MILWAUKEE — The head of Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation wants people to know, reckless driving is not just a Milwaukee problem. Secretary Craig Thompson says everyone in the state is being affected by reckless driving if they use the roads.
As Milwaukee works to fight reckless driving on city streets, Secretary Thompson says this issue doesn't stop when you leave the city.
"We have been seeing the exact same thing go on across the state the last several years,” said Thompson. "We have seen a lot more aggressive driving and it has led to more fatalities."
Data shows speed is a major factor behind reckless driving and Thompson says the state has stepped up patrols, including enforcement from the air to try to curb the problem.
"It has just been a dramatic jump in people going excessively fast. We have seen the amount of tickets our state patrol has given out to people going in excess of 100 miles-per-hour triple,” said Thompson. "It is not just speed but excessive speeding. From our state patrol back in 2019, we gave 583 tickets for going over 100 miles per hour. That jumped to almost 1500 for 2021, and back down 1,100 last year."
Along with the rising number of speeding tickets, the DOT has also seen crash deaths increase since 2019. There were about 550 in 2019 and it jumped to nearly 595 deaths in 2021. Last year, it was 603 deaths.
DOT Program and Policy Analyst Jeremy Kloss, who studies streets in Milwaukee, says the biggest difference between what is happening statewide versus what is happening in Milwaukee is Milwaukee has seen a slight decrease in property damage crashes.
"We kind of see a little bit of diverging trends,” said Kloss.
In Milwaukee, deadly crashes are on the rise.
"Fatal crashes, the number that is really important, unfortunately, is going in the wrong direction,” said Kloss.
Though the state is seeing some progress this year in bringing down those numbers, this year there have been 65 deaths, compared to 94 at the same time last year.
“Hopefully we are going to see some of those going down and some of the efforts we have been doing paying off,” said Thompson.
Those efforts include engineering changes, education, and enforcement. Some engineering changes set to take place in Milwaukee on Capitol Drive, which is a state-run street, include getting rid of the parking lanes along a stretch of road near 50th and Capitol. That will happen once construction season restarts. Thompson also says the governor has proposed adding more state troopers in his budget to increase enforcement.
