That seems well within reason, an article said about 1 deer collision prevented per day in the spring and fall high season. Having driven through the area and seen dashcam footage of collisions and near collisions, that $7k makes sense to me. I've known several people that have hit deer on the highways here, and I'm actually surprised if anything that the number is that low.

So my gut feeling is that it actually has slightly better returns than expected from those numbers.

The article linked by JKCalhoun lists

  Deer  $6,617
  Elk   $17,483
  Moose $30,760

No more cost plus contracts.

Is that the California high speed rail I see trying to hide in the back?

Don't forget the decades of time it takes to build the tracks.

That’s like one decently sized house with a yard and garage in a good neighborhood in the bay area

Yes, they place these at places where they're needed, the outliers.

It’s not “burn 15M on missiles or spend it inefficiently on infra buildout”. It could also be “spend half as much on efficient infra buildout”

Something like this only costs $15m because the incentives are crap. You know it if you've driven past any road construction project. 90% of the people at any given time are standing around. You have to pay just as much for a person to stand around as you do for them to be doing useful work.

Fixing the incentives is not easy at all. There are a lot of "good reasons" why this happens. Many of them are failures down the line, but no one at the contractor level pays the price for not mitigating them, so they don't. If a truck doesn't arrive on time, you could find something else useful to do, or you could just stand around waiting. If you/your company is paid by the hour, it's more profitable to stand there.

Your company could also charge the trucking company for arriving late, or the concrete plant for making them wait. This is not customary in the industry though.

Suppose you fixed all of this though. For a given number of construction projects, you'd need way less labor. If profits are a percentage of costs, less labor means less profit. Making things more efficient means the construction company has to lay a bunch of people off and make less profit, so their incentive is to convince the government that inflated costs are reasonable.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Laying people off is painful. However, one thing you might do would be to do more work for the same money, or higher quality work for the same money.

Story instead of reddit: https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/largest-wildlife-overp...

No you don't. You only need total costs of accidents before and after this crossing.

I've seen it and a few others on recent road trips.

Additionally, Colorado (and other states) are putting these "animal escape ramps" along the sides of highways.

From what I can gather, a fence runs along the freeway on both sides—presumably to keep the wildlife out. But, I suppose in case an animal makes it into the danger zone, every mile or so there are dirt berms built against the fence that provide a way up and over the fence. Presumably they drop off on the other side so an animal is not as likely to use these in reverse: to get into the danger zone.

Additionally, there are often small partitions at each berm, jutting out from the fence. I imagine an animal following along the fence—when they arrive at the partition, they either go around it and continue, or do the right thing: climb the berm to get to the other side of the fence.

(Apparently called "Jump Outs": https://www.dot.state.wy.us/home/news_info/district_news_inf...)

Surprised it took so long for a car-centric country to get on board with these

We need more of these - for pedestrians!

Practical Engineering has a good video about wildlife crossings (2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mYpQWPtfpo