Over the last year we’ve looked on with horror at a half-dozen cases in Europe and New York City in which assailants have used trucks and cars as deadly weapons to intentionally injure and kill large numbers of innocent people on foot. In the wake of these awful events, it makes sense to reduce the chance of this kind of attack happening in Chicago. In the past, city, county, state, and federal authorities installed vehicle-resistant barriers around buildings and plazas that could be targets, and after a truck assault on a Berlin Christmas market last December, the Chicago police staked out the Christkindlmarket in Daley Plaza.
Closer to home, on May 18, 26-year-old navy veteran Richard Rojas drove his car down a Times Square sidewalk for three blocks, mowing down pedestrians in what appeared to be an act of sociopathic fury before the vehicle made a fiery crash into metal bollards and came to a stop. Alyssa Elsman, an 18-year-old tourist from Michigan, was killed and 22 others were injured. Police said Rojas, who has a history of mental illness and drunk driving, was under the influence of drugs at the time, but terrorism is not suspected.
New York has about three times the population of Chicago and a higher percentage of trips made on foot, so Chicago’s injury and fatality numbers aren’t nearly as high, but they’re still extremely troubling. In 2015, the latest year for which the Illinois Department of Transportation has released data, 21,667 people were injured in Chicago crashes, or about 59 people a day. Among those injured, 2,814 were walking. That’s about eight pedestrian injuries a day. There have been at least three cases of drivers killing people on sidewalks or in buildings in Chicago this year.
For example, while New York and other peer cities released “Vision Zero” plans years ago and have since been pursuing the goal of eliminating all traffic fatalities within a decade or two, Chicago has dragged its feet on publishing such a blueprint for change, finally releasing the Chicago Vision Zero Action Plan only this week, on June 12.
This horrible event in Times Square looks like DWI, which kills thousands of more people a year than terrorism so we can ignore it.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 18, 2017
