Personal Injury Chicago, Illinois Blog

Last week, Gov. Pat Quinn signed a new law allowing the city to expand its use of speed cameras in designated zones. The zones will be clustered within an eight of a mile of schools and parks, but are expected to include nearly half the city.

Proponents of the new law say the increased use of speed cameras in these safety zones will help reduce Chicago car accidents.

The red-light cameras will be used in tandem with electronic devices that automatically generate speeding violation tickets. Fines would be $50 for going 6 to 10 miles per hour over the speed limit and $100 for those going 11 miles per hour over.

Critics claim that the city's motivation for expanding the use of speed cameras is as much about money as about preventing car crashes or injuries to pedestrians. In 2010, the cameras produced $69 million in ticket revenue for the city. That figure is likely to increase markedly once the new law takes effect on July 1.

Public safety campaigns are important. They are important because getting people to change their behavior when it comes to risky activities takes concerted effort on multiple levels. Law enforcement alone, as important as it is, isn't always enough. It's also necessary to educate people about the consequences of not changing the behavior.

Consider the case of Chicago pedestrian accidents. In October 2011, the Chicago Department of Transportation began a citywide pedestrian safety campaign. CDOT partnered with the Chicago Police Department and the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the initiative.

The goal was to reduce Chicago car accidents that kill or injure pedestrians. The campaign began in vivid fashion with the placement of 32 mannequins along Wacker Drive. Each mannequin represented one of the 32 people killed in Chicago pedestrian crashes in 2010.

The campaign also featured posters. Most of them were placed on the sides of trash or recycling containers on the street. Many of those posters have stark images depicting accident victims. They are not real victims, but rather actors portraying victims. Still, the effect of the posters is sobering and even depressing.

The Chicago area is one of the heaviest traveled corridors in the country for commercial trucks. With so many big rigs on the road, the danger from distracted or fatigued truck drivers is a constant reality.

The data on shows how accidents caused by these negligent drivers adds up, one Chicago truck accident at a time.

To take just one example, consider a recent investigation by the Northwest Times into federal statistics on accidents in 10 south suburban municipalities in Illinois and in Lake and Porter counties in Indiana.

The statistics show that, in this part of Chicagoland alone, there were 8,043 crashes involving heavy trucks from 2000 to 2008. A total of 218 people died in these crashes.

The analysis that produced these startling numbers was based on U.S. Department of Transportation records.

Safe driving is all about being attentive to conditions. If it's raining, the wet road should be taken into account, because it will affect braking. The same is true of a host of other conditions that drivers encounter, such as encountering a construction zone.

By taking such factors properly into account, drivers can help prevent motor vehicle accidents.

In the Chicago area, drivers know they usually need to plan on dealing with congestion. After all, for years Chicagoland has been the most congested area in the country for drivers.

A recent study suggests that the congestion may have eased ever so slightly. According to an urban mobility study done by researchers at Texas A & M University, gridlock in Chicago now ranks second in the country. The most congested area is Washington, D.C., the study found.

Chicago traffic is still plenty congested, however, and much of this is due to trucks. The researchers estimated that Chicago had the highest costs associated with truck congestion in the nation. The Texas A & M study estimated the figure for this at a whopping $2.3 billion - the result of 31 million hours lost in delays.

With so many drivers distracted by technology, driving in Chicago continues to be more dangerous than it needs to be. What can be done to reduce the number of Chicago car accidents caused by texting, cell phones and other electronic distractions?

Legislative bans on texting while driving are one way to address the problem. Chicago has an ordinance against it. And a statewide ban on texting while driving took effect in Illinois in January 2010.

Since Illinois began its texting ban, several other states have followed, bringing the total to 34 with a ban on texting behind the wheel. There are also a number of states that ban the use of hand-held cell phones while driving.

The effectiveness of such bans is open to question, because so much depends on how they are enforced. Law enforcement officers need to be trained on how to quickly identify drivers who are looking down at their phones for excessive periods of time. Public education campaigns, designed to help people to better understand the dangers of texting and driving at the same time, also play a role.

Texting or talking on a cell phone while driving a motor vehicle is against the law in Chicago. It's contrary to municipal ordinance and also a violation of state law. If fact, over 30 states have some form of texting or cell phone ban because of the documented dangers of distracted driving.

But what about distracted biking? There is growing concern that bicyclists in Chicago become so distracted by texting or cell phone conversations that they, too, are putting themselves and others at risk of traffic accidents.

The Chairman of the Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety of the Chicago City Council is convinced that the problem is severe enough to require a response from the city. Alderman Marge Laurino has proposed an ordinance that would require bicyclists to follow the same rules against texting or cell phone use while driving that apply to motorists.

"It really is about distracted drivers - no matter what you're driving," Laurino said. "I'm looking to make the streets safer for everyone: motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians."

Federal rules to prevent truck driver fatigue are on the books for very good reasons. Without limits on how much truckers can drive, the pressure to put in too many hours in too short a time leaves too many drivers overly fatigued - and therefore prone to causing truck accidents.

Nationally, from 1975 to 2008, over 4,000 people were killed every year in large truck crashes. Tens of thousands more were seriously injured.

To bring down these grim figures substantially, federal safety regulators have been trying for years to reduce the number of hours that truck drivers are allowed to drive at any one time. The battle over revising these hours-of-service regulations has been going on for over ten years - so long that it's sometimes called "the never-ending saga."

The lead federal agency is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. FMCSA has proposed reducing the maximum amount of driving time for truck drivers in one shift from 11 hours to 10.

The agency has also adopted a rule requiring motor carriers with a history of violating federal limits on drivers' hours to install electronic onboard recorders to account for those hours. The rule is due to take effect in June 2012.

The electronic records would be an improvement on paper logbooks. This is because the onboard recorders are far more difficult to falsify than the old paper logbooks.

Today is the first day back to school for many children in Chicago and across the country. After a long, hot summer, the familiar buses are rolling again.

In Chicago, the traditional yellow school bus was supplemented for the first day of school by city buses and trains. The schools have partnered with the Chicago Transit Authority and several businesses to give kids free rides to school today.

How safe are these buses? Whether it's a school bus or a CTA bus, safety should be paramount. And yet, even in the wake of numerous bus crashes in New York City, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, federal regulators and the bus industry have not taken the basic steps needed to improve safety for bus passengers.

For one thing, buses still lack lap and shoulder belts. Seat belts are now commonly required in Australia and in the European Union. Yet the American bus industry has been resistant to installing them here, even though they would save many lives in rollover accidents.