The Engineering of Wildlife Crossings

practical.engineering

61 points·impish9208··6 comments

I think this is a great effort but I wonder if they could have done something cheaper that can be put in many places. I am not sure how useful one super shiny crossing will be.

Sometimes one giant crossing is better than several-equivalently priced smaller ones, for animal behavior or geography reasons.

Half the ~$100M probably disappears in administrative BS.

Now that they've captured the federal government (re. Trump/Elon bromance), maybe The Boring Company can obtain some national environmental restoration funding and dig a bunch of holes to put the ugly freeways in.

If digging a short tunnel is a repeatable operation free of BS and possible at ~2-3x this cost (~$250M) then it could perhaps be widely replicated to good effect on relatively natural lands adjacent to but outside of core urban areas.

> If digging a short tunnel is a repeatable operation

It is not. Geology and drainage conditions are different at every site, and thus cookie-cutter solutions do not go nearly as far as you would hope.

Hah. As if. They are just going to funnel taxpayer money into private ventures and corruption. Just you wait.

Here's a case when a $660k tunnel didn't work out because it spooked the animals, then the Marines blocked it: https://jesseshunting.com/threads/660-000-wildlife-tunnel-un...

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