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Car crash
UPDATE: Michael Giorgio died on June 19 from complications related to his traumatic brain injury.
When Michael Giorgio of Waukesha left work at Milwaukee Area Technical College in Downtown Milwaukee on January 17, he began walking to his bus stop, just as he always did at the end of his workday. He reached the corner of Sixth and State and waited for the crosswalk signal. When it turned to WALK, he looked left, then right and left again before stepping off the curb into the street. Those few steps on what was a below zero winter day would be the last he would take for seven weeks
According to police reports, eyewitness accounts and surveillance video from a nearby building, Giorgio was struck by a 2008 Toyota Sienna minivan driven by a 76-year-old man who failed to stop or even slow down for a red light as he turned left into the intersection.
It’s a story all too familiar in Milwaukee in recent years because of increasing numbers of motorists speeding, ignoring traffic signals and signs and otherwise driving recklessly. It’s an epidemic that city officials are working to change. It’s yet another story about the human toll that accompanies the kind of dangerous driving for which the city has gained an unwanted reputation.
One of the witnesses to the crash was Ken Hanrahan of Menomonee Falls. “I saw the minivan hit the pedestrian,” Hanrahan told Shepherd Express. “It threw him up onto the hood and then he hit the windshield so hard that it cracked. Then the man fell off the minivan to the ground in front of it and the minivan stopped. I said to my daughter, ‘Oh my God, that guy just got hit,’ and I started running toward him. That’s when I saw the minivan driver hit the gas pedal and [they] ran over the pedestrian, too. Both the front tire and the back tires ran him over. My first instinct was that this was going to be a hit and run, and I didn’t want to let that minivan leave the scene. So, I ran after it and grabbed the door handle and pounded on the window until the driver stopped. I opened the door and yelled at him to get out because he had just hit a pedestrian.”
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Police say video evidence indicates the driver who struck Giorgio was going at least 30 mph when he ran the red light. Giorgio suffered multiple skull fractures, a fractured vertebrae, a broken leg and traumatic brain injuries. Hanrahan, a former military rescue diver, said Giorgio wasn’t breathing when he first got to him. “I thought I would have to do CPR. He wasn’t conscious but I still said to him, ‘We’ve called 911, an ambulance is on the way, we’ve got the guy who hit you and God is with you.’ That’s when suddenly his eyes opened, he gasped and took a breath.”
The accident left Giorgio unable to walk and incapable of sitting at more than a 30-degree angle without a cumbersome back brace. He was in a hospital for six weeks before being transferred to a rehabilitation facility. It was more than a month and half after the accident before he was finally able to take a few steps with assistance. It would be still another month before Giorgio was able to return home.
Immediately after sustaining the injuries, Giorgio had difficulty talking, reading and remembering things. “For a while there his memory was totally messed up,” his wife Kathie said. “He wasn’t living in current times in his head. He was living in a time 20 or 30 years ago.” While he has made progress in those regards, her husband still has large gaps in recollection. “He’s at least back in the present now. He knows what happened to him, but he doesn’t remember exactly what occurred that day or during the several months before it. He doesn’t even remember Christmas,” she said. While the couple expects that Giorgio will eventually be able to return to work, it isn’t a certainty. “The doctors haven’t given us any clear indication as to what Michael’s future is,” she said. “This is devastating.”
Traffic Deaths Increase
Several national studies in recent years have ranked Milwaukee as one of the worst cities in the nation for speeding and reckless driving. It also has three times the rate of hit and run crashes when compared to the rest of Wisconsin. The state as a whole saw a 36% decline in annual traffic related fatalities from 2002 to 2022. But Milwaukee County saw traffic deaths increase by more than 113% during the same period, most of them occurring in the city itself.
City officials say many, if not most, of its serious accidents are the result of reckless driving, especially speeding. Crash data shows that incidents involving death or injury were decreasing prior to 2015 but then began rising again, spiking further in 2020 and 2021. Milwaukee City Engineer Kevin Muhs said pandemic restrictions on public movement resulted in less traffic congestion and that may have encouraged more speeding because there was more room on the road. “Some of those bad habits seem to have lingered,” he said.
Jessica Wineberg, the city’s public policy director for Vision Zero, a city government-wide effort which began in 2022 and is aimed at reducing annual traffic deaths in Milwaukee to zero by 2037, agrees that the social isolation which accompanied the pandemic exacerbated the problem of dangerous driving. “I think lots of people felt more alienated and disconnected from each other and we retreated into our own little comforts. In a way, we kind of shut out what was going on around us and that translated to our driving.”
Localized data shows that the increase in traffic accidents resulting in injury or death has inordinately impacted predominantly minority neighborhoods where pedestrian traffic tends to be higher. A 2022 analysis by the city created a “High Injury Network” map which identified the most dangerous areas of Milwaukee for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists. The study showed that the majority of the high injury areas are located immediately north of I-94 with fewer located south of the interstate. A separate crash study commissioned by Milwaukee County also identified specific areas of concern. “That study found that 58% of the serious and fatal crashes occurred on only 10% of our road miles,” Wineberg said. Those are the traffic corridors where the city is focusing most of its efforts to curtail speeding and other reckless driving.
Reducing Speed
The Department of Public Works is employing many different types of street infrastructure improvements aimed at reducing speeds. “We’re trying to make it more difficult to exceed speed limits, especially in regard to drivers who go much faster than the limit,” Muhs said. “One way we do that is by adding curb bump-outs which create islands on the right side of streets near intersections. They discourage people from passing on the right, or what’s known around here as the ‘Milwaukee slide.’ It also makes crossing distances shorter for pedestrians and forces drivers to make slower right hand turns through intersections. We have really accelerated implementation of those in the last two years.”
Other strategies include speed humps and traffic circles on residential streets as well as flat-topped speed humps known as “speed tables” on more heavily traveled streets. Muhs said the city is also looking to reduce the number of lanes on some major thoroughfares. “Fewer traffic lanes give drivers fewer opportunities to drive above the speed limit,” he said.
Redesigning streets comes at a cost, of course. The city has committed close to $90 million toward the traffic safety improvements at a time when Milwaukee is facing daunting and well-publicized fiscal struggles. “But there’s a heavy price for not doing these things, too, if people don’t feel safe when they walk around, ride a bike or drive on city streets,” Muhs said.
Although a comprehensive study of the effectiveness of the traffic interventions won’t be completed for several years, Muhs said preliminary data suggests that they are already having a positive impact. Monitoring shows that average speeds have dropped where the new street designs have been completed.
“We know that the frequency of crashes which cause life-changing injuries or death are directly tied to speeds, so we focus on that,” he said. “We realize that there will always be accidents, but survivability depends on speed. You have only a 10 to 20% chance of death if you are hit by a car going 20 mph, but it rises to something like an 80 or 90% likelihood of death if the car is going 35 or 40 mph.”
Changing Attitudes
Wineberg said the Vision Zero project employs a comprehensive approach to reducing crashes. It not only includes systematic safety improvements in road design but also efforts to change attitudes and perceptions about driving, especially in regard to speeding. “You don’t have to speed. That’s a choice,” she said. “There are lots of stop lights in the city so racing between them doesn’t get you anywhere much faster anyway. All that speeding does is endanger yourself and others. It’s absolutely fundamental for us to rethink our own driving habits because crashes hurt and kill people. We could be the one hurt or killed or be the one who hurts or kills someone else. Going slower is the easiest way to prevent that from happening.”
Wineberg also encourages residents to use public transit because “it’s by far the safest way to travel through the city.” She said the same Milwaukee County traffic crash study which identified its most dangerous corridors also found a directly inverse pattern in which areas with the highest increases in public transit use also had lower serious crash rates. Conversely, in areas where bus ridership fell, crash rates increased.
Wineberg said Vision Zero will be launching an anti-speeding campaign this summer which she hopes will help to drive home to the public a message that having safer streets requires everyone’s participation. “Street design and construction that makes drivers slow down work, but we are also asking individual Milwaukeeans to be safe drivers who follow speed limits, to yield to pedestrians at both marked and unmarked crossings and to be aware of their surroundings,” she said.
“Because we have some severely reckless driving, it’s easy to picture ourselves as being the good driver while it’s everyone else who is bad. But realistically, many of us are going five or 10 mph over the speed limit and that really impacts average speeds. It makes it more difficult for pedestrians to cross the street. The government is working to build in self-enforcing infrastructure to slow us down, but with Vision Zero we also hope to give residents a sense of empowerment because we all can make a difference. Every time you obey the speed limit or yield at a crosswalk, you’re helping to change the norm.”
For Michael and Kathie Giorgio, however, their “norm” has already been changed forever. It changed the instant a speeding driver ran a red light on that bitterly cold Milwaukee evening. They are left to work through what could be several more months of recovery from injuries for Michael along with a mountain of new financial difficulties and obligations.
“I’m angry because we can’t force the man who hit Michael to pay for the suffering he caused,” Kathie said. “I’m angry because his insurance only paid $50,000 and, even though we had an underinsured motorist policy for up to $50,000, our insurance won’t pay us anything because they subtract what we got from the driver. Even though he was 100% at fault. We are considering a civil lawsuit, but all the guy owns is his old minivan and his house. By law he can’t be forced to sell his house so there’s really nothing to sue for. It’s not right because we might have to sell ours.”
“I can’t even call what happened an accident,” Kathie said. “I know the man didn’t run over Michael deliberately, but this feels so much bigger than an accident. I keep calling it a disaster or a catastrophe. It has affected everything we do now. We have all new worries and all new practicalities. I’m always trying to look ahead but now I just don’t know how to figure out what we’re going to do. Please, slow down.”
