Every year, nearly one hundred thousand people are displaced by new highway construction. Every minute, we lose three acres of productive farmland to road-building. That's 1.5 million acres per year. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, we've paved over more than 40 million acres of farmland. In Lodi, California, for example, rich soil forty feet deep was recently covered by a Wal-Mart parking lot.
Pavement now covers more than sixty thousand square miles of the United States.
That's 2 percent of the nation's surface area and 10 percent of the arable land. And all of these roads cost money. The Cyprus Freeway in Oakland, for example, cost taxpayers thirty-five hundred dollars per inch. Even from a strictly fiscal standpoint, it makes no sense to build more roads when we're not maintaining the ones we've got. While the U.S. population increased by about 40 percent between 1960 and 1990, the number of licensed drivers nearly doubled, the number of vehicles did double, fuel consumption more than doubled, and the number of miles driven almost tripled.