If you’re lucky, you haven’t had the chance to drive the new, smoother and wider section of Haines Highway.
It’s no improvement.
The road is smoother, and perhaps the lanes are a few inches wider, but the elevation of the roadway and the fact that it is hemmed in by guardrails for miles effectively has narrowed it, eliminating miles of virtual shoulders, roadside sections where a driver previously could pull over.
The elevated, contained design also means that the “improved” road is more difficult to get down from to reach the water. It is now literally high above the streams, ponds and marshes you might want to visit and also high above the wildlife you might otherwise see there.
Spotting a moose, swan or lynx will be more difficult on this road, but if you do, good luck finding a spot to pull over where your car is out of the lane of traffic.
I won’t go on at length about how this project has damaged fish habitat. Anyone who lives here long understands that all those little channels and eddies shelter salmon, and as they go, so do populations of coho, sockeye and king salmon. This project was so egregiously damaging to roadside habitat last year, construction triggered an explosion of protest.
As for moose and other animals that cross the highway, the elevated road is both an obstacle and a trap, difficult to get up on to cross, and once on, difficult to exit. Other places have elevated bridges and tunnels for wildlife crossings, but in Haines it’s every moose for himself.
Maybe most remarkably, the “improved” road doesn’t include one foot of improved bicycle or pedestrian trails. The state Department of Transportation built miles of paved bicycle trails that parallel state highways in places like Tok, Talkeetna, and Houston, where on some recent sunny summer days I didn’t see a single biker or walker.
Haines is a “recreation capital,” according to our tourism department, hosting an annual international bicycle race on a section of road designated as a National Scenic Highway, but this project moved ahead without a nod to bicyclists or pedestrians.
Some might argue that there’s “no room” for a bike lane on highway sections where the road forms the thin line between mountain and river. But there are many other sections of the road, particularly north and south of Klukwan, where there’s plenty of land roadside to expand a short section of existing trail built for eagle viewing.
Also, on those tough sections jammed between mountain and river, the state had no problem filling in fish habitat to make room for cars and trucks. Why not for bicyclists and pedestrians? On narrow Turnagain Arm south of Anchorage, the state built a paved trail between Indian and Girdwood that’s become a magnet for cyclists.
(The project was at least good for teaching one lesson: If residents don’t demand bike trails and threaten to hold up projects like this until the state puts them in, they won’t be built. I inquired about a bike trail during an “open house” meeting about five years ago. A DOT representative promised me a response. It never came.)
As perhaps an inside joke or final insult, the state posted “scenic viewpoint” signs along the road, as though the entire valley isn’t scenic. That money would have been better spent notifying drivers of the few spots that aren’t scenic.
The “improved” Haines Highway looks like your living room would if you invited a bunch of guys from the bar to redecorate it. In terms of roadway attractiveness, it’s a big-screen TV surrounded by Barcaloungers.
Unless you’re a jaded, long-distance trucker or a mining company official looking to move tons of ore at low cost, the new highway does not serve people. It does not serve wildlife. It does not serve fish.
It best serves an inanimate object – an automobile driven blindly, straight ahead, at high speeds.