Roadkill Toll

Idea 1: 

I have this idea about capturing the “roadkill” cost of a given trip (vs e.g. toll or gas). Context: last summer to fall, I spent a lot of time driving between Pittsburgh and NYC, and I was struck by the amount of roadkill I’d see. I was also especially affected because I had spent the year prior to that thinking about the consequences of the Anthropocene and the reconfigurations of our transit infrastructures for automobility. 

I started looking for examples of previous work done on this subject and found these quotes

  • The great irony of roadkill is this: Its most conspicuous victims tend to be those least in need of saving. Simple probability dictates that you’re more likely to collide with a common animal—​a squirrel, a raccoon, a white-​tailed deer—​than a scarce one. The roadside dead tend to be culled from the ranks of the urban, the resilient, the ubiquitous.
  • But roadkill is also a culprit in our planet’s current mass die-​off. Every year American cars hit more than 1 million large animals, such as deer, elk, and moose, and as many as 340 million birds; across the continent, roadkill may claim the lives of billions of pollinating insects. The ranks of the victims include many endangered species: One 2008 congressional report found that traffic existentially threatens at least 21 critters in the U.S., including the Houston toad and the Hawaiian goose. If the last-ever California tiger salamander shuffles off this mortal coil, the odds are decent that it will happen on rain-​slick blacktop one damp spring night.
  • Astronomical as those numbers for larger animals may be, they pale in comparison with the amounts of insects and other smaller creatures that perish on the road. To get a handle on that, Arnold van Vliet of Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and his colleagues devised a citizen science project specifically focused on insect mortality. Drivers were asked to take a daily photograph of all the insects squished on their license plates, record their car’s mileage and then scrub the license plate to start with a clean slate the next day. By extrapolating from the nearly 18,000 dead insects thus tallied, the group came up with estimates that, if extended globally, would mean that 228 trillion insects are killed each year on the world’s 36 million kilometers of roads.
  • Here are the relevant links for the quotes above:

I talked with Nica and we concluded that focusing on insects would perhaps capture the “least visible/highest impact” with a relatively simpler setup. I thought about perhaps capturing the exact moments that different insects collide with my windshield. I still have to think through the exact capture system, but the car environment does help with some of the space/power logistics. One constraint for this project I would like to impose is that I will not intentionally drive around to collect data for this project; rather, I’d collect data through regular use of my car. I would like to think of the capture system built as something that could allow people to collect open source and crowd-sourced data about this topic. Visually, I want to represent the data collected in a way similar to road logistics shown on Google Maps. Overall, I hope this project will serve as a first interaction on building a setup for collecting roadkill data on future trips (personally but perhaps in a more public way as well) and uploading visual representations of the data.