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Rate of Wildlife-Vehicle Collisions (WVC) in Blaine County
The community is aware and concerned that more than 20% of the crashes in the County involve wildlife vehicle collisions (Blaine County Safety Action Plan, 2024). Additionally, the Idaho Transportation Department estimates that the road segment north of Hailey had the 3rd highest official crash rate across the state, from 2018-2022. For an overview of wildlife-vehicle collisions across the State, see Blaine County under District 4 of ITD's WVC Crash Hotspot Dashboard or the ASHTOWARE Safety Tool.
Wildlife-vehicle collision data is collected through:
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Blaine County Sheriff's Office, which responds to crashes, and
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Idaho Fish & Game, which collects data from a portal where people are able to report road kill and salvage.
Click on the image to download the educational flyer,
"Wildlife Vehicle Collisions (WVC) on State Highway 75."
In 2023, a coarse-scale analysis of highways across 11 western states, named the “West-Wide Study to Identify Important Highway Locations for Wildlife Crossings,” marked the hotspots in Blaine County as being salient by measures of safety, economics and ecological connectivity. Seven hot spots in Blaine County fell within the top 10th percentile for wildlife-vehicle collisions and the top 50th percentile for ecological connectivity, across the 11 states analyzed in the study. All seven of the Blaine County hot spots identified in the study were located within 1 mile of a protected area– meaning that safe crossing could significantly benefit habitat connectivity.