Chauffer brags about not having an accident. But it’s a reminder about how all of these systems around roads also had to be invented and learned. Animals have never even been given an option other than darting across.
August 1925: Man fined for not helping dog he hit
November 1925: Deer confused by lights. Venison given to prison.
August 1926: …a strange example of the variety of ways in which the complexities of man’s civilization may be dangerous and destructive to wild life…” Ice cream trucks leak, causing deer to lick spillage in middle of the road and be killed be a vehicle
May 1926: Boy is walking his bull, which was taunted and then charges a car three times.
November 1926: Deer is confused by headlight, upsets machine
December 1926:“The buck, in the fresh bloom of animal youth and weighing nearly 200 pounds, in settling its destiny, almost ruined the plans of three persons…” Very poetic telling throughout
December 1926: Driver is stunned; deer’s neck was broken.
Conflict between animal mobility and automobility
“Early roadkill mitigation techniques prioritized the hardening of the highway, an attempt to make the highway as uninviting to animal mobility as possible.”(from Abstract)
What I learned from my user journey experiments was to think about what is impossible more than what is inviting or uninviting. When we aimed to make something uninviting, we didn’t make it impossible. We also didn’t give animals a pathway to something that is possible.
“As far back as the 1960s, when road-killed numbers began their climb up the steep side of a J curve, the Humane Society noted that an average of one million vertebrates were killed every day.5 These numbers have only recently attracted national attention; a 2008 report to Congress notes that between one and two million deer and approximately two hundred people are killed every year. The au thors suggest that the total estimated cost of these collisions amounts to $8,388,000,000.(Footnote 6)”(Kroll 4)
Documentation
History of Roadkill Research
NYTimes History
Gary Kroll