Parks Highway is ‘the road to the bank’

It’s the road to the bank.

The Parks Highway is a vital supply line over which millions of tons of food, supplies and equipment travel en route to the North Slope oil fields.

Upgraded and extended in 1971, it connects Anchorage — where most barge traffic enters the state — to Fairbanks, which also is the terminus for the Alaska Railroad.

For Alaska companies doing business on the North Slope, the railroad is the cheapest way to move freight between the state’s two largest cities. And from there, heavy-haul truck drivers deliver cargo to Deadhorse and beyond via the Elliot and then the Dalton highways. The human workforce relies on jets to travel to work two- to six-week shifts on the North Slope before flying back home.

Without these vital transportation links — train, barge, jet and the Parks, Elliot and Dalton highways — the economics of producing oil from Alaska’s North Slope would be vastly different.

As is, the oil fields that neighbor the Arctic Ocean generate one in three jobs in Alaska, the vast majority of tax dollars for state coffers and Permanent Fund Dividend payments, according to study by the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute for Social and Economic Research.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System carries the black gold to Valdez, where it is loaded into tanker ships that will deliver it to market. But the pipeline would soon cease operation without these other companion transportation networks.

That brings us to the proposed Knik Arm Bridge.

How would a bridge that connects the Anchorage and Mat-Su sides of the Cook Inlet impact transportation to the North Slope?

For one, it stands to shorten the route between Anchorage and Fairbanks.

The bridge would make landfall near Port MacKenzie on the Mat-Su side and connect to the Burma Road-South Big Lake Road corridor, and to Knik-Goose Bay Road and then to the Parks and Palmer-Wasilla highways in Wasilla.

Trucking companies like Lynden Transport, Air Liquide and Carlile Transportation Systems could use the new road to ship freight, but there will be a toll associated, although the dollar amount is unknown at this stage in project development.

While the Knik Arm Bridge would add options for the route commuters and freight travel, there is only one “road to the bank.”

See without the Parks Highway in place since 1971, the Prudhoe Bay, Kuparuk and Endicott oil fields might not have been developed. Because no matter how much oil is found on the North Slope — or anywhere else — it has to be “economically recoverable” for the project to advance.

The Parks Highway extension to Fairbanks and the construction of the Dalton Highway are significant transportation projects undertaken by the state to facilitate oil production on Alaska’s North Slope. They are companion pieces of infrastructure put in place to facilitate the sale of North Slope oil to world markets.

Which brings us back to the Knik Arm Bridge and a statement Valley legislator Rep. Mark Neuman made in a Dec. 21 Frontiersman story. He compared concerns about the Knik Arm Bridge and related transportation upgrades in the Mat-Su to the extension of the Parks Highway to Fairbanks. Neuman said he thinks the Parks Highway has proven it’s worth.

That’s true. The Parks Highway has proven a vital investment.

In fact, according to that same ISER study, state revenues generated from oil production have funded construction of most of the infrastructure in Alaska since statehood.

But while the transportation route across the proposed Knik Arm Bridge to points north would shorten the mileage between Fairbanks and Anchorage, it seems unlikely it will provide the same boost to the state’s economy that the Parks, Elliot and Dalton highways have delivered in tandem with the pipeline since oil first arrived at the Valdez end of the pipe in June 1977.

Certainly, in the near-term the project would create construction jobs, but any eventual bridge across the Knik Arm stands to be more like a new road to the same old bank rather than a route to new riches, such as the Parks, Elliot and Dalton highways have delivered for the past 33 years.