Access is how humans and animals get in and around a site, particularly in relation to water and activity patterns. Access can often be a restricting factor when selecting appropriate management strategies. Additionally, access routes present huge opportunities for passive water harvesting on- and off-property. While access routes, especially roads, are costly to create or modify, a well-designed and placed access route can result in lower long-term maintenance costs, and efficient movement of people, animals, and materials around a property – while a poorly designed access route can lead to huge erosion issues, extensive maintenance costs (until the route ultimately becomes infeasible to maintain and access is lost), the sacrifice of water harvesting opportunities, and unnecessarily spent energy in trying to move about the property.

Site topography and its resultant influence on the movement of water through and within the site is the primary influencer of access route placement. How water interacts with any access route, be it a hard top road or a deer trail, will determine the route’s long term stability and required level of maintenance. The following list summarizes the rules of thumb for good access design:

• Harmonize with the patterns of water already present in the landscape when planning, installing or remodeling access routes. This will always lead to better performance and lower maintenance costs. Good access at minimum maintains watershed function, and ideally improves it.
• Cross valleys, whenever possible, along dam/pond walls or following contour; traverse a landscape on contour as much as possible; and ascend and descend the landscape along ridge lines (these areas have the least potential to accumulate water in destructive volumes).
• Drain water from access routes as often as possible, and always at first chance and last chance locations. Erosive runoff water should be diverted from the access roads¹ as shallow, non-erosive flow using rolling dips, crowning, cut-off drains, and water bars into passive water harvesting systems such as swales and retention basins.
• Maintain access routes regularly – A stitch in time saves nine.

An incredibly detailed and useful resource for efficient and low-maintenance access road design is the ebook “Water Harvesting from Low-Standard Rural Roads” by Bill Zeedyk. Most if not all of the access design principles discussed within are applicable to all roads, low-standard or not, rural or not.