Most people know Highway 17 as a winding, mountainous road that thousands of motorists use every weekend to travel from Silicon Valley to beaches in Santa Cruz.
But one particular stretch is also a notorious killing zone for animals. From 2009 to 2023, there were at least 196 collisions between vehicles and large wild animals on a 2-mile-long portion of Highway 17 between the Cats restaurant near downtown Los Gatos and the Bear Creek Road overcrossing near Lexington Reservoir.
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Those high-speed crashes not only killed wildlife — 10 mountain lions, 181 deer, 4 bobcats, and one coyote — but they also killed one person and injured numerous others, according to data from the CHP, Caltrans and other agencies.
“That stretch is one of the hottest spots in California for animals getting hit by cars, which puts both the animals and drivers at risk,” said Fraser Shilling, a researcher at UC Davis who studies wildlife-vehicle collisions. “People drive pretty fast through there, and if they hit a deer or a mountain lion, they definitely can be injured or die.”
Hoping to safely help hikers, bicyclists, horse riders and wild animals across the treacherous 4-lane highway, a Bay Area parks agency is moving forward with a $38 million plan to build a pedestrian bridge over the roadway, along with a separate undercrossing for wildlife, at Highway 17 near Lexington Reservoir.
Last month, the board of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, a government agency based in Los Altos, voted to select a preferred location for the projects. The wildlife undercrossing will be located a quarter mile north of the dam at Lexington Reservoir, and the pedestrian overcrossing will be another quarter mile farther north.
Planners say the project will connect more than 30,000 acres of parks and open space, running from San Jose’s southern edges in places like Mount Umunhum to forests and parks along Skyline Drive in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties.
The project also will fill a 4-mile gap in the Bay Area Ridge Trail, linking a contiguous 50 miles of the 550-mile route proposed to ring the entire Bay Area, and which currently has 407 miles completed.
The wildlife undercrossing will include at least two miles of fences to …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
