Reckless driving and speeding has become a defining issue for Milwaukee County. A recent report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum finds this has led to an increase in traffic deaths.
The report shows rising numbers in the county, especially for Black residents, that sharply contrasts the statewide trend where traffic deaths have been on the decline for decades. Mark Sommerhauser, communications director and a policy researcher for the Wisconsin Policy Forum, dives deeper into some of the findings from the report.
"What we really saw, nationally and in Wisconsin and in Milwaukee County, was a pretty significant uptick in crash fatalities and traffic accidents of all kinds, including traffic fatalities and crash fatalities," he explains.
Sommerhauser also goes on to describe how in the mid 20-teens, there were also increased traffic fatalities in Milwaukee that then seemed to plateau before spiking again in the first year of the pandemic.
However, the pandemic wasn't a trigger point for these trends — there were also reports from 2013 through 2018 studying the same driving patterns in Milwaukee. Unfortunately, both studies yielded similar takeaways. Sommerhauser says, "What we found out is that, especially in Milwaukee County, some of those increases that we documented and wholly continued in the period since, especially from the last three years."
The latest data also paints a concerning image. "If you look outside of Milwaukee County, if you look at Wisconsin whites, what you see is improvement. You see a picture that's getting better. The crash fatality rate among white Wisconsinites has declined very steadily for two decades," says Sommerhauser. "But when we look at Black and Hispanic groups, we see increases that are really concerning. And that's what we tried to document here."
While many factors attribute to these trends, Sommerhauser says that it's clear that one of main factors is speeding related deaths. "That to me, honestly was probably the most striking data point in our whole report," he says. "If you look at crash fatalities for which law enforcement deemed excessive speed to be a factor, over the last two decades in Milwaukee County those have increased 213%. If you look in the other 71 counties in Wisconsin, those have decreased 55%. So, you know, you're not going to find a much more stark divergence than that."
Sommerhauser says that Milwaukee area and state officials are aware of the issue and are continually taking measures to improve the conditions, such as passing laws to increase the penalty for reckless driving, fleeing from law enforcement officers and proposing bills to increase funding for driver's education courses. However, red light cameras are still not an approved enforcement measure and would need to be passed by the Wisconsin legislature. "So, there are a number of things that the state has done. I think there is, of course, more in particular that local officials would like to see the state do," says Sommerhauser.
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