On August 22nd, the City of Ludington announced an update on the proposed lane reconfiguration of Ludington Avenue, going from a mostly 5 lane street to a 3 lane street.  An interesting point made in their update was the following: 

"MDOT has also provided the City with a list of 403 crashes that have occurred on Ludington Avenue between Jackson Road and William Street between 1/1/2007 – 1/1/2017.  Many of these crashes involved rear-end collisions and sideswipes."

Frankly, I wanted to see that data too, but the City nor MDOT would provide it publicly at that point, so as it was a list in the possession of the City, it was ripe for the picking of a FOIA request, which I made promptly later that day.

One week later, at the August 28th meeting, a citizen had asked whether the City would share the crash list data, and the city manager started as if he was going to say that it had been "FOIAed", but instead said something along the lines that they should be able to put that out for the public.  I received the crash list early the next day.  Yet more than a day after receiving it, there has yet been shared to the public through the City's webpage or Facebook page this crash list.  They must be very busy.

Apparently they want me to frame the data set instead of doing their own spin on it.  I'm okay with that. The list is interesting for those wanting to determine whether the road diet is safe, but there are a couple of surprising results in the data set that need to be pointed out. 

Here is the Excel version of the  Copy of US-10 Ludington Crash history for the ten year period 2007-2016 I received.  Recall, it supposedly is a record of all the crashes that took place on Ludington Avenue between William Street and Jackson Road in that period.

Here are some things you can notice:

1) About 20% of the crashes do not occur on Ludington Avenue (aka US 10):  Seventy-four crashes occur on the north or south streets that intersect Ludington Avenue, topped by north Harrison with 17.  Had they occurred in the intersection one would think that Ludington Avenue or US 10 would be attributed as the primary road rather than a side street with a direction indicated. 

2) Sideswipes and Rear End Crashes account for 50% of the crashes:  The City refers to this as 'many', and seem to be under the belief that sideswipe and rear end collisions will magically go away with a re-striping.  The City hopes to infer that there are many rear end collisions, but the data shows quite the reverse.  Only 110 of the 403 crashes are labelled rear end collisions, that's just over 27%; however, rear end collisions statistically are the most common type of crash accounting for 40% of all crashes.  This area has significantly less rear end crashes than average.

Sideswipe accidents do trend significantly higher than average over this data set, but none of the sideswipe accidents (other than one where two vehicles were going opposite directions) led to any injury. 

3) Only twelve accidents occur on "Ludington Avenue":  Over 300 accidents are marked down as US 10, the rest are either the 74 side streets above, or a dozen marked "E Ludington".  The stretch of avenue is all within the City of Ludington jurisdiction, so the LPD would be the primary investigating agency in most cases.  It seems rather odd that they would use US 10 for that stretch when using East or West Ludington would be more proper, and that they would do this over 97% of the time.

Could other more dangerous sections of US 10 (like around Jebavy and the PM Highway) been added to the totals of this relatively safer area to pad the figures so this reduction would appear to boost safety?   

4)  Zero accidents occurred on Ludington Avenue in the 3 blocks between William and James Streets:  Look through the list, there are no accidents on West Ludington Avenue, which starts at James Street going west to William.  Zip.  West Ludington Avenue is not US 10, US 10 goes up James Street, so none of the US 10 results are there either.

This result is incredible; for ten years nothing happened according to the records in these three blocks, and yet the proponents of the road diet tell us until they are blue in the face that this area is so unsafe because traffic is moving so fast, there is so many lanes to cross to get to Wesco/House of Flavors, and all those doors swinging open from the parked cars where clueless tourists pop out.  Shoot, as seen below the Google-maps driver looks like he's about to hit one of them. 

But from 2007 until the beginning of this year, no crash of any type has taken place on that stretch of avenue.  There has been 16 attributed to North Rath or North Robert, but none on West Ludington Avenue.  How do you get any safer than zero crashes for 10 years in a well-travelled five-laned downtown area like this?

That statistical anomaly would have one believe that there may be many crashes in the data set attributed to "US 10" that took place not on Ludington Avenue but on James Street (aka US 10), a street which is super dangerous during the tourist months because of parked cars and buildings blocking any reasonable sightlines from all of the connecting streets other than Dowland, and a street where tourists just getting off the boat make last minute decisions at Ludington Avenue to go right rather than left, less than a minute after having a near-miss at the intersection of Dowland when they failed to realize it was a 3-way stop and that driver coming at them didn't.

Personally, I feel this list is not entirely accurate as to the accidents taking place on the avenue, and I hopefully will have the ability to access the UD-10s that describe these accidents before MDOT comes before the council and makes their case.  Feel free to review the data and make your own observations one way or the other.

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Well said, Verdad.  Who has time to properly run a city when an annoying snit of a citizen ("snitizen" ?!) from the wastelands of Dowland Street is taking all of your time making FOIA requests for all those records you never had any intention of making public?  Surely not John Shay who our city councilors pay about $3000 per week in wages and benefits to be a blatherskite and obfuscator.

Terrific research X. Thanks. This is typical of those City Hallers. Twisting information to fit their agenda while trying to pull the wool over the public's eyes. As far as I'm concerned the most unsafe part of Ludington Ave is the jog in the road between Franklin and Stafford. Why that was not removed years ago is beyond me. I wonder how many unsuspecting tourist were awakened from their vacation haze when they almost ran off the road at that location. That area should be renamed side swipe alley. Thanks again X.

Thanks very much, Willy, and an even bigger thanks to IHAN who has found a web source that allows me to look at the basics of these traffic reports (at least as far back as 2010).  Preliminary searching has some of these "US 10" crashes referencing crashes that happened off US 10, on West Ludington Avenue. 

It's totally unclear why the database would call these US 10 crashes, because the UD 10 (state police-gathered accident report) never refers to it that way. 

I like the 'jog' because I can always tell those smart guys from Grand Rapids that we had an "S" curve through town long before they did.  It's also a great way to introduce the unsuspecting tourists to Laveaux Park.

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