Corona has brought a lot of suffering and little positive. One of the few positive aspects is that the number of accidents involving wildlife has gone down. Because most accidents happen at night and because bars, clubs and discos were closed during Corona and the curfew for restaurants was brought forward, there was hardly any traffic on the streets at night. However, this circumstance also made the results of a test unusable, which was intended to examine the effect of a new type of wildlife warning system: It was to be tested between February 2019 and February 2022 on three sections of track in Bavaria, in the districts of Schweinfurt, Wunsiedel and Erding. Unfortunately, the effort was for naught.
Among other things, the Bavarian Ministry of Transport had the Animot system installed on the test track near Hohenpolding. “Animot” consists of boxes that are attached to the side of the white street delineator post. They are equipped with infrared sensors and strike heat sources next to the road. The system should even be able to register hares at a distance of up to 28 meters. When a heat source is detected, a warning light will flash on the boxes. Signs in front of the test track explain this warning to drivers, who should then take their foot off the gas pedal when the lights turn on. A solar panel connected to a battery feeds in the electricity required for the warning system.
The system was considered promising and good results were achieved in tests in Switzerland. Also in Hohenpolding one hoped for comparable results. There, the federal road B 15 cuts through two hunting grounds of the Taufkirchen Conservancy. Accidents with wildlife increased on this section of the federal road because there is a so-called forest-field boundary. The animals leave the forest there and move across the street and into the fields to graze, explained Rudi Hamberger, head of the Taufkirchener Conservation Ring. 25 hunting accidents per district and year are not uncommon there. Hamberger said that the number of accidents has fallen to “almost zero” in recent years. This sounds like good news on the surface, but the result is unfortunately unusable because the numbers have lost their meaningfulness.
For the manufacturer of the warning system, the numbers are completely distorted by Corona. If there is hardly any traffic at night, there are hardly any wildlife accidents. You can no longer put that in context with the warning system.
In any case, the focus of this test was not on the number of wildlife accidents, but rather on how best to communicate with road users. For example, we know from surveys that around a third of road users misunderstand how the flashing lights work: They assume that the flashing lights are intended to deter wildlife, not as an indication that they need to drive more carefully. One wanted to optimize such factors. However, the company accepts this setback caused by the falsification of the data due to the effects of the corona virus: “We are still in the development phase anyway,” said Managing Director Sabine Dahl.