Two interesting solutions to deer on the railroad tracks, excerpted from this story:
Ultrasonic waves:
Deer collisions have been on the rise for many of Kintetsu’s mountainous rail lines, the Asahi Shimbun reports, noting the total grew from 57 in 2004 to 288 in 2015.
Hikita began to study the deer, finding hoof prints and dung along both sides of the tracks. He came up with an idea, and two years later, that idea won a 2017 Good Design Award from the Japan Institute of Design Promotion.
It’s already in use on part of the Osaka Line, where netting rises 2 meters high (about 6.5 feet) alongside the tracks, except for periodic 20- to 50-meter gaps (about 65 to 165 feet). In those gaps, ultrasonic waves form temporary barriers at the riskiest times around dawn and dusk, but not when trains are offline overnight. And since humans can’t hear the sound, it’s less upsetting in residential areas than lion dung.
Three of these crossings have been set up on the Osaka Line in a mountainous area of Tsu, the capital of Mie Prefecture, according to the Asahi Shimbun. That section of track suffered 17 deer collisions in fiscal 2015, but only one has been reported there since the deer crossings were installed more than a year ago.
Trains that bark and snort:
In another inventive approach, researchers with the Railway Technical Research Institute (RTRI) have been testing trains that snort like a deer and bark like a dog.This combination of sounds turns out to be a good way to scare deer, the BBC reports. First, a three-second blast of deer-snort noises gets their attention, followed by a 20-second clip of barking dogs, which is apparently enough to make them flee.
RTRI officials say the results have been encouraging so far, with deer sightings down about 45 percent on trains that snort and bark
