National Parks

TransCanada Highway

Overpass crossing structure on the divided Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park.

Click to learn more: Performance of Current Wildlife Crossing Structures and Fences Current Project Editorial – Banff’s TransCanada Plan Integrates Needs of Humans, Needs of Nature What’s Happening in our Mountain Parks?

83km of the Trans-Canada Highway (TCH) runs through Banff National Park, Canada's flagship park. The highway runs through the heart of the Bow Valley, the most ecologically rich and important part of the Park. In doing so it bisects the Park.

The TCH has often been identified as one of the single greatest ecological challenges facing Banff, and this has been so for many years. The environmental challenges fall into five broad categories, as they do for all such roads:

1. Habitat destruction (habitat being paved over)
2. Habitat alienation (wildlife being deterred from using that habitat close to the road due to the sight, sound, smell of people and vehicles)
3. Increased contact between people and wildlife, giving rise to more opportunities for habituation or negative encounters, perhaps leading to the destruction of the wildlife
4. Habitat fragmentation - the inability (or unwillingness) of wildlife to pass from one side of the road to another leads to an inefficient use of the landscape and habitat, restricts dispersal and movement of the population, and can divide the gene pool of a species
5. Direct mortality - the death of wildlife on the road.

Habitat fragmentation and direct mortality have been the greatest concerns respecting the TCH in Banff.

49.5km of the 83 km in the Park have been twinned previously from 1981 to 1997. In October 2003 the federal government approved $50 million to twin the remaining 33.5 km, from Castle Junction to the BC border. That entire project would cost approximately $150 million, so Parks Canada is currently only planning to construct a 12.5 km stretch of road lying east of Lake Louise. With the various phases of twinning has come an experiment in mitigating the fragmentation of habitat and the direct mortality of wildlife. In particular, fences of varying designs have been constructed on each side of the highway as it has been twinned, and a variety of wildlife crossing structures (overpasses and underpasses) have been constructed.

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