Deer crashes perplex road operators - mixed results with high-tech devices (ADDITIONS)

A couple of weeks back at around 11:20pm on a Saturday night a Canadian died on the Maine Turnpike near York when the car he was traveling in hit a moose, rolled several times and came to rest against a roadside tree. The dead man was in the right passenger seat. The driver sustained serious head injuries too. But a second passenger, a woman in a back seat, got minor scrapes and bruises.

It is dangerous to be in the front seats of a car in moose country.

A male moose stands 2m (7ft) tall and weighs half a ton (1100pds). That's a quarter to a third of the mass of a passenger car. It is the biggest of the deer family in north America and therefore the most dangerous to motorists in collisions.

Says Wikipedia: "A moose's body structure, with a large heavy body suspended on long spindly legs, makes these animals particularly dangerous when hit by passenger cars with low ground clearances. Generally, when colliding with a moose at high speed, the car's bumper and front grille will break the moose's legs, causing the body of the moose to fly up and over the car's hood and deliver the bulk of the animal's weight into the windshield, crushing the front roof support beams and anyone in the front seats. Collisions of this type are frequently lethal; seatbelts offer no protection, and airbags may not deploy or be of much use if they do."

In moose-dense regions such as New Brunswick, Canada major roads often have heavy duty moose fences to prevent collisions by attempting to keep moose off the roads. But these are expensive to build and maintain, and hardly justified elsewhere. Fortunately for American motorists moose are pretty much confined to Canada and a couple of adjacent US states like Maine. The Canadian moose population has been put at 900k and the American 100k.

Man-sized deer the real menace

The real deer hazard on American roads is from the moderate sized deer like the white-tailed deer. Their numbers are huge - 20 to 30 million - and growing with habitat preservation and the longterm trend to reduction in agricultural land.

These common deer are similar in body mass to humans (40kg to 125kg, 100pd to 275pd) or between a tenth and a 20th of the mass of a car.

So these deer almost always come off worst in collisions and they pose no danger to the passenger space of the car and little crushing threat to passengers.

Insurance industry estimators are that there are 1.6m deer/car collisions each year in the US with most of the deer, perhaps a million, getting killed, versus about 150 humans killed in those collisions. That's 10,000 deer collisions per human fatality.

But they say there are thousands of human injuries, and hundreds of thousands of cases of vehicle damage in deer/car collisions. The average deer collision claim of $3,000 multiplies up to total costs of $4 to $5 billion/year. Plus the psychic costs of accidentally killing and maiming animals.

Road operators have the costs of responding to deer collisions, and cleanup.

A number are using some high technology to attempt to reduce deer collisions.

DeerDeter - how much does it deter?

A system from JAFA Technologies partnered with the Austrian firm IPTE reports success with a roadside system called DeerDeter.

It uses a light sensor to detect approaching vehicle headlights. This will trigger deer-frightening sounds and strobe lights that give deer the impression of movement. The effect can be tuned to to discourage any deer from crossing while there are vehicles in the vicinity.

Cost

DeerDeter units are not very expensive - MSRP is $150 each. At 70/mile that's about $10k/mile ($6k/km).

The unit is autonomous: "Install it and walk away just returning every now and then to make sure it hasn't been run over or snow plowed," says JAFA's Ed Mulka. 

Power comes a lithium battery with a solar-powered charging system. 

Mulka says he has a leg up on the competition with a power management system.

"The concept of a roadside device is not new, but up until now one had to revisit on a regular basis to change batteries - sometimes every two weeks or so.  We believe our unit will continue to function for five years or more without any maintenance - including battery replacement.  A few hours of charging is enough for the battery to function literally for
months."

Major success is claimed in Austria where around 4,000 of the IPTE devices have been deployed, and over 20,000 competing products from two other suppliers. Some of these go back ten years or more.

Results positive in Austria, NJ

They claim dramatic reductions of collisions in Austria. (see graph nearby)

Utah DOT and Essex County NJ have been major US purchasers, with positive results reported also - major reductions in deer-vehicle collisions.  Essex County is making new purchases so pleased are they about the results.

Toller has less success

The only toll operator we know to deploy DeerDeter is E470 in Denver Colorado - 200 units in a troublesome six mile (10km) stretch of their 47 mile (76km) tollroad that constitutes a half belt route around the eastern portion of the Denver area. That was in 2006.

There experience is discouraging.

Jo Snell official spokesman at the E-470 Public Highway Authority:

"Although the deer deterrent devices had some positive effects in keeping deer from crossing the highway (mostly at night), we have seen an increase in deer hits.  The devices seem to have changed the movement pattern of the deer and instead of them getting hit often at night, they
are getting hit during the day.  We have no plans to install additional devices on the highway."

Before and after data for deer hits on the highway are:

No DeerDeter:
2002:  25
2003:  20
2004:  35
2005:  38

With DeerDeter:
2006:  38
2007:  47
2008:  65
2009:  52
To date 2010:  37

Ed Mulka principal at JAFA Technologies says:

"The devices do not change the natural habits of deer. They don't force them to travel more during the day.  The device only affects the animal's behavior when it nears the road at night and only if a car approaches."

He says something else is making the E-470 deer move from their daytime bedding/feeding areas to the roadway during the day. He speculates that recent construction may have interrupted their former migration paths, there may have been increases in deer population, new sources of food, or perhaps more predators forcing them to move.

Mulka also says he supplied 210 DeerDeter units to E-470 which at a recommended 50 yards (40m) apart is about sufficient for 3 miles (5km). If they are spread out over twice that distance they could be spread too thin.

CONCLUSIONS: It seems the devices are no panacea. They can certainly help in reducing night collisions, but they are no use in the daytime.

Before-&-after comparisons - apparently favorable and apparently unfavorable - have serious limitations because they rarely control for other things that are changing.

The high-tech gear needs to be supported by hunting programs to control deer numbers. Deer are notoriously prolific breeders, capable of doubling their population every two years - meaning that a pair can breed up to 32 in ten years and over a thousand in 20 years.

Deer herds need to be actively managed around urban areas based on an understanding of their local habitat - where they are safe, where their feed is located and their likely migration patterns. In some places fencing and other expensive features like wildlife underpasses may be needed.

http://jafatech.com/index.htm

Ed Mulka comments after publication:

"I agree 100% that our solution, or anyone else's for that matter, is a no panacea to this problem. 

"There are too many deer - in some areas twice as many as when the pilgrims landed and the number continues to increase each year.  At the same time traffic increases at an ever growing rate.  The number of hunters decreases, but I'm not sure how
relevant that is since the money generated from licenses and tags all goes to increasing the herd size.

"It is difficult to actually determine the real number of Deer-Vehicle Collisions (DVC) each year.  Some estimate that it is as many as 1.5m, but we think it is even more.  We managed to get a hold of some data from PA that suggests that it could be as many as 750K in that state alone - and they were number four for total hits last year. 

"It's truly staggering when one considers that there about 750K combined alcohol and weather-related accidents each year - about half as many as the above conservative estimate for DVC.  The difference is that there are tens of thousands fatalities from the former and only about 200 or so from DVC - considerably less, but still
a 100% increase over the last decade.

"The very best solution (most effective) is a tall fence with protected crossings (underpasses) to which the animals are funneled.  This is great for limited accesses highways like a turnpike and might even be the most cost effective approach, but it doesn't fare well in rural areas with one-mile square plots of farm land.

It's a multifaceted problem and needs to be approached from more than one angle."

TOLLROADSnews 2010-08-12, ADDITIONS 2010-08-14 11:30