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| An existing wildlife overpass on the Trans-Canada Highway. |
The first ARC: North American Wildlife Crossing Structure Design Competition, which was announced late last year, is being used to encourage new ideas, materials, methods and thinking.
Dr. Tony Clevenger, a senior wildlife research scientist at the Western Transportation Institute at the Montana State University in Bozeman, said the question is whether overpasses can be built cheaper using recycled and new materials coming onto the market, including plastics and concrete.
“The idea is really to bring in some bright minds to think innovatively and to design functional cost-effective crossing structures,” said Clevenger, who initiated the design competition and has been studying the effects of roads on wildlife populations in the Rocky Mountain national parks since 1996.
Banff National Park is home to two 50-metre-wide overpasses, located near the Sunshine turnoff and Red Earth Creek, built in 1997 at a cost of $3 million each, and four new overpasses currently under construction on the Trans-Canada Highway as part of the twinning work at a cost of $11 million.
“They’re saying Banff will have half the overpasses in North America and rightly so, it is a world heritage site and a pretty critical place to be mitigating in a transportation corridor. It’s a busy, busy place with the railway, the Trans-Canada, the parkway. There’s a lot of activity going on here,” he said, adding Banff and Yoho are the only national parks in North America with major transportation corridors bisecting them.
Given Banff is on the forefront of the use of wildlife crossing structures, new overpasses in other regions tend to use the Banff plans, which Clevenger said have not changed much, with little or no modification or adaptation, potentially leading to new techniques and ideas.
“The objective is really to get landscape architects, bridge engineers, transportation planners thinking differently about how to build these things,” he said.
For example, Clevenger said reducing the weight of the structure might allow for wider structures.
The steering committee first met in October 2008 and its members spent last spring looking for a site that would fit a series of criteria, including data demonstrating the location is an important wildlife movement area requiring an overpass, the type of species requiring a structure, a transportation agency open to the idea, near or on federal lands in the U.S. as the U.S. Department of Transportation: Federal Highway Administration and the Office of Federal Lands Highway are major funding partners of the project – which Clevenger said eliminated potential Canadian sites as a result.
The site also had to be on a major highway near a metropolitan centre.
“If you have got a potential site where this competition is going to take place and you’ve got 70,000 vehicles passing it, it’s a huge opportunity for education,” he said.
After evaluating the 22 potential sites across North America, the steering committee narrowed it down to Interstate 70 in West Vail Pass, located an hour west of Denver, CO.
The West Vail site is home to black bears, moose, elk, deer and smaller animals such as lynx, martens and weasels and has support from the government of Colorado. The site has also been assessed for animal movement, ground stability and the physical data of the site have been completed, providing key information to the design teams.
“The idea of this competition isn’t just let’s build an overpass for Colorado, it has implications for getting transportation agencies throughout north America and the world to use that information for building structures where ever they are. It’s really to get transportation agencies to think differently about designing and building these things,” he said.
The other goals for the project are to improve safety by reducing collisions that kill and injure both wildlife and motorists and restore wildlife movement in the West Vail Pass region.
Once the competition opens in late May, prospective design teams will have 2.5 weeks to create an initial design using information provided in the design package, including information required to understand the site, such as terrain and the habitat of West Vail Pass.
“The information that is required isn’t very detailed. It is conceptual. From that there will be a committee that short lists these entries to about five and that will go into a second phase.”
The technical committee will choose five initial designs from Phase One for Phase Two of the competition. Those five design teams will then be required to provide more detailed designs demonstrating “what it would look like and how it would function in this location for these species in this landscape”.
When the competition is over and a winning design has been chosen, Phase Three of the project will be used to create an educational and outreach component.
Part of that goal is to have an exhibit about the process, the overpass and its site in West Vail Pass displayed in a prominent museum, such as the Smithsonian Institute, which Clevenger said has expressed interest.
The final phase of the competition is, of course, construction of the overpass in West Vail Pass, but Clevenger said he does not know if all or part of it will be built.
“There may be facets that could be extrapolated or used in the eventual design and construction. It may not be 100 per cent, but we’re going to take the template and give it to the Colorado Department of Transportation and they’ll farm it out to an engineering company, there may be certain facets of it that could be used in the eventual structure,” he said.
For more information on the design competition go to www.arc-competition.com
