Stop signs and painted crosswalks are relatively ineffective because they are essentially optional. It's clear that the layout of many Chicago roads doesn't force drivers to slow down at all. The dramatic decrease in traffic and significant increase in speeding, crashes, and fatalities during the pandemic suggests that our streets are designed in such a way that, in the absence of congestion, drivers will opt to travel at dangerous speeds. Let’s take speeding for example, since it’s a main factor in determining how likely it is that someone will be killed if struck by a driver. But in all traffic collision cases it's important to ask, “Did the street design and infrastructure allow or even encourage behavior that is known to lead to crashes?” In layman’s terms, in most cases we simply don’t know why there was a crash. According to the data, Chicago traffic crash reports most commonly state that responding officers were "unable to determine" the primary cause for pedestrian and bike crashes. RIGHT: A map of where cyclists have been struck by cars since 2020, with “bike routes” in orange. Images: Colin Anderson Left: A map of where pedestrians have been struck by cars since 2020. Right: A map of where motorists have struck people on bikes, which strongly correlates with city-designated bike routes, shown in orange. Left: A map of where drivers have struck people on foot since 2020. But it also suggests that the bike infrastructure that currently exist on these routes isn't sufficient for protecting bike riders. ![]() That's not surprising, since these are the corridors that have the most bike traffic. ![]() It's notable that the bike crashes strongly correlate with city-designated bike routes. My maps of locations where drivers have struck people walking and biking in Chicago since 2020 show that no parts of the city were spared from these collisions. I also tried to gauge how effective or ineffective existing infrastructure is at keeping vulnerable road users safe.įirst, it’s important to understand the magnitude and scale of the problem. In order to better understand this public safety crisis, I created a Tableau story mapping out where recent pedestrian and bike crashes have occurred in Chicago. This summer alone, motorists have struck and killed at least seven Chicagoland children on foot, scooters, and bikes. And bike crash deaths spiked by 16 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, and then rose another 5 percent in 2021. But pedestrian deaths rose 13 percent in 2021 from the previous year. Between 20, there was a 10.5 percent increase in traffic fatalities overall. Vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists have been disproportionately impacted by the increase in dangerous driving. But, as director of Transportation for America Beth Osborne noted, when private car drivers kill people, it's often chalked up as “ the cost of doing business.” As many have observed, if these statistics were applied to any other form of transportation like trains or airplanes, swift and decisive action would be taken to improve safety. ![]() Last year local traffic fatalities spiked to 174 deaths on city streets. Even now that the crisis has eased and traffic volumes have returned to normal, fewer people are commuting to downtown offices, which means fewer rush-hour traffic jams and higher speeds overall, which has fueled the spike in road deaths.Ĭhicago is no exception to this trend. In 2020 when the number of car trips dropped during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic reducing traffic congestion, overly wide American roads designed to prioritize vehicular throughput above all else suddenly felt like speedways. But these numbers should not come as a surprise.
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