Strategic highway improvements to minimize environmental impacts within the Canadian Rocky Mountain National Parks

This paper describes how strategic highway engineering improvements have be en developed or adopted to mitigate the unique environmental impact highway s and roads have within Canadian Rocky Mountain national parks, which are a lso World Heritage Sites. Three levels of strategic highway development are presented. The first is the re-capitalization of existing park roads. Exam ples are presented from several national parks where parkways and low-volum e roads were reconstructed or repaired in ways to reduce terrain impacts. T he second is the development of the passing lane system on the Trans-Canada Highway in the Rocky Mountain national parks to defer twinning. The third example is the twinning of 18.6 km of the Trans-Canada Highway. Twinning re presents a logical next step following the passing lane phase. This paper d escribes how highway engineering improvements were developed to address and mitigate numerous potential twinning impacts identified during environment al assessment. Included within the environmental mitigation measures are fe ncing and animal crossing structures, addressing wildlife movement, biodive rsity, and mortality as well as stream, terrain, and vegetation disturbance minimization techniques. Research has found that the mitigation measures h ave been effective in reducing wildlife and vehicle collisions by 97%.