The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing
101wildlifecrossing.org
101wildlifecrossing.org
The video does.
Unfortunately new motorways are still being planned and constructed further dividing up bushland and the region keeps sprawling out further with large greenfield developments on farmland and bushland.
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/koalas-...
The crossing will span 10 lanes of highway and aim to provide safe passage for wildlife – especially mountain lions – from the Santa Monica Mountains into the Simi Hills of the Santa Susana mountain range.
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) began constructing the crossing in April 2022, CNN previously reported. As the project nears completion in 2025, the bridge will be covered in soil and native plants to blend in with the natural surroundings.”
*from CNN: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/04/14/us/california-wildlife-cr...
Looking through the FAQ, it's very funny that it began planning in 2016 and completed environmental reviews in 2018, and that the NEPA review got a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI). So its cleared the bar.
...But the whole point of a wildlife crossing is to impact the environment! That's its job! So its kind of amusing it might have needed a "finding of no impact", first.
OK reading around more: I don't get it. Why this website? Why did it take so long to build a bridge? Have they been funding guys playing with LEGOs or is that just a hobby? This news piece they link to says it took the lego guy a year:
https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/environment/2024/03/13/...
that might explain why it takes almost a decade to build a bridge? I'm more confused than when I started. What percent of projects like these is grift?
We don't just go and bulldoze through entire city quarters primarily inhabited by poor Black people any more [1].
[1] https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...
If that's the case, then I can understand environmental reviews taking a long time. Its similar to pre-production in movies/games, where the writing/high level design can take a huge amount of time, and is not accelerated by adding more people, but is also very cheap to do, so companies partition small teams out to constantly be in pre-production.
If that's not the case, then it probably is debilitating to construction work.
How much cost inflation has occurred since this project was initially budgeted? A lot.
Could educate the public about the need to keep spending more solid money on this kind of things.
> Construction will close a portion of the Los Angeles County’s 101 Freeway overnight on weekdays for several weeks starting Monday.
We should cheer that less people will have a car crash against a deer or a puma in the area from now on.
"Data collected from crossing structures with wildlife fencing throughout North America indicate up to an 86-97% DECREASE in wildlife-vehicle collisions upon affected roadways.”
says:
_The Transcontinental Railroad was built by hand_. For the most part all they had were hand tools. There were very few power equipment. The Union Pacific had some steam shovels, but the actual rail, the track laying was done as a hand operation and what you see as a crew when they started building the railroad, they started with a small crew, maybe just a dozen men laying the track. They would take a cart like this out to the end of track. It would be loaded with a row of rails.
On top of that would be ties. They would take it out to the end of track pulled by a horse or a mule. The crew would unload the ties one at a time with two men per tie there to lay those ties down as far as they went and then they would start to take the rails off the car. The one thing that Jack Casement figured out and he applied this first at the Union Pacific, was how to involve more people. In some cases on the Union Pacific, they were laying ties 40 miles ahead of the railroad because in the Union Pacific, the ties were actually to the west of them, so they were bringing them back to the railroad.
Not until I was an adult did I realize how uncommon this idea actually was…
Glad to see more!
For CA HSR, I saw a quote of $200m per mile, but the article is old enough that I imagine the costs have gone up even more in the meantime.