David Hill: If we can't beat highway litterbugs, get them to join us

COMMENT

There are some memorably ugly streets in the United States. In Washington, New York, Chicago and other cities you find thoroughfares that look as if they've been saturation-bombed by rubbish skips.

But our little democracy could learn a lot from the world's biggest when it comes to cleanliness of main highways.

All across the US, beside their freeways and interstates, you see signs: "Adopt a Highway. This highway sponsored for the next 1 ... 2 ... 5 miles by Hickory Elementary School". Or "by Delta Sigma Chi Sorority ... the Slade Family ... Red Plains Furnishing ... employees of the Snake River Saloon" (my favourite by far).

The sponsors visit their stretch of highway twice a month or so. They clean up roadside litter, clear fallen branches and notify authorities of any surface problems. In some cases, local bodies provide them with transport, rubbish containers and signs.

The result is that long stretches of American roads are startlingly (to a New Zealand eye) free of the strew of plastic, cans, broken glass and fast-food containers that stretch like scurf lines across lots of our land.

Highways in the US aren't all spotless. Apparently they are messy in the eastern states. (It was a westerner who told me this.) But we travelled for hundreds of kilometres on roads whose cleanliness could serve as a model for our country. And remember, this was in the world's most throwaway consumer culture.

I'd love to see New Zealand try the Adopt-a-Highway scheme.

Tourism represents some 10 per cent of our national economy. The way our scenic attractions are scattered across the landscape means that visitors who contribute to that 10 per cent often travel long distances on our main roads.

Along too many of these roads, lovely background scenery is seriously compromised by unlovely foreground rubbish.

People we talked to in the US saw highway sponsorship as a shrewd commercial move. For businesses whose names appear on signs, there's an environment-friendly, civic-minded (and free) image that PR firms usually can only dream of.

There are other benefits, too. Schools and youth groups involved in the scheme gain hands-on experience of caring for the environment, plus a detailed knowledge of what grows and lives in their sponsored stretch of it. For a generation to whom highways are usually a blur seen from car windows, that matters.

There's also a growing sense of ownership and pride among such groups. This is their bit of highway, their contribution to the local and national image. Schools say that participation in the scheme often means less litter in playgrounds and neighbourhoods. Youth courts report a general improvement in community attitudes.

There are a few aspects of American highway-adopting I wouldn't want to see applied here. Some zealous American road-tidiers have been known to chase litter-dropping cars and to have a free and frank exchange with drivers, or even dump the litter on relevant front lawns. I couldn't possibly condone that - unfortunately.

But if we want to maintain the clean, green image so vital to our significant tourist industry, we seem to have three options for our roads.

We can pay local or central government more to keep them tidy. We can try using periodic detention workers. Anyone feel enthusiastic about either of those ideas?

Or (pause here to grit patriotic teeth) we can go where the US has gone. And gone with particular success in the case of the age groups for whom tossing rubbish out car windows is another way of raising a finger at the world.

The Adopt-a-Highway scheme is a classic example of if you can't beat them, get them to join you. I'm sure we could get it to work here.

And I'm sure we could find New Zealand sponsors whose names are just as lyrical as the employees of the Snake River Saloon.