Skip to main content

Japan takes unique action on road safety

In a bid to tackle the growing problem of collisions caused by deer, transport officials in the Japanese island of Hokkaido have taken drastic action. As well as spraying wolf urine near roads and railways they will also be broadcasting the roar of lions to try to keep the deer away. A spokesman for Nexco East, which runs the island's highways, said: 'Even though we have increased the height of fences to 2.5 metres from 1.5 metres, fences sometimes break because of heavy snow, so we need this stop-gap measu
June 26, 2013 Read time: 2 mins
In a bid to tackle the growing problem of collisions caused by deer, transport officials in the Japanese island of Hokkaido have taken drastic action. As well as spraying wolf urine near roads and railways they will also be broadcasting the roar of lions to try to keep the deer away.

A spokesman for Nexco East, which runs the island's highways, said: 'Even though we have increased the height of fences to 2.5 metres from 1.5 metres, fences sometimes break because of heavy snow, so we need this stop-gap measure while mending them.

Hokkaido Railway Company earlier this year erected equipment that broadcasts the roar of lions in an effort to keep the timid animals away from its tracks, a spokesman said. He added there were 2,581 incidents involving deer last year, a figure that had doubled in less than a decade.

Related Content

  • Need for performance standards for road user charging systems
    February 2, 2012
    GNSS-based road use metering systems need performance metrics, as well as ways to test and reliably compare them. Bern Grush and Joaquín Cosmen write about the function of the GNSS Metering Association for Road-use charging (GMAR), recently set up to address this issue
  • Plate matching technology more accurate than conventional OCR
    February 3, 2012
    EngiNe srl's patented Plate Matching technique is something of a paradox, in that it achieves formal vehicle identification without recognising, in the accepted sense, the characters on its number plate. Here, Angelo Dionisi of ENG Group explains how it works
  • Tecsidel’s Pan-American Highway tunnel eases Lima’s traffic woes
    December 4, 2018
    The Pan-American Highway connects the US and Canada with Latin America, running for thousands of miles from Alaska in the north to Argentina in the south. Mauro Nogarin finds that one tunnel built underneath it is now providing relief for thousands of travellers each day On the Pan-American Highway, the lengthy series of roads which spans both American continents - from the US state of Alaska to the Latin American country of Argentina - ITS solutions are many and varied. One of these, in Peru’s capital
  • Theoretical limits
    February 27, 2012
    I'll take a punt that a few months ago not many outside those with some form of business or economics qualification had even heard of John Maynard Keynes and his ideas on governments' interventionist role in stimulating growth and stability.