By Dave Dahl

SPRINGFIELD – Our good neighbors to the northwest shared some strategies and experiences about getting Illinois closer to zero fatalities.

Kristine Hernandez coordinates such a safety program for the Minnesota Department of Transportation and said before all agencies got together, a county engineer would not even know the sheriff, for example, much less communicate; a dispatcher wound up sending the helicopter ambulance to a hospital farther away from the scene because it was in the same jurisdiction as the crash.

IDOT’s Cindy Watters, who is in charge of safety programs and engineering, says it’s important to bring people and agencies together.

“We’ve brought in the four E’s: engineering, law enforcement, education, and EMS,” says Cindy Watters, IDOT’s bureau chief for safety programs and engineering. “The plan is to get everyone together to work together to reduce the fatalities on the roadways. At IDOT, people think of us as the roadway, the designers, but you can’t engineer your way out of everything.”

Illinois’ traffic deaths are edging back up over a thousand a year.

The Partnering for Zero Deaths conference was at a Springfield hotel Tuesday; lest anybody miss the point, a wrecked car was on display in the parking lot.

Dave Dahl can be reached at [email protected].