The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Living History: Burwash Bridge

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Governments across North America keep building and expanding roads. This can have deadly consequences for animals but, potentially, drivers too. One way to manage these risks is by building ecopassages, that help animals get around barriers humans create. This animal overpass near Burwash, Ont., is the first and-for now-only one of its kind in Ontario.In this episode of Living History, we'll get a close look at the Highway 69 animal bridge, learn about the impact it's been having and see other ecopassage styles that you might never notice.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From epic camping trips to scenic local hikes, spending time outdoors is a great way to create lasting memories to share with friends and family. This summer, TVO is celebrating the natural wonders that inspire unforgettable adventures with great documentaries, articles, and learning resources about beloved parks in Ontario and beyond. Visit tvo.me slash Ontario summer stories for all this and more. And be sure to tell us your stories for a chance to win great prizes. Help TVO create a better world through the power of learning. Visit TVO.org and make a tax-deductible donation today. North America is obsessed with highways. We keep building more and more of them. But that comes with a cost and not just a financial one. More lanes equals more

land and more impacts to the natural wildlife. So how do we deal with that? Well here in Northern Ontario there's an interesting solution to that problem. What you see behind me is a highway bridge but it was never meant for humans to use it. Welcome to the Killarney Animal Overpass. The roads connecting Northern Ontario are, in many places, out of date. There are still spots on the main highway between Sudbury and Toronto where it's just one lane in each direction. There have been massive upgrades in recent years. Now, when you're going down 69, it looks a little more like this for much of its length. The rest of the

highway is supposed to get the four-lane treatment in the coming years and when it does get built it'll be done in a slightly different way. Twinning highways has its advantages and challenges. Supporters say they're easier to drive on, they're safer in some ways, and they help people get to their destinations faster. However, there are some disadvantages as well. Higher speeds make crashes more severe. People who feel safe on a roadway are also more inclined to take risks. Plus, having better roads kind of reinforces this whole car-dependent society we have.

Then there's physical effects of twinning a highway. Twinned roads take up more than twice the space of a regular road. That causes more impacts to the natural environment. My name's Sean Boyle. I'm a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial University, and I study the different ways that humans affect wildlife. If animals might be moving from one place to another before that road was what's in existence, now there's this barrier in place that if they might not want to cross or there's a risk of crossing, then it can cut off populations, it can cut off resources

that those animals needed to access. That creates a dangerous situation, both for animals and drivers. One solution to this is an eco-passage. Eco-passages are things that help animals get around the barriers that humans create. The idea of eco-passages isn't new, but they're not usually as spectacular as the animal bridge. In fact, there's one a few steps behind me. Can you spot it?

Until 2012, most eco-passages in Ontario used modified road construction elements, like drainage culverts. They were meant to help vulnerable species, like snakes and turtles, which have a higher rate of dying on the roads. But culverts tend to be small and confined, except for the massive oversized one behind me that is purpose-built as a large wildlife underpass. But with small culverts, animals either couldn't fit inside or didn't feel comfortable using them. The other option was to bring them into the open air and use a bridge. I'm Carrie Gunson. I started a business in road ecology and I mainly look at how to connect wildlife across roads so they can access habitat. We found that the overpass was the most used structure by the ungulates which is moose

and deer and black bears used it a little bit more but they also didn't mind using the neighbouring underpass. We also had a higher frequency of links as the monitoring increased over time. This is the first animal overpass in Ontario, but it's not the first one in Canada. In 1996 Banff National Park added its first two animal overpasses. Since then it's added many more crossings. Some people were against the idea originally. They said it would cost too much money and it wouldn't help animals like they had promised. Researchers in Banff proved those people wrong and after a 10-year study on this bridge,

they found similar results. There was an overall large animal decrease of wildlife vehicle collisions about 70 percent. So that includes the moose and the deer and the black bear. We had the greatest reduction in collisions with moose. This isn't the only eco passage in the area. As you saw earlier, just up the road there's a large animal underpass. In other spots along a river, there's a place for animals to walk underneath the highway bridge. And in other places, crews have improved drainage culverts so that animals are more likely to use them. We are at Shepherd's Lake on Highway 69. And this culvert was put here for water, but it was upsized for turtles to allow more light in.

It's the largest tunnel I know that was built for turtles in the world. We have had no roadkill along this stretch. I'd say for turtles it's three kilometers since we've been maintaining it. So 100% functionality with no holes. Simple. Studies have shown that eco-passages are a good idea in general, but as always, there's a catch.

They have to be very well maintained or else they could end up doing more harm than good. It can have a really, really strong impact on the population in a good way. And if it's done poorly, it can have a bad impact on the population as well. Eco passages can only be truly effective if they're planned and built properly. There were elk living in this area, but they've moved farther north since the highway expansion. This bridge has reduced large animal crashes by quite a bit, and that's great. But the wildlife fencing that drives the animals onto the bridge ends just a few kilometres to the north. At those places where the fence ends, animals are more likely to try to cross the roads,

and it can make those spots more dangerous than the average stretch of road. Building fencing and eco-passages is expensive, but there's a cost to not doing anything either. There's a break-even point with the number of collisions per one kilometre of highway and the cost of those collisions with the number of injuries, fatalities and property damage. You add that all together and you can look at the cost of putting the crossing structure and the fencing in. So in some sections of road, that break-even point would happen sooner. And I think the responsibility is definitely there with building new roads and as we upgrade our roads. That idea of responsibility is something that's becoming more common in projects of all kinds.

As humans, we do have a major impact on wildlife, and it even comes back to affect us with things like higher crash rates. But that's not to say that these animal safety measures should just be for humanity's sake. Highway 11 bisects conservation reserves and there's two conservation reserves with endangered species on each side of the highway and we know they're getting killed on Highway 11. That's a a no-brainer. As I was driving up there's more fencing. It's going to be continuous right to Parry Sound pretty much. Yeah with the twinning. Yeah it's going to be the most heavily mitigated highway for wildlife probably in the world because it's like we have everything here. There's a symbolic value to this bridge. It's a monument of sorts to the changing relationship between humans and the natural world.

It's set a new standard for environmental responsibility, and other projects are following its example. This is the plan for an eco-passage in Windsor, Ontario. It's designed to help several species at risk avoid deadly roadways. But within all of this, these eco passages are still reflective of North America's car dependency. So mitigation strategies are second to think about. First, we need to think about having alternative methods of transportation rather than highways and making it easier, more accessible for people to use these things.

If they're going to build highways, this is the cost of building the highways. North American society does need to become less car dependent, but that's going to be the hardest to do in rural and northern communities. Until then, reducing the impact of our growing transportation needs is going to become more important and more common. This bridge was the first one in Ontario to do just that, and it's a part of Canada's living history. Thank you.