dealing with a new type of pollution that’s not specifically covered by environmental law.

Pittsburgh Sprawl Map and Talk on Urbanophile

Image from Urbanophile (Screen capture from TEDxPittsburgh - Don Carter - 2.4 Million)

Aaron Renn of The Urbanophile blog has a great post up, that includes a graphic display of sprawl in the Pittsburgh region. Also, included is the earlier and even more dramatic picture of sprawl in Buffalo, from a Chuck Banas post on the subject.

Read all the comments, which include many interesting links. Several people point out the map is a bit deceptive since it doesn't compare with the region's peak population of around 2.7-2.8 million reached in the 1960's. Even so, what one sees is a dramatic increase in land use for a population that stayed pretty close to the same.

A few people thought things didn't look that bad relative to sprawl in other regions.

My response:

I would love to see some kind of estimate of infrastructure costs per person. (LOL, since these are “public goods” nobody has likely tried to come up with that number)

My guess is that the Pittsburgh region has to have one of the highest costs. Whatever the relative level of sprawl here, one has to see every small bit of it as very, very expensive.

After, Venice, the Pittsburgh area has the largest number of bridges–over rivers, over hollows, over gorges and across valleys. These don’t come cheap. Add to that, a good number of tunnels.

Of course, that just scratches the surface of the massive environmental impact. Not surprisingly, the area is known for areas of very poor air quality and a flash flood risk from storm drainage problems.

The area also is pretty close to leading in the number of bridges considered substandard.

Detroit Shrinks To Survive (Or Thinks About It)

Sorry, once again for not posting more--it's not that there isn't news, in fact I'm overwhelmed with things we should be thinking and talking about.

When I made my post about the snow, I meant to do a follow up delving into the issue it opened up. Are all people entitled to the same level of government funded infrastructure, schools, roads, snow plowing, transit etc... no matter where they choose to live--or is it reasonable for a city to limit services and use prudent cost benefit judgments to focus money on places where it would be most productive? Should it charge according to cost? Believe it or not, in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, transit either breaks even, or is operated by a company with real estate interests along the line.

Infrastructure, is the great unspoken entitlement program, so embedded in our culture few ever think about it.

Detroit, never ever thought about these things. All people were entitled to live anywhere they pleased regardless of cost and as the city shrank, tax dollars by default flowed towards the areas of greatest "need". The final result, was a regional population spreading out and shrinking at the same time. Detroit's land area today could hold all of Boston + all of San Francisco + all of Manhattan and a nice chunk of some other city and still have room.

Boston Population 620,535 ('08 estimate) Land Area 48.43 sq mi
San Francisco Population 808,976 Land Area 46.7 sq mi
Manhattan Population 1,634,795 Land Area 33.77 sq mi (area includes bulk of NY regions good jobs)

Detroit Population 912,062 (estimated to now not be much over 800,000) Land Area 138.8 sq mi

Finally, the city and entire state of Michigan are beyond broke and beyond temporary bailouts or fixes. The subject is on the table in a big way.


"Bing's (Detroit mayor) staff is using its own data and a survey released last weekend by Data Driven Detroit. The block-by-block study of the 139 square-mile city showed that roughly one in three parcels are vacant lots or abandoned homes. The mayor's staff didn't elaborate on Bing's comments to WJR beyond a statement saying, "the mayor will utilize data from several sources including city departments, Data Driven Detroit, as well resident input, to prepare a viable land use plan."

Steven Ogden, executive director of Next Detroit Neighborhood Initiative, is using the group's data to come up with a plan for which neighborhoods his nonprofit should target in the next several years with time and money. He submitted a proposal to the Bing administration within the past several days on what areas he wants to partner with the city to target."

I don't have time or details on this. It's pretty clear using force to physically remove people from their homes and neighborhoods is wrong and not likely to be possible on a large scale. (even though the city has done this over and over in the past) Equally clear is that one way or another some type of triage in terms of providing city services will likely be made either now or in the future. Already, Detroit's utilities are making these choices and cutting more and more blocks off from power and gas.

An extreme example of issues many cities in the former rust belt are facing.

Related articles.

http://www.rethinkdetroit.org/2010/01/30/how-kresge-plans-to-reconfigure-detroit/
http://www.rethinkdetroit.org/2010/01/24/jane-jacobs-on-detroit-low-density-failure/