Daily Herald opinion: It’s not just on the open highway where excessive speed kills

We’ve been hearing the statistics for years: Speeding kills. As reporter Marni Pyke told us on Monday, just last year 1,214 people were killed in Illinois vehicle crashes, and 55% of those crashes were speeding related.

That’s in line with previous years; and so, we have year after year of people killed in preventable accidents on Illinois roads.

The numbers are at once horrific and ubiquitous.

Readers may be forgiven if they assume most of those deadly crashes occur on interstates and tollways, where the 70 mph speed limit appears to be a mere suggestion for most drivers. But take a closer look at the numbers, and a surprising fact emerges: Most of these fatalities are on local roads, the kind with lower speed limits.

Consider: Between 2010 and 2019, traffic fatalities surged 34% in urban/suburban areas. Nearly half of those happened on roads with speed limits of 35 mph or lower.

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning has gone so far as to declare that northeastern Illinois is in the midst of a traffic safety crisis, one where fatalities have been rising since 2014, especially among pedestrians and bicyclists. The biggest spike in deaths was during the pandemic, when more residents started walking or riding bicycles. The relatively empty roads during COVID-19 encouraged speeding, authorities say, and the trend hasn’t let up since.

CMAP says speed is now considered a contributing factor in 35% to 40% of all the fatal accidents in this state.

It's not hard to imagine why local roads are such a risk, even though they have significantly lower speed limits than interstates. Our suburbs in particular come alive along these roads, which are often a blur of activity involving multiple intersections, people walking or riding bikes, businesses, schools, parks and neighborhoods.

Do most drivers even know the speed limit on these roadways, the ones they travel sometimes every day? It's bad enough that 5% of walkers hit by a car going 20 mph will die, CMAP says. But at 30 mph, a full 45% of pedestrians could die. And at 40 mph the fatality rate jumps to 85%.

Even on local roads, speeders often “become overconfident in their skills to evade accidents and they overcompensate,” Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police Executive Director Kenny Winslow told Pyke. “Additionally, it reduces your field of vision when you're going faster; it makes it harder to see people, you can overdrive the technology in your car (such as) headlights, etc.”

In June, CMAP put out an ambitious report called Speed Management, which among other things offers recommendations on what to change for the better: roads that can be redesigned to slow vehicles down naturally, better protecting pedestrians and bicycles; workable speed limits can be introduced; embarking on public education to encourage safe driver behavior; and what CMAP calls “equitable enforcement.”

We urge local officials to study this report. (To see the Speed Management executive summary, click on Speed-Management-Executive-Summary_CMAP_2024.pdf (illinois.gov)

“Speeding is the No. 1 factor in all accidents involving injuries and deaths,” Winslow said. “When you look at what can we address to avoid these fatalities — it's slowing down.”