Fracking to Take a Heavy Toll on Roads

Transportation advocates should also be concerned, as the fracking industry’s impact on New York’s roadways could be quite extreme. The fracking industry would take a huge toll on New York’s roadways. It would introduce substantial truck traffic to rural roads that weren’t designed for such heavy vehicles and, moreover, would make upstate communities’ streets noisier and more dangerous. The roads’ capacity and flow constraints have serious implications for safety and operations, and the increased traffic would inevitably lead to expensive maintenance and refurbishing. The industry could bring 1.5 million heavy truck trips annually and increase peak traffic by 36,000 trips/hour.

The New York State Department of Transportation has studied the subject and reached these same conclusions. In August, a leaked agency document outlined the “ominous” effects that fracking could have on the state’s roads and bridges—that’s where we got our data.

“Pavement structural damage done by the passage of a single large truck is equivalent to that done by about 9,000 automobiles,” reads the report.