51
I'm all for this, but how on Earth does a simple bridge cost £460 million? Just putting that in the headline feels like rage bait.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
51 points (89.2% liked)
UK Nature and Environment
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According to this, the entire road project is costing £500 million, so I doubt that this figure is for the bridge alone.
That makes more sense. Seems like a terrible headline from the Mirror, and probably entirely on purpose at that...
This post should be taken down if the article is misinformation.
oof. I thought, someone must be embezzling
That sounds crazy expensive, like everything related to car infrastructure. The width of the bridge and big number of lanes to cross probably increases cost as well.
The solution isn't to give up on wildlife crossing, it's to reduce the number of lanes of course.
you right, it will actually cost 800-900 million probably
They hired American contractors
I didn't know bats needed bridges to cross motorways.
It depends on the species. Some tend to follow hedgerows or lines of trees etc. They would find a motorway to be a barrier, but would cross using something like this.
Ah, interesting!
We have some monkey ropes leading up to a smaller cage style bridge, so they can climb the rope to the bridge and then be somewhat shielded from all the motor traffic. apparently crossing the road, even in the air, is kind of intense for a lot of bats.
Not sure what they mean by “groundbreaking”: wildlife bridges existed since 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_crossing
I wish cities would build these over highways
Groundbreaking? Not exactly, wildlife crossings on major highways have been in Canada since the 90's.
We've got existing ones in the UK too. Not sure what's groundbreaking about this particular bridge.
Practical Engineering on YouTube has a great video about the hidden engineering of wildlife bridges, if anyone is interested in that kind of thing.
I am confused as to how this helps bats ?
Here's some good information I found: https://www.batconservationireland.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Managing-Hedgerows-for-Bats.pdf
The price in the title is an outright manipulation.