The federal government announced about $110 million in funding for 19 wildlife crossings in 17 states and four Native American tribes on Tuesday.
The projects include a crossing between state lands over a major Southern California freeway, a wildlife overpass across a six-lane Colorado highway and nearly 17 miles of new infrastructure along an Arizona highway, all with the hopes of cutting down collisions between drivers and wildlife.
The grants are part of the Federal Highway Administration’s Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, created through the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The Department of Transportation will make $350 million available over five years, including this round of grants.
“This is not just the right thing to do ecologically, but this is also something that touches the core mission of our department, which is safety,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg told Spectrum News. “We lose hundreds of lives, thousands of injuries and billions of dollars every year in damage, because of wildlife-vehicle collisions. These kinds of investments are going to help us save lives, reduce that damage and — of course — have a big environmental benefit.”
Grants are intended to design and build wildlife overpasses and underpasses spanning roadways, research safety innovations and develop mapping and tracking tools.
The largest projects in this batch of grants will be taking place in Wyoming, Arizona and Colorado, each of which will receive at least $22 million to build overpasses and infrastructure to cut down on crashes along major highway corridors.
In California, an $8 million grant has been approved to connect animal habitats in state park lands on either side of U.S. Highway 101 in and around Goleta, a community west of Santa Barbara. That area, Buttigieg said, sees deer, black bears and mountain lions seeking to cross the road.
“Every one of these projects is a little different, but a lot of them create overpasses or underpasses that just mean that the scenario of an animal-vehicle encounter is less likely,” Buttigieg said. “A lot of drivers won’t even notice that this is there, but it’s making them safer, and it’s improving your commute.”
Southern California is already the future home to what's been billed as one of the largest wildlife crossings in the world — the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, an overpass planned to cross over the 101 in Agoura Hills, Calif., east of the Goleta project. That stretch of road has been known as especially hazardous for mountain lions, while the crossing is famed as the legacy of P-22, Los Angeles' celebrity mountain lion. P-22 was euthanized — and widely mourned — in 2022, following injuries from a suspected collision with a car.
The bulk of projects are going into western states, particularly in rural regions and long stretches of highway running through animal habitats, though grants have also been issued for projects in Pennsylvania and Virginia, for planning efforts and studies on future wildlife crossing projects.
Learning about wildlife patterns and habitats, Buttigieg admits, is not the DOT’s bread and butter.
“But vehicle safety and roadway safety is. So I view this as a new branch on something that has been very core to what we do every day, which is to find new ways to make sure that transportation systems work better for people,” he said. “And in this case, it turns out the right thing to do to make sure they work better for people is also associated with making sure they make more sense for wildlife.”