GPS may help avoid collisions

location based services


GPS technology may soon help drivers avoid hitting animals on the highway.
UNBC researcher Roy Rea has partnered with ICBC, the B.C. Conservation Foundation's wildlife collision prevention program and Excel Transportation to track animal sightings on Highways 16 and 97.
Ten trucks hauling goods from Prince George to Vanderhoof, Mackenzie, McBride and Quesnel have been fitted with customized GPS devices, Rea explained.
When the trucker sees a deer or moose -alive or dead - on the side of the road, he or she hits a button the device logs the time, species and location of the sighting.
"With the mountain pine beetle and logging, animals are changing the way they're moving across the landscape," Rea said.
"What this new device does is give us real-time data of where the animals are now."
For the last 25 years, the Ministry of Transportation has collected animal bodies from the side of the road and used that data to determine high-risk collision areas, Rea said.
"The problem with carcass counts is often an animal wanders off into the woods before dying.
[And] that data only gets recorded if that [animal] corpse is a danger to the motoring public -bodies in the ditch aren't counted," Rea said.
"You've got a lot of bias in the data."
Corpse counts also don't record the time of the collision, he said. If the animal body is eaten by scavengers or covered in snow it may never be spotted, Rea added.
Animal collision statistics gathered by ICBC often provide accurate times of collisions, but are vague on location, Rea said. Neither method counts the animals nobody hits, he said.
"We may see deer along a straight stretch day after day but nobody hits them because people can see them and have time to slow down," Rea said.
The objective is to pinpoint the months, times and locations where animals are crossing highways and inform the public, he said.
"We're not trying to identify where animals are for the truckers - the reality is if they hit an animal they're likely going to be fine," Rea said.
"The data these truckers are collecting for us is to try and prevent that family in the mini-van behind the truck from hitting the animal."
If the pilot project proves successful, the $200 units could be installed in trucks throughout the province, Rea said.
"What's really neat about these gizmos is they could be fashioned to share information on a peer-to-peer basis," he added.
If someone with one of the units saw an animal and logged it, the system would alert other drivers in the area, Rea explained. Rea said the idea came from a brainstorming session he and colleague Dexter Hodder had while driving home from Banff.
"Nothing like this has been done before," B.C. Conservation Foundation spokesperson Gayle Hesse said.
"Provincially we estimate there is around 19,000 large animals killed [in collisions] a year.
More animals are lost to collisions than are killed by hunters."
A large animal means anything larger than a porcupine, predominantly deer and moose. In the north, 75 per cent of animals hit are deer and 20 per cent are moose, Hesse said.
"Moose collisions are really significant because there is a higher chance of serious injuries or fatalities," Hesse said.
"Only 30 per cent of animal collisions happen in the north, but 50 per cent of ICBC costs are incurred here.