> 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.

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.

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.