An Elegant Fix For One Of America’s Deadliest Road Problems

Highways weren’t built for animals. That’s starting to change.

In 2012, Southern California was besotted with an unlikely celebrity: a telegenic mountain lion who had crossed one of the state’s most perilous freeways, seeking a territory to call his own. Widely deemed “LA’s loneliest lion” and “most eligible bachelor,” the chiseled puma in question, named P-22, roamed the bustling but otherwise big cat-less Hollywood Hills, unable to safely return to the home he’d left behind. His search for a mate below the Hollywood Sign rendered him an icon of his city, but also a rueful reminder of the sprawling highways that bifurcated his habitat in the first place, leaving his clan on the other side of I-405 on the verge of local extinction.

Beth Pratt, then recently named head of California’s branch of the National Wildlife Federation, remembers strolling through Griffith Park with the wildlife biologist Jeff Sikich in 2012. Pratt knew that P-22 roamed somewhere nearby, and she found herself wondering aloud how she could help. “Well, there’s this little wildlife corridor we need to get built,” Sikich told her.

<a href=”https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/502341/wildlife-crossings-wallis-annenberg”>Read on here.</a>