Politics
City Council Votes 21-28 to Reject Push to Lower Chicago’s Default Speed Limit to 25 MPH
The Chicago City Council voted 21-28 Wednesday to reject a push to lower the city’s default speed limit from 30 mph to 25 mph, an effort supporters said was sure to dramatically reduce deaths and serious injuries in traffic crashes while opponents warned of unintended consequences.
The measure had the support of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus, which pointed to a study from the Chicago Department of Transportation that found the change would reduce the number of traffic-related injuries among Black and Latino residents, who are disproportionately more likely to die as the result of a crash.
“All of this matters because even at a five-mile-an-hour difference, it cuts in half the likelihood that the vehicle kills the person in that collision,” said 1st Ward Ald. Daniel La Spata, the chair of the city’s Transportation Committee who led a monthslong effort to push the change through the City Council. “Why are we doing this right now? Despite the fact that I would say notably we have never in the past decade, we have never had fewer than 100 traffic fatalities in any given year, this is an essential tool.”
But the measure failed after nearly all members of the City Council’s Black Caucus voted against it because of concerns that the change would mean more fees and fines levied against Black, Latino and low-income residents.
Ald. Jason Ervin (28th Ward) said the measure would have “unintended consequences.”
While it might make sense for some North Side neighborhoods, it is not right for his West Side ward, where many residents would struggle to pay additional speeding tickets, Ervin said.
La Spata called off a planned vote in January, and the City Council agreed to form a working group to study any change in the city’s speed limit.
Reducing a car’s speed by just a few miles per hour significantly increases the chance of surviving a crash and reduces serious injuries, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation.
New York City and Boston recorded fewer deaths as a result of traffic crashes involving speeding and pedestrians after lowering their default speed limits, records show.
In 2023, 163 people died in car crashes in Chicago, data shows. Nearly 70% of those crashes involved speeding, records show.
Traffic deaths surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, peaking in 2021, when 186 people died in crashes. That represented a 55% increase over the number of traffic deaths in 2019, records show.
Black Chicagoans are nearly four times likelier than White residents to be killed in a traffic crash, according to city of Chicago data from 2021.
That same data showed people 70 and older were more than 1.7 times as likely to die in a 2021 traffic crash in Chicago as the average fatality rate of those ages 20 to 69 — and that Latino residents, too, are almost twice as likely as White Chicagoans to be killed in a crash.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone| (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
