As expected from the press release at open about 9 months ago. (they estimated 90% reduction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46321557)

The $15M price tag still seems like a lot. Happy for the critters and motorists tho

The ROI is beyond solid. It's actually insane this wasn't done sooner at this location. The normal ROI for a wildlife crossing is 15 years. Here, it's two to three years.

> Cost savings: Each prevented wildlife–vehicle collision can save thousands of dollars—more than $19,000 per deer crash, $73,000 per elk, and $110,000 per moose—in vehicle, injury, and wildlife costs, making well-placed crossings a strong investment [0]

This section of highway had one deer-vehicle collision per day.

365 * $19,000 = $6,935,000 per year.

[0] https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheets/202...

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edit: this post and resulting thread made me realize that "wildlife crossing" sounds far too tree-hugger for our society. They need to rebrand to "obvious money-saving infrastructure," or better.

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.

$15M is less than 4 Patriot PAC-3 MSEs. Which do you prefer your taxes to be spent on?

$15M is dirt cheap for the USA. That buys you like 100 yards of urban light rail or something. :)

Cool - want to suggest changes to the legal code to lower the cost?

Instead of doing that boring thing the unthinking do - I challenge you to ask why 15M seems like a lot.

Is it a lot in comparrison to the costs to the taxpayers for all the emergency crews responding to animal caused accidents over the lifetime of the crossing, not to mention dealing with carcasses of animals, etc?

How much of any single person's tax money went into it? How long until those few cents get paid off in terms of saved time and gas by not dealing with the traffic backup from those accidents? How much do those few cents amortize to your savings in reduced insurance since thats less potential accident you have to bet against... how much savings does that reduction confer on your expected direct costs in cas you had been in a the accident?

Does 15M still seem like a lot?

Maybe you think it could be built cheaper - how? Show your work.

All these things sure are an interesting conversation to have. Much more interesting than "hur dur, 15M is a big number" anyway.