Davenport tops list of dangerous intersections

Font Size:

By Nicole Nyarko/ QUAD-CITY TIMES | Saturday, March 30, 2002 12:10 AM CST | () comments

Once again, Davenport is No. 1 in Iowa. But it's a dubious distinction that won't have anyone waving those gigantic, foam index fingers in the air.

In fact, the city not only tops the list of most dangerous intersections in the state with Brady Street and Kimberly Road, but it also has seven of the top 10 on a list compiled by State Farm Insurance Co.

In 1999, Davenport had three of Iowa's five worst intersections, according to State Farm. In 2001, Davenport had the four worst in the state. In its latest rankings, Brady Street and Kimberly Road is followed in order by the intersections of Eastern Avenue and Kimberly, 53rd Street and Elmore Avenue and Kimberly and Elmore. Spring Street and Kimberly came in ninth, with 53rd Street and Welcome Way closing out the top 10.

On the plus side, State Farm, Iowa's largest auto insurer with 20 percent of the market, is providing a $20,000 grant for a professional engineering study of the Jersey Ridge Road and East 53rd Street corner. At No. 8 on its list, that intersection is recognized by State Farm for the highest incidence of crashes in Iowa.

The $20,000 check will be presented at 4:30 p.m. Monday during a Davenport Committee of the Whole meeting at City Hall.

"We see this grant as an opportunity to study this intersection (Jersey Ridge Road and East 53rd Street) and determine if improvements to traffic operations and safety are in order," City Traffic Engineer Gary Statz said Friday.

City Public Works Director Dee Bruemmer has said that major street improvements are planned at the 53rd-Elmore and 53rd-Welcome Way intersections, with millions of dollars to spent in the next two years to make those corners safer.

Davenport police Capt. David Struckman said the department does not recognize State Farm's list. He said the statistics used by city police coincide closely with the information compiled by the Iowa Department of Transportation, or DOT. He said the two lists differ in terms of how the data is compiled.

The differences can be dramatic. A DOT spokesman said last summer that the agency ranks Brady and Kimberly 373rd out of 17,000 intersections across the state at which accidents have been reported. The DOT ranked the Des Moines intersection of Southwest 9th Street and Porter Avenue as the worst, and a state traffic safety engineer said the agency gives more weight to the severity of accidents and the amount of traffic.

Struckman said the police department is fully aware of the potential danger at many Davenport intersections, though.

"These intersections are clearly high-volume traffic areas, and we know accidents occur there. The most major accidents that happen at Kimberly and Eastern and Kimberly and Bridge are people not paying attention, resulting in rear-end collisions."

Lisa Vonnahme, a State Farm public affairs officer, said the insurance company's list is based on a "danger index" that weighs crashes with injury more heavily than those without and accidents with higher amounts of physical damage more heavily than those with less.

"We are involved in this project because we are involved in insuring auto safety and want to reduce the amount of crashes at intersections," she said, adding that the project should help reduce the number of rear-end collisions.

By comparison, the index that State Farm uses for its rankings has assigned Brady Street and Kimberly Road a figure of 647. The worst Illinois intersection, North Avenue and Illinois 83 in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst, has an index figure of 1,613. The worst in the nation is a suburban Miami intersection with an index of 2,568.

Nicole Nyarko can be contacted at (563) 383-2202 or nnyarko@qctimes.com.