Traffic Mortality, Analysis And Mitigation

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the impact of transportation on wildlife. Measures are frequently applied to mitigate these impacts. Most measures involve technical devices that change the road characteristics. However, also other measures may reduce traffic mortality, such as reduction of traffic volume or speed, and periodic closing of roads. For effectively applying these mitigating measures, insight in the effects of road and traffic characteristics on traffic mortality is needed. We argue that the success of measures that mitigate habitat fragmentation by roads drastically increases when minor roads are integrated in transportation planning. We discuss a strategy based on the concept “traffic-calmed rural areas”, where the effects of minor and major roads are not mitigated separately, but in coherence. To enable transportation planning to include the impacts on wildlife in the planning process, we present a traversability model derived from traffic flow theory that can be used to determine the probability of successful road crossings of animals based on the relevant road, traffic, vehicle and species characteristics. We apply this model in a case study in The Netherlands to evaluate different scenarios. Several levels of traffic calming are compared with the autonomous development, which shows that traffic calming can drastically reduce traffic mortality.