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

  • New Zealand government driving the switch to electric vehicles
    May 9, 2016
    The New Zealand government has announced plans to double the number of electric vehicles in the country every year to reach approximately 64,000 by 2021 in an ambitious and wide ranging package of measures to increase the uptake of electric vehicles. The package also includes extending the road user charges exemption on light electric vehicles until they make up two percent of the light vehicle fleet and a new road user charges exemption for heavy electric vehicles until they make up two percent of the h
  • ANPR integrity is as important as capability
    February 1, 2012
    Increasing the capability of automatic number plate recognition should go hand-in-hand with efforts to ensure number plates' integrity, says the ESVA's Viv Nicholas. Before we apply increasingly sophisticated technology to Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), says the European Secure Vehicle Alliance's (ESVA's) executive director Viv Nicholas, there is a lot we can do to make the task of vehicle recognition simpler by addressing issues relating to the number plate itself.
  • Transport in the round
    October 13, 2015
    The ITF’s Mary Crass tells Colin Sowman why future transport demands will require governments to overcome the silo effect of individual single-modal authorities. The only global multimodal transport policy organisation,” is how Mary Crass describes the International Transport Forum (ITF), which is housed at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As head of policy and summit preparation at the ITF she says: “All other organisations are either regional or have a modal focus, we cove
  • Umovity's Christian Haas: AI in ITS is 'evolving at speed'
    September 17, 2024
    The intersections between AI and ITS will shape the future of the industry. Christian U. Haas, CEO of Umovity, outlines some challenges – and looks forward to the opportunities