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Page 12 - வர்ஜீனியா துறை ஆஃப் மோட்டார் வாகனங்கள் News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

CASEY: As 2020 drew to a close, the Blue Ridge Parkway lost a lot of Friends

Once upon a time, there was an organization known as Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Over the course of 32 years, the nonprofit group raised funds to support maintenance and beautification efforts along its 469-mile-long namesake. The parkway is often cited as America’s most-visited national park. In some of those years, the group raised millions of dollars, according to its tax returns. Even more importantly, the organization annually fielded and organized thousands of hours of labor by do-gooding volunteers. On parkway property, they picked up trash, created and maintained hiking trails, planted viewshed-protecting trees and much more. In 2019 Friends volunteers contributed 13,444 hours of labor. In 2020, which was impacted by the pandemic, it was 9,574 hours.

Editorial: We have to curb the need for speed — for highway safety, and for our planet

The year 2020 will go down as historic for a lot of reasons. Less traffic on our roads was one of them. The COVID-19 pandemic shattered the norms of how we move as a society on a day-to-day basis. Fewer cars in use led to declines in congestion and improvements in air quality, two things that we clearly have been — and should be — striving for. “The longtime goals of reducing the number of cars on the roads and unacceptable levels of air pollution [were] achieved in a few weeks,” said Claudia Adriazola-Steil, director of health and road safety at the World Resources Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, in a June 2020 New York Times report. “You can see the Himalayan blue skies for the first time in 25 years.”

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