aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Road kill

An animal lover, in the last couple weeks I’ve hit a deer and a squirrel. I’m hardly alone:

Wildlife-related crashes are a growing problem on rural roads around the country. The accidents increased 50 percent from 1990 to 2004, based on the most recent federal data, according to the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University here.

The basic problem is that rural roads are being traveled by more and more people, many of them living in far-flung subdivisions… Ninety percent of the accidents occur on rural two-lane roads, and the most common animal involved is a deer.

It’s deadly - “the human death toll has risen from 111 in 1995 to around 200 in 2005” - and it’s costly:

The average cost of a deer collision is $8,000, including repair, towing and cleaning up the carcass, while hitting an elk averages $18,000. If the driver strikes a much larger moose, expenses average about $30,000.

The total cost of the accidents to insurance companies exceeds $1 billion a year, the institute estimates. Pennsylvania has the most vehicle-wildlife crashes. Drivers there struck nearly 97,000 deer in the last half of 2005 and first half of 2006, according to estimates by State Farm, the insurance company.