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I-90 Wildlife Bridges Coalition

Considering the Cost of Roadkill
by Erika Teschke.

It was in June of this year that a car traveling to Seattle on I-90 struck an elk as it crossed the highway. The impact caused the Honda Accord to plunge off an embankment, killing four of the five people in the car. The fifth was critically injured. This wreck ranks among the most deadly single-car accidents in Washington State’s history.

	Photo Credit: Restore the Rockies Alliance

And what is the cost of all of these accidents? Insurance companies have departments dedicated to figuring the worth of a human life and the risks associated with driving a car. Those risks are given a monetary value and are folded into the cost of your insurance bill. In 2001-2002, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that about 200 people per year die in animal/vehicle related crashes. (4) Using figures arrived at by the education arm of the insurance industry, we find that these 200 deaths can amount to $160,757,600.00 worth of human life. (5) That is over 160 million dollars a year lost because 200 people die on our highways due to a collision with an animal.

The costs don’t stop adding up with just fatalities. With more cars on the highway and collisions with animals on the rise, the cost of vehicle repairs parallel these two upward trends. It is estimated that in 2004 we will spend $1.5 billion on deer/vehicle crash related car repairs (numbers adjusted for inflation). (6) This billion and a half dollars doesn’t account for the cost of repairs to vehicles that hit an animal other than a deer.

Dead animals by the side of the road cost taxpayers as well. Expired deer and elk on the side of the highway pose a hazard to drivers and it is the responsibility of the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to clean them up. The state agency spends $620,000 a year doing just that. This is a full 20% of their $3.1 million/year litter clean-up budget. In the I-90 Wildlife Bridges project area, mile post 55 -70, WSDOT had plenty to keep them busy. Between the years 1998 and 2002, they cleaned up 77 carcasses, an average of one carcass for every mile in the project area.

All of the above discussed numbers demonstrate that having wildlife mitigation measures addressed along the I-90 Wildlife Bridges project area could only benefit Washington State taxpayers. Animal/vehicle collisions are expensive for all of us. Whether it is in the direct cost of car repairs, injuries or by taking the life of someone we know or indirectly with an increase in insurance premiums or with our tax dollars paying for road side clean-up. By building structures that allow the deer, elk, bobcats, bear etc. to pass over or under I-90, we will greatly reduce the possibility that drivers along the route will collide with them on the highway. With properly placed fencing funneling animals to these mitigation structures we could avoid having another disaster like the one back in June involving the elk and the Honda Accord.



Footnotes

1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Nonfatal Motor-Vehicle Animal Crash-Related Injuries-United States, 2001-2002,” MMWR 2004; 53: 675-678.

2 WSDOT, Collision Data and Analysis, Transportation Data Office.

3 Romin, LA & JA Bissonette. 1996a. “Deer-Vehicle collisions: Status of state monitoring activities and mitigation efforts,” Wildlife Society Bulletin 24(2): 276-83.

4 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Fatality analysis reporting system data file, 2001-2002. Available at www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov.

5 The value of a human life is nearly impossible to determine. However, this figure was arrived at using the very conservative Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education’s 9/15/04 study which estimates the average value of a human life at $803,788.00. http://www.life-line.org/press.html

6 Conover, MR, et al. 1995. “Review of human injuries, illnesses and economic losses caused by wildlife in the US,” Wildlife Society Bulletin 23: 407-14.