Roughly four fifths paved, and the gravel is almost all the towns’
Inside the Blue Line there are about 5,529 centerline miles of public road. Just under 4,342 of those miles are asphalt, concrete or overlay; about 1,178 are unpaved. Nine miles have no surface recorded at all.
The split by who maintains the road is the part your town supervisor is actually being asked about, and it is lopsided in a way most people do not expect. Every single mile NYSDOT maintains in the Park is paved. County highway departments have paved all but 16 miles of theirs. All but about 20 miles of the Park’s unpaved public road is a town road — 935 miles of it, a third of everything the towns are responsible for. The gravel road problem in the Adirondacks is a town budget problem, in the most literal sense.
Those figures cover public road only. They do not include private logging roads, camp roads, driveways, or the administrative roads DEC keeps on Forest Preserve. Those are counted separately further down, because no single inventory holds them.
The Park’s road network, by maintaining agency
Bar width is total centerline miles inside the Blue Line. The darker portion is paved, the ochre portion unpaved.
How much of it runs across state land
Public road crossing DEC land
Of the 5,529 miles of public road, 645 cross the 2.66 million acres of Forest Preserve and other DEC holdings inside the Park. 279 of those miles are unpaved.
Public road on conservation easements
Working-forest land the state bought development rights to. The public road crossing it is counted here; the logging roads on it are not, because they are not public roads.
DEC’s own roads on state land
DEC separately maps 216 miles of road it manages, 180 of that classed as Forest Preserve Road. None of this is in the NYSDOT file — it is a wholly separate count.
Public road not on state land
The remainder runs across private land, village lots, farm country and the hamlets. The Park is half private, and its road network is more than that.
Logging roads, camp roads, and everything off the books
NYSDOT only counts public road. To see the rest I ran a second, independent pass over OpenStreetMap, which is edited by people who drive these roads.
OSM has 11,205 miles of drivable way inside the Blue Line — more than double the public inventory. The gap, about 5,700 miles, is driveways, camp roads, hauling roads and gated woods roads. Within that, 2,249 miles are tagged track: the unpaved forest-road class that captures most logging roads.
Tracks on private land
Almost all of this is active or abandoned logging road on timber company and private holdings. It is the closest thing to an answer on unpaved logging road mileage, and it is a floor, not a total — OSM has no obligation to map a gated haul road.
Tracks on conservation easements
The easement lands are where public access and working forestry overlap, so this is the mileage most likely to be a logging road you are legally allowed to walk or ride.
Tracks on Forest Preserve
Old truck trails, administrative roads and grown-in haul roads on state land. Compare with DEC’s own 216-mile figure: the difference is roughly the mileage that exists on the ground but not in DEC’s current road layer.
Twelve counties, the Blue Line portion only
These are the miles inside the Park boundary, not whole-county totals. Hamilton is the only county wholly inside, so only Hamilton’s row is also its full county figure.
| County | Total | Paved | Unpaved | % unpaved | NYSDOT | County | Town / vil. | Other | Surface |
|---|
All 123 municipalities with road inside the Park
The last column is the whole-municipality total, Blue Line ignored. Forty-three of these towns straddle the boundary, so for those two the numbers differ — and the whole-town figure is the one a highway superintendent would recognize as their network.
| Municipality | In park | Paved | Unpaved | % unpaved | NYSDOT | County | Town / vil. | Whole town | Surface |
|---|
All figures in centerline miles. (V) is a village, (C) a city; everything else is a town.
Roads on the map that are not on the ground
There is no systematic re-survey after a blowdown. Nothing in New York requires DEC or NYSDOT to walk a road after a storm and retire it from the map, so the 1995 derecho, the 1950 blowdown and forty years of deferred upkeep are all still carried forward in the layers. The published maps are legal and administrative records first, and a record of what is passable second.
The state file does leave a fingerprint, though. Inside the Blue Line it carries 90 miles marked “Public – Unclaimed” — public road that no agency has stepped forward to maintain — and another 51 miles flagged “Private or Restricted Access.” That is not the same as impassable, but it is the closest thing the inventory has to an admission that a line on the map has no highway department behind it.
The 300-mile gap between OSM’s 514 miles of track on Forest Preserve and DEC’s 216-mile road layer runs the other direction: routes people are demonstrably still driving or walking that DEC does not carry as roads. Between the two errors, the only inventory that self-corrects is the crowdsourced one, because someone has to fail to get through before the map changes.
How these numbers were made
Everything was clipped to DEC’s official Park boundary polygon and measured in UTM zone 18N, where scale error across the Park stays under a tenth of a percent. Divided highways are inventoried once per direction, so the second carriageway was dropped before centerline miles were summed, and ramps counted apart.
NYSDOT Roadway Inventory
57,617 segments pulled for the twelve Adirondack counties, 11,352 of them inside the Blue Line. Carries pavement type, maintenance jurisdiction, municipality and county per segment.
The check that matters
Hamilton County lies wholly inside the Park, so its computed total must equal its published one. County roads came out at 93.5 miles against NYSDOT’s published 93.5; town and village roads 181.5 against 181.2. Geometry lengths ran 98% of the inventory’s own measured mileage across all 57,617 segments.
OpenStreetMap
The Geofabrik New York extract, clipped to the Blue Line: 36,285 ways, 11,205 miles of them drivable. Used for the private and unmaintained network the state file does not cover. Surface tags exist on only about a third of segments, so OSM was not used for the paved/unpaved split.
DEC land and road layers
DECinfo Locator: 1,610 state land polygons (2.66M acres in the Park, against DEC’s published ~2.6M), 87 easement tracts, and the DEC road layer. The Blue Line polygon measures 5.82M acres here against the traditional 6.0M figure.
Cross-reference
NYSDOT’s Highway Mileage Report publishes centerline miles by municipality and jurisdiction for the whole state, updated annually. It is the document to hand a town supervisor — it just has no idea where the Blue Line is.
Boundaries
Census TIGER 2024 county subdivisions for town and village geometry, DEC’s Adirondack Park Boundary layer for the Blue Line itself.