No matter where you live in the U.S., we all face similar dangers on the road, including wild animals running into traffic. New data from State Farm shows there’s a 1-in-145 chance of you hitting an animal.
Among several solutions floated by the insurance giant are wildlife crossings. Those are specially designed bridges to allow animals to safely cross busy roads and highways.
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The U.S. has hundreds of wildlife crossings across the country, but how effective are they really?
Animal collisions
The annual collision odds have improved from the year before. What runs in front of your car depends on where in America you’re driving.
To the east, the biggest issue is clearly deer. As you move west, you start running into elk, bison, coyotes, mountain lions, and more.
“We’ve been doing 20 years of data to show that there’s usually more than a million estimated animal collisions that occur across the country,” Dave Phillips, a spokesperson for State Farm, told Straight Arrow. “At one point, we saw data as high as 2 million.”
The states where you’re most likely to encounter an animal are West Virginia, Montana and Wisconsin. The safest states in the contiguous U.S., according to the data, are Arizona, California and Florida. Pennsylvania has the highest number of estimated industry claims.
Bambi’s mom is the one animal in particular that causes the most damage on the East Coast.
“I’ve seen estimates of whitetail deer in Virginia in the neighborhood of a million,” Clinton Epps, professor in the department of fisheries, wildlife, and conservation sciences at Oregon State University, told Straight Arrow.
Governments have changed decades-old policies to better cull the growing deer population.
Wildlife crossings
Wildlife crossings have become an increasingly popular method to prevent this issue. Does it work?
“If you’re just talking about wildlife vehicle collisions, wildlife crossings are really not a solution,” Fraser Shilling, director of the Road Ecology Center at UC Davis, told Straight Arrow.
You can’t teach wild animals to use the crossings.
The way to get the animals to use them is to put up fencing around the highways, forcing them to find the crossing. And that’s where they become effective. Many interstate systems are fenced to keep deer from wandering into traffic, but fencing all highways would be a herculean task.
“Crossings provide animals a safe way across the highway, and they are important,” Shilling said. “Fencing prevents animals from entering the highway and getting hit. So, if you want to reduce roadkill or wildlife vehicle collisions, then you have to have fencing.”
Epps agreed.
“The combination of the fences and the busy roads actually serves as a barrier to the movement of these animals,” Epps said.
More wildlife crossings tend to come as you move further west in the U.S. Colorado has the most. Part of that is because the further west you go, the bigger the animals get and the bigger threat they become to human life.
“In the East, we’ve already killed off most of our large mammals,” Epps said. “There were bison, there were elk, there were mountain lions, and those animals are largely gone.”
No matter where you go, crossings are expensive. Just take a look at a major one currently being built in California.
Fencing is also expensive, but one is easier to find money for than the other.
“Fencing is not sexy,” Shilling said. “Fencing doesn’t help you raise funding. Fencing doesn’t give you a place to stand when you’re cutting the ribbon.”
Insurance issues
An email chain among experts from across the U.S. obtained by Straight Arrow shows many question the cost benefits of wildlife crossings and whether they really do help deter collisions.
Part of that thread discusses the insurance issues that come along with this, with some experts saying reductions in crashes may actually cause insurance companies to lose premium revenue.
“The number of claims that we settle and handle for our customers go up,” Phillips said. “And if those costs continue to rise, then it can have impact on the premiums.”
Companies are not typically fond of losing money. While State Farm has thrown its support behind this solution, some experts are more skeptical.
“If you reduce the rate of crashes, you’ll reduce the need for premiums or the size of the total premium pool, right?” Shilling said. “You’ll reduce the cost of premiums, and therefore you’re going to reduce the profit of the insurance companies. Incredibly cynical, but makes perfect sense when you think of it through a capitalist lens.”
That’s exactly what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic in California. The state required insurance companies like State Farm to refund drivers because of changes in driving habits.
When it comes to an insurance company helping pay for these expensive animal crossings, Phillips said, “it’s something to consider.”
“It is an industry issue,” he added. “Whether or not the investment becomes research from another third party to help with this or to help invest in measuring the successes of these animal corridors. It’s a responsibility for the industry, not just for State Farm.”
Other solutions
While fencing and wildlife crossings can clearly help reduce these dangerous crashes, other options exist as well.
“One of the most important solutions we looked at was certainly education and awareness,” Phillips said. “Letting people know that there are particular times of the year where your risk intensifies, and that certainly includes the fall timeframe, where we see November being the number one month.”
That especially applies to deer because they are more active at that time due to mating season.
Other solutions State Farm pointed to included better infrastructure and using vehicle technology.
Occasionally, some have pointed to manually moving the animals.
“That’s very expensive,” Epps said. “It’s very interventionist, and budgets are not necessarily going to support that thing. A well-designed crossing structure, hopefully, is a one-time expense, and then relatively low costs after that.”
On average, animal collisions kill 150 people per year, which experts say should have an impact on any proposed solutions.
“Human life is worth quite a bit,” Epps said.
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