Tribune analysis: About half of the kids hit by cars are near a school, Chicago crash reports display
The van’s driver blasted the horn and then, after hesitating, ultimately braked as crossing monitor Elisa Salinas entered the crosswalk on Clark Street directing a “STOP” placard toward traffic. With her other palm, she signaled to waiting children that she wasn’t ready for them to step off the curb yet.
“Some cars will not stop, even if they see little kids,” said Salinas, who has been volunteering for six years as a crosswalk monitor at Hayt Elementary School in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood on the Far North Side. As she spoke, the driver glared at her while waiting for the children to cross.
Salinas, mother of two Hayt students who said a car almost struck her the previous week, has become acquainted to close encounters.
From two thousand seven through 2011, almost 1,700 youths, ages five to Eighteen, were struck by vehicles in Chicago within about a block of a school, according to a Tribune analysis of the most latest accident data the city reported to the state. Youths involved in accidents near schools represent an average of about ten percent of all pedestrians hit by vehicles in the city over the five-year period.
Citywide, about twenty two percent of the approximately 16,500 vehicle-pedestrian crashes over the five-year period involved injuries to youths, the accident reports showcase. The data showcase no improvement from an earlier city probe that found, on a per capita basis, children ages five to eighteen are more likely than adults to be involved in pedestrian crashes.
The number of near-collisions runs much higher. Experts consider such incidents warning signs, signaling that the potential for tragedy is high and that city streets are not safe for children.
“There is a bit of a culture of reckless driving, of not taking earnestly that your car could be a coffin on four wheels if you are not responsible,” Chicago transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein said.
He acknowledged that Chicago hasn’t come close to Washington, D.C., and a few other metropolitan areas in reducing fatal crashes involving pedestrians, despite ongoing efforts here to carry out a pedestrian safety program, step up enforcement of traffic laws and introduce traffic-calming strategies.
“This is a multipronged holistic process, and it will take a number of years. But we expect gains in Mayor (Rahm) Emanuel’s very first term,” Klein said, adding that it will be unlikely to attract families with children to live in the city if the streets are deemed unsafe.
Pedestrian fatalities in Chicago hit a 17-year low in two thousand ten with thirty two deaths, including eight school-age children, down from eighty eight pedestrian deaths in 1994, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation.
But forty eight pedestrians were killed in vehicle crashes in the city last year, according to a preliminary count that is subject to switch, provided last week by the Chicago Police Department.
Vehicle-pedestrian crashes have totaled about Trio,000 a year in Chicago for a number of years. A federally funded investigate that the Chicago Department of Transportation released in two thousand eleven found that eighty percent of fatal and serious crashes occurred within one hundred twenty five feet of the midpoint of an intersection – at crosswalks or nearby.
The most latest data available indicate that locations on the West and South sides are hot catches sight of for vehicle-pedestrian crashes involving youths and teenagers.
Intersections and corridors that the Tribune identified from the data as being among the top danger zones for school-age Chicagoans include Ashland Avenue and 79th Street; the majority of Central Avenue in the Austin community; Chicago and Laramie avenues; Cicero Avenue around West Ohio Street and West Race Avenue; Pulaski Road and 79th Street; King Drive and 63rd Street; Pulaski and Jackson Boulevard; and 103rd Street around Corliss and Cottage Grove avenues.
Studies have suggested numerous possible reasons for the high concentration of crashes inbetween pedestrians and vehicles in poorer neighborhoods, which typically have much less foot traffic than central business districts.
“In some of these blighted neighborhoods with a lot of vacant properties, traffic speeds tend to be higher because there is less commerce, fewer reasons to slow down and stop,” said Ian Savage, an economics and transportation professor at Northwestern University.
But there are many other possible factors, Savage said. In poor neighborhoods, generally more people walk than drive, he said. Also, suburban drivers travel through low-income neighborhoods en route to downtown and other popular destinations in Chicago, Savage said. The enlargened volume of drivers, coupled with the fact that most are passing through and attempting to cut travel times, may contribute to the high number of pedestrian crashes, he said.
Savage said he doubts that pedestrians in low-income neighborhoods are more careless than pedestrians elsewhere. And no evidence exists to support the idea that driving styles are more aggressive in impoverished neighborhoods, he said.