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States act on animal-car crashes

An increasing number of human fatalities from collisions with large beasts has stimulated technological imagination, even Senate attention

When some elk amble across U.S. Highway 101 here on the Olympic Peninsula of western Washington, radio collars around their necks set off flashing lights up and down the busy road.

By Blaine Harden
The Washington Post

http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0405040215may04,1,1664608.story?coll=chi-techtopheds-hed

Across the continent, when moose wander out on State Highway 4 in the mountains of western Maine, their hulking bodies break an infrared beam that triggers flashing lights on moose warning signs.

On re-engineered highways between the broadcasting elk and the beam-breaking moose, there are underpasses for tortoises in California, vibration-detectors for deer in Wyoming and a 52-foot-wide overpass for deer, foxes, coyotes and opossums on Interstate Highway 75 in Florida.

At an accelerating pace, federal and state highways across much of the United States are being fitted with critter-crossing technology. It is an attempt to halt a rising tide of human death and roadkill, the grisly result of more cars, more sprawl and a resurgence of large hoofed animals, including deer, elk and, deadliest of all, moose.

The scale of America’s roadkill and highway ecology problem is attracting high-level attention after decades of being ignored by highway engineers and regional planning agencies, said Richard Forman, a professor of ecology at Harvard University.

"We have come a long way since the mid-1990s, when there was a pitiful amount of information," he said. "Thinking about road ecology is now permeating state departments of transportation."

That thinking has also percolated up to Congress. For the first time, the Senate version of a pending transportation bill would require all state transportation departments to consult with fish and game agencies on planning for roads built with federal money.

Moose collisions have become so common in Maine that the state Transportation Department warns that if the beast is unavoidable, drivers should aim for its tail. That reduces the chance of a 1,500-pound antlered ungulate crashing through the windshield.

People are killed or seriously injured in 1 out of 4 of the 700 or so moose-vehicle collisions that have occurred in Maine every year for the past decade. Moose and elk are the most potentially lethal because their height puts most of their body mass higher than the hood of a car. Late spring is high season for these crashes, and Maine had its first fatality of the year last weekend when a motorcyclist died after hitting a moose.

In the past two decades, moose trouble has spread across much of New England. The number of moose killed by cars in Vermont, for example, jumped from two in 1982 to 164 in 2002, according to the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department.

"We have had an explosion of moose in the past decade," said Eugene Dumont, a wildlife biologist for Maine. "Our habitat is conducive to moose, with less farming and more forest. We have more moose per square mile than anywhere else in North America. Combine that with more traffic, and you get more accidents."

Although moose and elk are the deadliest of animals commonly hit on U.S. highways, the country’s primary collision problem is deer.

More than 90 percent of animal-vehicle collisions in the United States involve deer, researchers have found. In 1995, the number of these collisions was estimated at more than 1 million, causing 211 human fatalities, 29,000 injuries and more than $1 billion in property damage.

"All these numbers are now far, far higher than they were in the 1990s," said Bill Reudiger, ecology program leader for highways at the U.S. Forest Service.

It is a twofold problem. First and most obviously, there is what writer John McPhee has described as the "D.O.R." phenomenon, creatures dead on the road after high-speed collisions with vehicles. Second, highways carve up ecosystems, isolating animals and fish in grids that can push some species toward extinction.

Highways are believed to be factors in the decline of bears, lynx, wolves and, in perhaps the best documented case, the Florida panther.

"For the most part, this had always been an afterthought," said Patricia White, director of the habitat and highways campaign for Defenders of Wildlife. "Fish and game experts have traditionally been the last ones to know when a new highway is going through a key wildlife area."

Research has found that flashing animal-warning signs can raise driver awareness and cut reaction time in half, said Marcel Huijser, a research ecologist at Montana State University’s Western Transportation Institute.

In Switzerland, which has had similar warning systems for 11 years, the number of car collisions with deer and wild boar has been cut by 80 percent, Huijser said.

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

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