Reducing habitat fragmentation by minor rural roads through traffic calming

The rural road network suffers continually from ambiguity. On the one hand, the presence of this network and its traffic flows offer accessibility and make a contribution to economic development. While on the other, its presence and its traffic flows cause fragmentation. The actual ecological impact of this fragmentation depends on several variables such as species and road characteristics. This paper focuses on minor rural roads. The spatial concept developed to address this, ‘traffic calming rural area’ (TCRA) is intended to address both accessibility and sustainable environment. It does this by concentrating the current diffuse traffic flows on a few rural highways, thus, creating rural residential areas within the region. This paper presents some formulae to quantify the resulting fragmentation. A more practical method compares the sizes of continuous landscape units. Both the formulae and the method have been used for two pilot studies. The results indicate that implementing the TCRA concept leads to larger continuous landscape units, thereby helping to reduce fragmentation effects.