Who doesn’t love seeing animals on the side of the road?

Unfortunately, it’s often because they’re trying to cross to get to their natural mating or foraging grounds or even continue on a longer migration.

These encounters between animals and vehicles can be deadly to all involved. The problem isn’t likely to go away anytime soon as the country’s population, towns, and cities grow. What were once forests and fields are now large suburbs connected by all the infrastructure humans need, including ever-bigger roads.

According to the Insurance Information Institute, millions of wildlife collisions are reported on the country’s roads every year. But that’s just what is reported to insurance companies. The number of small creatures killed, like reptiles, birds, and small mammals, is thought to be as high as 350 million per year, according to some estimates.

The larger collisions result in tens of thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths to people. The number of collisions increases by about 7,000 annually.

Hoping to slow the problem, Congress set aside $350 million of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure ill passed in November 2021 to fix it.

The answer is animal crossings. The idea originated in France in the 1950s and quickly spread around Europe. The first U.S. animal crossing was built over an interstate in Utah in 1975. Other states were slow to catch on until a tunnel for frogs was built in Davis, California, in 1990.

There are now 1,500 crossings around the country, helping anything from panthers and alligators to moose and tortoises avoid being hit. The crossings reduce collisions by as much as 83%, according to one study by the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis.

But it’s not just a case of building a bridge across a road and hoping the animal will work it out. It requires extensive scientific research to make sure the crossings go in the right place. Some may even be large underpasses or small tunnels.

Scientists also have to get the animals to use the crossings and ensure that predators don’t discover it’s a good place to find an easy meal. While these crossings may sound like cutesy or unnecessary accommodations for animals, they are becoming increasingly important as humans multiply and spread into the habitats of America’s wildlife.

Reckon spoke with Dr. Nicki Frey, an associate extension professor of wildlife biology at Southern Utah University, where she specializes in human-wildlife conflicts.

Can you tell me a little bit about why we need animal crossings and the $350 million initiative the government is promoting?

The government is focusing the money on this issue because of the increase in wildlife-vehicle collisions every year. We have more people and there’s more suburbia where roads are bisecting wildlife habitat, increasing the number of animals killed annually.

One example is the Liberty Canyon Overpass in California. It will be the largest overpass in North America and cost about $90 million, but the benefits will far outweigh the costs.

How many collisions are there every year?

We’re closer to about two million a year. Those are usually just the larger-bodied animals, the ones that folks make insurance claims on. So you have to consider that it doesn’t include the frogs, the snakes, the squirrels, and those animals that don’t get reported.

They’re not going to report it unless there’s some sort of property damage to their vehicle.

It sounds like this data is coming from insurance claims.

All these estimates are coming from insurance claims. We get the annual reports that say how many claims were made each year and how much they cost. It’s costing about $8 billion a year, but that’s just property damage.

Wildlife also has a cost estimate associated with it, especially if it’s a game species that may be hunted. We usually say that elk, deer and moose are worth about $2,000 a piece. There are about a million deer collisions each year, so we’re looking at about $2 billion in damages.

Are there any hotspots we should be aware of?

In every state, there is a hotspot where there are roads bisecting with wildlife.

There are hotbed locations when a migration route requires an animal to cross a road to reach the spring habitat and then cross that road again to reach the winter habitat.

A whole population of wildlife repeatedly does that, mostly when we have roads bisecting a migration route. That’s a massive problem for humans and for the health of that wildlife population. There are important migration routes for species in nearly every state.

In Alaska or Maine, moose are trying to migrate. In Wyoming and Colorado, there are huge pronghorn antelope migrations. In the Rocky Mountains, we’re dealing with elk, deer, and bighorn sheep.

Billions are spent building more roads nationwide with a few animal crossings thrown in. It feels like the solution will never catch up to the problem.

Can we really keep going like this at the expense of animals and people?

That’s a really good point. We can’t just keep expanding and instead start being more strategic.

We’re starting to look more closely at how wildlife moves and lives. We have so much better technology with GPS transmitters that we can put on wildlife, giving us a really in-depth hour-by-hour look at how some of these animals are moving through the landscape.

I just finished working with a student on a project in Alaska. They’re looking at how moose use the landscape and encounter roads of different sizes. They can use that information for future road planning.

Maybe in the future, we can modify where we put roads, knowing where the animals tend to want to be or where we tend to have the most conflict areas. Or can we just avoid putting a road there altogether?

Teams of biologists and transportation companies are meeting together more and more often to actually figure that out so that we don’t have to fix the problem.

Are the opinions of scientists like yourself ever ignored because the government just wants to get the project done with minimal fuss?

Yes, of course. With wildlife-vehicle collisions, there’s so much physical cost, and then what I would call decreased opportunity cost in that if you create these overpasses, you’re talking about 15-25 years of reduced conflicts. It’s an easy sell in that respect. Even if they’re putting a highway someplace that we don’t think is the best idea, they can work with the scientists. We have the knowledge to say, “Okay, if you have to put it here, let’s go ahead and make it friendly towards wildlife.”Let’s figure out what we need to do ahead of time to minimize the conflict so that we don’t have to go back in 15 years and spend $25 billion to retrofit.

Fewer collisions sound like a mutually beneficial thing, given what we all know about politics, money, and business. If it’s good for insurance companies, it’ll no doubt get done.

You know, it only takes one special person to get into a vehicle collision before they realize, hey, this is actually serious.

You said earlier that planners try to put the crossings in places where animal activity is detected. Is there a process of trying to convince animals to use it?

It’s actually a stepwise process. The Department of Transportation records every single collision. In Utah, we have people who drive the roads just to record these collisions.

And even the smaller bodies, collisions, like porcupines or raccoons, can get recorded. Once they notice the hotspots, then they can bring in the biologists and the Department of Transportation experts. We look at what species are involved, what their habitat needs are and why they may be crossing the road. Is it a seasonal thing, or is it a daily thing?

From there, we bring in architects, engineers, and people who understand landscape ecology, like topography and hydrology and all of that. And they can actually figure out where to put this overpass or underpass in the landscape so that it’s more natural to the animal.

We definitely want something that flows into the environment and that the animal could come to naturally. But just in case, they also usually put a couple of miles of fencing on either side of the entrance, so that if an animal is going to cross a road and sees the fence, it knows it can’t cross, and it just sort of naturally follows that fence line until it finds the underpass or the overpass and feeds itself through.

In a lot of the newer roads, they’ll actually put two or three wildlife crossing structures in a row spaced out in the target area, so that there’s more opportunity for the animal to come to a fence and then whether it turns left or right, it’s going to come to that crossing.

Are different species attracted to different structures or landscapes?

They have ways to make it more natural for particular species. They can clear vegetation, add rocks, or take away rocks; they can make [an] overpass or underpass look natural to the animal.

When it comes to preyed species, they’re worried that they’re going to come to a predator, especially if they’re going through an underpass. They don’t know what’s waiting for them on the other side. But we know how wide we need to make that underpass. So when a deer looks through it, it says, Oh, this looks like a safe spot. I can cross here, and a lion isn’t going to eat me.

In the most recent crossing structure that I studied, collisions decreased by upwards of 77% within the first year.