`Luckily,” says professional race car driver Chris Kneifel, “I’m just not a crasher. Getting into accidents out here–that just doesn’t seem to happen to me.”
With those words and a knock on the wooden paneling of his Mercedes Benz 500E, Kneifel, 33, takes to the roads of Lake County one Friday morning in search of the circumstances that seem to make so many other drivers–in his words–crashers.
The mission is to put a professional driver, in this case Kneifel, out on the roads to see what problems and bad habits he can find. He will take a route through some of the most accident-prone intersections in the area.
And almost everywhere, he will find the circumstances that put motorists in hospitals or worse:
At U.S. Highway 12 and Lake-Cook Road, where there are more accidents for the volume of traffic than anywhere in the six-county Chicago region (according to the Illinois Department of Transportation), it is the mass of cars approaching the intersection at freeway speeds, as if the stoplight were not there.
At Illinois Highway 83 and Arlington Heights Road, it is the parade of trucks thundering through the intersection with seemingly little concern for other traffic.
Down the street, where Illinois 83 meets Aptakisic Road, there is loose gravel, the dust of road construction and uneven asphalt–tests even for good drivers.
Kneifel, of course, maneuvers through it all, his nerves even and unfrazzled, his Mercedes unscathed. But he does it without the tricks or the skills that help him maintain a high rank among Trans-Am drivers worldwide.
Rather, he uses the skills that he says all drivers should possess before they tackle roads that seem perfectly safe on a map but really are as dangerous as any.
“You need a full awareness of what’s going on. With your eyes, it’s really a discipline. They need to see everything,” says Kneifel. “Most people do anything but drive when they’re in the car.”
It is the distracted driver who makes the dangerous intersections even more dangerous. True, the county’s dozen most accident-prone intersections are dangerous, an asphalt collage of lousy roads, blind corners, poor safety postings and nasty curves. Add to that mix the driver who follows too closely or the motorist who uses drive time to read a book, and it can become a positively frightful experience.
Kneifel travels slowly this day. He keeps his distance from the cars ahead of him. His eyes dart everywhere, the only indication that something else lies behind his calm demeanor. For in Kneifel’s world, when accidents happen, that phrase uttered by so many crashed-up drivers–“all of a sudden”–really means the motorist was not paying attention.
Consider: As he approaches U.S. 12 and Lake-Cook Road, Kneifel spots the full range of driver misdeeds, a veritable catalog of motorist errors on what should be only one page of this highway book.
Some observations: A driver rushing to the intersection only to slam on the brakes before a red light; another peeling out of the intersection on the green.
Then, the real offenders: a motorist wearing sunglasses on an overcast, almost dark day, and a woman applying makeup as she brakes herky-jerky style to the stoplight.
All this occurs at the worst intersection in the six-county Chicago area, as listed by the Illinois Department of Transportation.
Kneifel shakes his head. He pushes the car toward Arlington Heights Road and Lake-Cook Road, then along Arlington Heights Road to llinois 83 and over to Aptakisic Road.
Soon the Mercedes will be moving through the northern part of the county. But just as the housing developments look the same all over, so do the bad roads and bad drivers.
Doubled-up turn lanes on Arlington Heights Road might get more cars through the intersection, but they strike Kneifel as risky, especially when the road is littered with gravel. Aptakisic is particularly bad, with all the road construction.
“This,” he says, “is a zoo.”
Illinois 83 and Rollins Road near Round Lake is just as dangerous, with drivers going through red lights and stopping at green lights. There is a tough corner, too.
“You can imagine this on a rainy night–some guy chirping along and he doesn’t make the turn,” says Kneifel, handling it himself slowly and with real deliberation.
Fifty yards or so down the road is the light at Hainesville Road. Talk about trouble. Cars are pouring out of the shopping center, stacking up on a road that hardly seems able to handle the flow. Drivers are honking at each other.
In many cases, it is simply the volume of traffic that makes the intersection dangerous. These roads are clogged at 10 in the morning. Imagine the rush hours.
“Any time you have congestion like this, you’re going to have the accidents,” Kneifel says. “They’re going to happen. And any little T-bone or head-on is going to ruin your day.”
Now it’s back to Hainesville and Cedar Lake Roads. Cars positively zoom along both roads, as they do at Grass Lake Road and Illinois Highway 59, north of Lake Villa.
“People just move too fast,” Kneifel says, noting that few people ever drive the speed limit.
Kneifel drives slowly, though, which would almost seem out of character for a man who makes his living driving a high-performance automobile on weekends.
Kneifel first became interested in racing cars when he was a teenager. He spent some summers in Europe with a family friend who took him to the races. Kneifel found his calling and has been racing ever since. He has run in the Indianapolis 500 and all of the big races in the Trans-Am racing series.
And Kneifel has won, too–15 times in the Trans-Ams. He has been in the top three in 35 races. In a profession that demands experience and youth, he may be at peak performance this season.
Kneifel, of Lake Forest, also is chief instructor at Mid-Ohio Driving School, one of the country’s best, says Paul Brian, director of communications for the Chicago Automobile Trade Association.
It is a tough combination–race car driver and driving instructor. So Kneifel knows all about road conditions and speed, a driver’s mistakes and the products of those mistakes.
He drives slowly.
At Yorkhouse and Green Bay Roads, Kneifel shakes his head as cars approach the intersection as if the drivers are all running late. He shakes it again and laughs. A woman has a dog on her lap.
“There’s no way that she can drive or see or do anything with that dog on her lap,” Kneifel says.”
If there is a common denominator in all this, it is stupidity. For whatever reason, drivers caught up in getting from here to there don’t realize that they are behind the wheel of a weapon. And though many roads are dangerous, bad drivers simply exploit the dangers.
A case in point: all along Washington Street, from Waukegan through Gurnee to Illinois Highway 21. It is a fast road, with drivers trying to squeeze every second of green from the lights. Even as they approach the rises in the road that obscure sight lines, they push.
“If something happens, there’s really not a lot you can do about it,” Kneifel says. “These aren’t fender-benders when they happen here; they’re wrecks.”
Kneifel turns onto Illinois 21–Milwaukee Avenue–and heads south. There is relief in his voice. A nearly three-hour tour of Lake County’s most dangerous intersections is near an end, save what officials say is the 12th most dangerous in the six-county area.
It is Illinois 21 at Illinois Highway 60, a.k.a. Milwaukee Avenue and Town Line Road. The crush of mall traffic from shopping centers on three of the four corners rivals traffic anywhere.
As Kneifel approaches the intersection, a danger that he had not figured on appears: geese. They are waddling across the road, and not everyone is stopping for them. Then comes the traffic from mall exits and Town Line Road, then another round of mall exits.
Kneifel stops at a light and looks around. The turn signal is not directly over the turn lane. The westbound lanes of Town Line Road rise as they approach Milwaukee Avenue, obscuring lines of sight. Kneifel sees accidents waiting to happen.
And they do, often, to hear the Illinois Department of Transportation tell it. But then accidents happen all over the county, all over every county. Kneifel is not surprised. He is a top driver, and he teaches other people to drive. What he knows about them is no secret. They make mistakes, he says. They do not pay attention. They do not take into account the dangers of a road–the bad intersections, the bad pavement–when they get behind the wheel.
“It shouldn’t surprise anybody that there are a lot of accidents,” he says as he brings the car to a stop. “It shouldn’t surprise anybody that there’ll be more.
“There’ll always be more.”
