One driver in North Dakota has had such a huge headache from deer-related collisions—she was involved in three separate crashes in the past few years—that she recently called up a local radio station to publicize her ingenious plan to cut back on the crashes: move deer-crossing signs to areas with less traffic so deer won’t cross in high-traffic areas and cause accidents.
You can hear the whole conversation she had on the air in the following video:
Donna seems to be facing a bit of a disconnect. Deer aren’t supposed to adhere to deer-crossing signage; drivers are.
But even though Donna’s plan is fundamentally flawed, her call to the talk show—which has already accumulated nearly 2 million YouTube views—highlights a major safety issue for drivers in areas with large deer populations.
Deer don’t usually regard the rules of the road, and they often travel together and will follow each other out of the forest, onto the road, and in front of your bumper.
A single instance of hitting a deer can be serious, and they occur plenty frequently in some states. Recent data out of Michigan showed that there were eight deaths and thousands of injuries from the 53,600 deer-related crashes that occurred in that state last year.
Besides likely being injurious, deer encounters behind the wheel can be costly. The Ohio Information Institute (OII) estimates that cars crashing into deer cost Ohio insurers about $70 million in 2011.
For drivers themselves, hitting the antlered critter or their doe counterparts can suck thousands of dollars out of your wallet, with the Insurance Information Institute (III) estimating that the average deer-related claim is $3,100.
An insured driver is covered by the “comprehensive” part of their policy in such situations, but drivers without that optional portion of a policy will have to foot the bill on their own. (Readers can learn more about getting covered for deer-vehicle collisions here.)
An annual State Farm report on deer-vehicle collisions, compiled from the insurer’s claim statistics, showed that the overall likelihood of crashing into a deer nationwide is about 1 in 192.
In North Dakota, there’s about a 1-in-85 chance that a resident driver will get into a deer-vehicle collision in a given year, according to federal licensing data and statistics form the state Department of Transportation. Deers and cars collided just under 2,900 times in the state last year.
That means Donna caught some plain old bad luck to be victimized by deer three times throughout the years. (Of course, that might just be because she’s always driving past deer-crossing signs, according to her.) But road signs or no, Donna and every other driver should know the roadway threat deer present during this time of year.
