As long as there are highways and wildlife, there will be roadkill. Highways are dangerous barriers for all sorts of wildlife. Therefore, all around the world, local infrastructure planners are increasingly adopting a technique to reduce collisions and make it easier for animals to migrate, mate, eat, and survive: wildlife overpasses. Animal crossings are popular all over Europe, with the first crossing originating from France in the 1950s. They are designed to help animals travel safely under and over busy highways, and engineers try to blend them in with nature, increasing the likelihood that animals will use them. If significantly invested in, wildlife under- and overpasses greatly reduce collisions on the highways, save animals and reduce the financial burden to humans. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that in the United States, about two hundred people die in over one million car collisions every year, and these numbers are on the rise. Rob Ament, the road ecology program manager at the Western Transportation Institute (WTI) at Montana State University says that over the most recently reported 15-year period, wildlife-vehicle collisions have increased by 50 percent, with an estimated one to two million large animals killed by motorists every […]
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