Wide overpasses are good[0], this isn't the world's largest (the Ecoducts in the Netherlands average 50m wide, and the longest is 800m), nor North America's largest (many in Banff National park are 50m+ wide)... but then there's nothing on the linked page that claims that (title: 101 Wildlife Crossing, h1.. well there's multiple [seo fail], but the first non-navigation one is: The Wallis Annenberg [which is a terrible title])
The 800m crossing in the Netherlands isn't really an 800m long bridge. The span over the roadway and railway looks considerably smaller than most wildlife crossings I've seen on interstates in the United States. Measuring on Google Maps, I needed to include the golf course in the crossing just to get anywhere close to 800m.
There's one in Brisbane, Aus near where I live. Lots of big roads and motorways carve up remnant bushland and a few of those roads now have wildlife underpasses and/or overpasses for animals.
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.
Construction on “the world’s largest wildlife crossing” will close a portion of the Los Angeles County’s 101 Freeway overnight on weekdays for several weeks starting Monday.
“Construction on ‘the world’s largest wildlife crossing’ will close a portion of the Los Angeles County’s 101 Freeway overnight on weekdays for several weeks starting Monday.
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.”
It's just a bridge for animals? Or a tunnel for humans, depending on how you look at it.
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:
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?
Everything takes forever in the US now, and California especially. We built an entire interstate highway system in the 50s in the same amount of time it takes us now to build 10 miles of carpool lane in LA.
In LA only half that planned system was built due to protests over how it was planned to be built (eminent domain through populated neighborhoods). So even back then, it is false to say these things were easy, they ran out of political will within a few years of construction.
How expensive are environmental reviews? Is it a purely on paper/surveying exercise, that doesn't require any construction to happen first?
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.
"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.”
_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.
Its a amazing how costly these are, rebuilding an entire mountainside basically and terraforming it. Then you will see videos of animals using cheap wooden human bridges all the time. Animals are smarter than we think, they understand how bridges and underpasses work already. You probably don’t need to make a man made mountain, although I’m sure the contractors involved aren’t interested on a study comparing their solution to something cheaper where they wouldn’t be supremely qualified to build.
My guess is that the web developer skills needed to build this website and the rail building skills needed to build high speed rail are highly orthogonal. Plus their project isn’t high speed rail, or rail at all as far as I can tell. Do you mean “building [one] actual mile of animal crossing” maybe?
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9753749/