Reckless driving is still one of the biggest problems that is plaguing this city, county, state and country. The vast majority of people know how they should drive but some choose not to obey the traffic rules that we all go by. Recently I attended a reckless driving town hall meeting at the Lubar Center on the Marquette University campus. There were over 100 people in attendance with officials from the city, county and state on the panel. Former Judge Derek Mosley is the director of the Lubar Center, and welcomed everyone to the event.
The program started out with a presentation by Jeremy J Kloss, from the Wisconsin DOT Program, who is a Policy Analyst. He talked about crash trends for the City of Milwaukee. He reported we are going the wrong way with fatal accidents in the city. In 2021 there were sixty-six fatal accidents compared to 80 for 2022. Regarding injury accidents there were 4583 in 2021 and 4086 in 2022. Lastly PDO, property damage only, there were 14,941 in 2021 and 13,345 in 2022. So, as you can see injuries and property damage numbers went down from 2021 to 2022. For some reason not known at this time fatal accidents went up in October more than any other month. Contributing factors for fatal and severe injury accidents were speed, hit and run, FTR (Failure to yield right away), and DOS Disregard redlights or stop signs. To be a reportable accident it has to involve either $1000 in damage or injuries.
There were 10 hot spots in the city looking at data for the past 2 years where the most reckless driving occurred. Those spots include at least four on Capitol Drive and 4 on Fond Du Lac Avenue. County Executive Crawley states the county is a data driven organization. They are part of the Milwaukee Safe Streets Taskforce. Looking at things like design of streets and working with municipal governments. It takes an all on hands approach and working with the nineteen municipalities in the county. Mayor Johnson talked about the Reckless Driving Taskforce and the county and city working together on this issue. He referred to visual zero, a way to find and reduce the amount of people dying on the roads. Municipal Judge Chavez reports he has seen an uptick in younger drivers in court and has never seen reckless driving the way it is now.
Chief Norman reports the police department has towed 218 cars to date for some kind of reckless driving. They currently have two lawsuits for public nuisance regrading reckless driving. Judge Chavez added that most people in court for reckless driving do not have driver’s licenses. Mayor Johnson added “ we need to get at the root cause of the problems.” “Work to make sure people have access to family sustaining careers and increase stability in people’s lives.” County Executive Crawley added “everyone has to take ownership for the problem and the solution.”
This is the first of four meetings on this subject and three more will be coming at various locations.