More wildlife getting helped across the highway

Beginning in the ’90s, federal highway spending bills earmarked funds for environmental mitigation, Clevenger said. Incorporating wildlife crossings in their highway plans has “basically given the (states) the opportunity to tap into that money. … So that’s really gotten a lot of states thinking about building them and then building them.”

One of those states is Washington, where environmental studies of the I-90 project have yielded three options for wildlife crossings that have now been put out to gather public comment.

When it comes to wildlife crossing projects, “obviously, right now the showcase is Banff,” says Defenders of Wildlife’s White, but “when I look at the plans for Washington, if they go with the best scenario there, it’s going to be the best thing we have in North America.”

The Highway 93 project in Montana deserves a nod for “the most progressive … in terms of the number of miles and the number of crossings,” says Hilty of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

But Washington, with a range of $20 million to $113 million, is the big bucks entry in the current crossing sweepstakes. I-90 project engineer Randy Giles acknowledges that, under some scenarios, the cost of providing the 14 animal passageways in the Cascades could account for more than a third of the tab for the whole project, expected to run from $311 million to $728 million.

Is that expense a gamble, given the uncertainty over how well the crossings provide connectivity, a “controversial issue” squarely addressed in environmental planning documents for the project?

“We know that we can connect habitats,” says Giles. “What’s hard to do is quantify them and say, ‘Well, triple the amount of elk crossed at this place.’

“I wouldn’t say it’s a dice-roll.”

Anthony P. Clevenger / Western Transportation Institute A grizzly bear crosses one of the Banff overpasses.

Environmentalists are quick to agree.

Charlie Raines, the director of the I-90 Wildlife Bridges Coalition, an umbrella group formed to push for the “highest standard” of wildlife passages across the revamped mountain freeway, points out that it runs like a belt over the 35-mile waist that joins Washington’s North and South Cascades. “This is the place they’ve got to move through,” he says of the elk, deer, foxes and other species that call Snoqualmie Pass home. Widened to six lanes, the interstate is “going to be impassable for most species” without crossing structures.

Raines and Giles also consider the I-90 project a good example of a new spirit of cooperation between traditional foes in the road-building and tree-hugging camps.

Seeing that highway engineers had “made wildlife crossings a goal of the project, we said, ‘OK, we’ll go along with expanding it to six lanes,’” Raines says. In the past, the opening gambit of the Sierra Club, for which Raines also works, and other environmental organizations would have been to oppose any expansion. He says that accepting the wider road “had a lot of heartburn” for many in the environmental camp, but they were persuaded to go along in exchange for a top-notch wildlife crossing plan.

Raines allows that “we won’t know whether our approach is going to work until next year,” when the final crossing plan is adopted, but “it’s how you do business in the modern world.”

The trump card of human safety
And if Joe Taxpayer is not impressed by images of critters bounding blissfully through natural passageways over and under the freeway, engineers and environmentalists are both quick to throw a trump card on the table.

Animals on the asphalt are “a human threat as well as a wildlife threat,” says Hilty.

“We may not know everything about the movement of wildlife,” Raines adds, but “we do know what happens when a car hits a deer or an elk.”

Indeed, the National Safety Council says there were 750,000 animal-vehicle collisions in 2000 alone, resulting in 120 human fatalities.

Just a few miles west of the I-90 project area, four people were killed and a fifth critically injured when their car slammed into an elk as it tried to cross the freeway on an early June morning a year ago.

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