Almost a decade after the city set out to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2026, nearly as many people are dying on Chicago streets as they were when the ambitious goal was announced.
The number of yearly injuries and crashes on the roads has actually increased in that time, despite the city’s efforts to upgrade dangerous intersections and install miles of bike lanes, among other safety measures.
In 2024, Chicago logged 109 deaths on the road — 38 pedestrians, two cyclists and 69 people in vehicles. Although that represents a drop from a spike in deaths during the pandemic, that’s only 18 fewer than in 2017 when the city’s Vision Zero plan was published.
And more than 23,000 people were injured in crashes in 2023, the most recent year for which collision data is available — an 8% increase or nearly 2,000 more injuries than in 2017.
“This is incredibly frustrating given the emphasis the city has placed on safety,” says Joseph Schwieterman, director of DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development. “This trend has to be slowed just because it’s unacceptable for any modern city.”
Why isn’t the city making meaningful progress at reducing traffic deaths?
Experts and advocates say the city has the right idea in its Vision Zero plan, which was part of an international movement in the 2010s to address persistent traffic deaths by addressing road design, speeding, enforcement and public education.
Similar plans have worked in other cities. Vision Zero city Hoboken, New Jersey, has gone seven years without a traffic death. Evanston has a similar plan and has drastically reduced serious crashes.
But Chicago has not made similar progress, in part because it’s not invested enough at redesigning its dangerous roads, says Kate Lowe, a professor at University of Illinois Chicago’s urban planning and policy department.
The city is adding miles of bike lanes and neighborhood “greenways,” and upgrading around 400 dangerous intersections every year with curb bumpouts and pedestrian islands. But it’s not enough to counteract a host of other issues driving deadly crashes, Lowe says.
Among them:
- More people are driving bigger SUVs and electric vehicles, which tend to be heavier and slower to stop. Both factors are proven to be deadly to people outside of vehicles.
- The city this year rejected a proposal to lower the speed limit from 30 mph to 25 mph. Speed is the biggest factor in whether a crash is deadly.
- More cyclists are on the road. Cycling doubled in popularity in Chicago from 2019 to 2023, according to one analysis.
- The city is not prioritizing traffic enforcement. Just 0.7% of traffic tickets issued by CPD were for speeding in 2023, while two-thirds of traffic stop tickets were for issues not related to safety, such as expired plates and registration or broken taillights, one study found.
- The city doesn’t have a single speed camera on DuSable Lake Shore Drive, the city’s deadliest road with 61 deaths logged since April 2019, according to the city’s Vision Zero fatality dashboard that excludes expressways.
- The city does not have jurisdiction over many of the its deadliest roads. They’re controlled by the state, which has been historically slower to prioritize safe road design.
And then there’s the theorized fraying of social bonds, rise in reckless behavior and emptying of roads that likely encouraged more speeding during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a national 40-year high in pedestrian deaths in 2022.
In 2023, Chicago logged 186 traffic deaths, more than any year in the previous decade.
While Lowe says small steps like improving a single intersection can save lives, it’s not enough to move the needle overall in a city like Chicago.
“The scale of what’s needed is not there,” Lowe says.
Chicago’s new transportation commissioner, Craig Turner, said the city’s Vision Zero plan is “a priority.”
“Public safety is important. Yes, we are committed to Vision Zero,” Turner told the Sun-Times.
But perhaps the largest thing preventing transformational progress is the city’s most deadly roads are designed for higher speeds and moving cargo — and haven’t been made safer in any meaningful way since World War II.
Deadly roads neglected
The city’s widest, fastest and deadliest roads have not seen major redesigns since the city’s expressways were built in the 1950s and ’60s and shifted much of the crosstown traffic to highways, says Ian Savage, professor at Northwestern University’s economics department.
Those arterial roads — such as Archer Avenue, Pulaski Road and Cicero Avenue — kept the same configuration but see far fewer vehicles than they did before the expressways, allowing drivers to go faster and increase the chance of a deadly crash.
That could be driving crashes on the West and South sides of the city, which Vision Zero specifically targeted for improvements because they have more traffic deaths. The areas, which tend to be less affluent, have a lower population density, which also leads to more speeding and more fatal crashes since fewer people are on the roads, Savage says.
The reverse is true in some areas on the North Side that have become more and more congested.
“Traffic is so tied up, lots of people and lots of cars, no one’s moving fast. Fatalities are quite low,” Savage says.
The city recognizes that wide roads are driving fatal crashes. Chicago streets wider than 50 feet have 14 times as many fatal crashes than narrower streets, according to the department’s latest annual report on crashes.
Grandparents killed on Archer Avenue
It’s been 17 months since a driver struck and killed Dominika Chruszcz’s grandparents in Garfield Ridge, just north of Midway Airport, as they crossed Archer Avenue holding hands while walking to church.
She thinks about them every day.
What makes it worse is that her grandmother, 73-year-old Zofia Chruszcz, had been hit a month earlier by another driver on the same road, just a block away — but had survived.
“A block away. And this driver was also turning right,” Dominika Chruszcz, 25, says.
Dominika Chruszcz, granddaughter of Zofia Chruszcz and Ryszard Stebnicki, who were killed by the driver of a pickup truck while crossing the street near the intersection of South Archer Avenue and South McVicker Avenue in Garfield Ridge in 2024, walks near South Archer Avenue and South Meade Avenue to get to her car, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Archer Avenue is one of the city’s deadliest roads, with 19 traffic deaths in the last five years. The stretch where Dominika Chruszcz’s grandparents were killed at McVicker Avenue has not seen safety improvements since the crash in February of last year.
“My grandma and I talked about how dangerous this road is,” Chruszcz said.
‘A chance to build’
Perhaps the largest hurdle to improving the safety of roads like Archer is Chicago is not responsible for the design of streets that tend to be the deadliest.
Nine percent of the city’s road network is run by Illinois Department of Transportation, but those roads accounted for 45% of fatal crashes in 2023, according to CDOT’s 2024 crash report.
Officials have blamed an Illinois law that prohibited the state from building safety features such as curb bumpouts and pedestrian islands. The law required IDOT design all of its roads to accommodate semitrailers.
That began to change with an agreement signed in 2023 between the state and city transportation departments, in which they agreed to work together to address road safety concerns.
Illinois Transportation Secretary Gia Biagi says that agreement with Chicago required a change in state law to allow the state to design roads that accommodate school buses instead of larger semitrailers. As a result, the state can now design roads in Chicago to be a little more friendly to people and cyclists.
‘Pulaski is not the only street that has these issues’
Pulaski Road is a wide arterial road operated by the state that had seen close to zero improvements to pedestrian safety despite being one of Chicago’s deadliest roads. Thirty-eight people have died on the road, in and out of cars, since March 2019.
After the separate deaths of two Southwest Side residents who were trying to cross Pulaski, the community pushed the city and state to do something.
“People in the neighborhood were outraged,” says Dixon Galvez-Searle, a transit advocate for the Southwest Collective, a community advocacy group. The group gathered input from hundreds of neighbors in a community survey and hosted a town hall with city and state transportation officials at Curie High School in Brighton Park.
The state approved a host of temporary infrastructure improvements between 43rd and 51st streets that CDOT installed earlier this year. At the intersection at Pulaski and 44th Street where Jiekun Xu was killed in February 2024, crews installed flexible bollards and left turn posts.
Now the community is waiting for IDOT to install permanent, concrete versions of the safety improvements, Galvez-Searle said.
“It should not have taken the deaths of two people to spur these changes,” Galvez-Searle said. “Pulaski is not the only street that has these issues.”
Biagi said she wants IDOT to “build on that” agreement with Chicago that allows more safely designed roads — which she helped put together when she ran CDOT — and sign similar agreements with other cities and towns to build safer infrastructure.
“Know that that’s a work in progress. It’s going to be built on that … framework,” Biagi said.
Recently, IDOT ceded some authority to municipalities to determine the speed limits of the state roads that pass through them, Biagi said.
City officials remain committed to Vision Zero plan
Despite Chicago’s slow progress in reducing traffic deaths, city transportation officials say they remain committed to the plan.
David Smith, assistant commissioner of CDOT’s project development division, said the safety features spelled out in Vision Zero and its companion Complete Streets program “have become standard in many ways.”
The city is building 40 to 50 miles of new bike lane infrastructure yearly. And 80% of those projects have been curb-protected bike lanes or bike-focused neighborhood greenways, which Smith says have the highest safety improvements.
“We are addressing cultural and physical decisions that go back 100 years. It’s going to take time, and that’s the reality,” he says.
Critics have resisted the transportation department’s push to add safety measures, since many of the projects slow drivers and replace parking spaces with protected bike lanes.
Some have said a Granville Avenue greenway under construction in Edgewater, which would prioritize cyclists and pedestrians and introduce short one-way lanes, would “cause chaos” by sending auto traffic onto adjacent streets.
Years after a West Side protected bike lane was removed in 2014 due to complaints about the loss of parking to the local alderman, a cyclist died on that stretch of road.
“We know what works, but we still have all these veto points in the decision making of transportation infrastructure,” says Jim Merrill, managing director of advocacy at the Active Transportation Alliance. “Safety is up for negotiation.”
‘Not shocking we haven’t moved the needle on traffic deaths’
It’s hard to make safety a priority when so much of the culture depends on cars, and its institutions continue to prioritize speed over proven safety measures, say Lowe, the UIC professor.
In 2021, when the city was deep into its Vision Zero plan, the city’s transportation department removed a bike lane from Halsted Street near the south branch of the Chicago River to make way for a left turn lane for a new Amazon warehouse.
The warehouse was never used, and the city eventually reinstalled a bike lane. But the example shows the city still makes decisions that can make streets more dangerous for some road users.
That is “a really sad example of the disconnect of the stated goals and decision making,” Lowe says. “It’s not shocking we haven’t moved the needle on traffic deaths.”