When you drive down residential streets in Brookfield, you might expect to see children playing in their front yards after school or walking around the neighborhood in the warmer seasons. But on the 3600 block of Prairie Avenue, that’s not the case.
Some residents told the Landmark they no longer allow their children to play outside due to a pattern of destructive, speeding-related crashes they’ve witnessed.
But Brookfield police told the Landmark they have studied traffic patterns on the block since 2022 using varied approaches and have not found reason to make further traffic control changes.
“Since I’ve been there in 2020, I’ve seen about five accidents just on my block, within my view from my home. They’re not just fender benders. Multiple times, cars have been totaled,” one resident said. “People fly down Prairie. I mean, it’s almost like drag racing sometimes.”
The resident, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid potential community backlash, said drivers “top out sometimes at 50, 60 mph” on the street, which has a speed limit of 30 mph. She said she now backs into her driveway so she can pull out onto Prairie Avenue due to her fear that she could be struck by a speeding driver she couldn’t see if she were to back out.
Another resident, Dustin Carper, said he didn’t realize there was a pattern of speeding-related crashes until it affected his family in December 2023.
“We first noticed it when our car got hit,” he said. “Our car was parked in front of our house in the middle of the day on, I think it was a Tuesday, and got completely totaled [by] a big family SUV.”
He said he felt fortunate he and his wife weren’t loading their children into or out of the car when the crash occurred around midday.
Afterward, he remembered multiple previous traffic incidents on the block, including when one car sideswiped another several years ago and flipped onto its hood in the middle of the road.
Both residents recalled another incident around 3 a.m. on Jan. 27 where a driver hit a neighbor’s street-parked car, pushing it into the car parked in front of it and up onto the curb. The crash destroyed the front left side and hood of the car and left the other parked car’s trunk and back bumper dented.
Carper said he counted three traffic-related incidents in the area since his family’s car was destroyed by the speeding driver, who he said was driving while intoxicated.
Motorcyclists were seriously injured in crashes on Prairie Avenue in 2015 and in 2021, according to Landmark archives. While the 2015 crash took place at Congress Park Avenue near Ehlert Park, the 2021 crash occurred at the intersection with Grant Avenue, which marks the south boundary of the 3600 block. There were two other crashes there between 2016 and 2020. While there are stop signs for the intersection on Grant Avenue, there are none on Prairie Avenue.
Carper and his neighbor aren’t the only concerned residents. They said they have a group chat representing two more households on the block with other residents who also fear for their own, and their children’s, safety.
Police say data shows no need for changes
Residents say they’ve reached out to the Brookfield Police Department for help but that the department’s response hasn’t eased their worries.
“I brought up, to the chief of police, my concerns about safety on the street, and [police] were very receptive to it. Multiple times, they put out a speed detector to see if there was any sort of speeding issue, and they said that there wasn’t,” the anonymous neighbor said.
Brookfield Deputy Police Chief Terry Schreiber said the department has taken residents’ concerns “seriously” and investigated them “thoroughly” but that traffic data collected from 2022 through 2024 showed no need for additional adjustments along Prairie Avenue after Brookfield improved sightlines at the intersection of Prairie and Grant avenues in 2022. He said street parking was pushed back by 80 feet from the intersection on the north and south sides of Prairie Avenue to increase drivers’ visibility as they approach.
Schreiber said the department’s first response to residents’ concerns was to conduct special watches along Prairie Avenue, “where officers are going to sit out there at various times throughout the day, through all the shifts, and conduct radar out there” while watching for traffic violations. He said these took place after the sightlines had already been widened, so there was no data from before that change for comparison.
“We conducted multiple traffic details from 2022 to 2024, and it was a combination of officers in marked cars, also officers in unmarked cars,” he said. “There are certainly times where, if you put a marked car out there, people can tend to follow the rules better … It isn’t always indicative of exactly what that behavior is when there’s not a marked car out there, so we tried to do that with a mix of both.”
He said there was no noticeable difference in the data collected by officers in marked police cars compared to those in unmarked cars.
The department also used a “covert speed radar unit” — “which is just a small box mounted to a pole,” Schrieber said — on the 3600 block of Prairie Avenue four times for about two weeks each from 2022 to 2024 to collect data on traffic patterns without alerting drivers.
“We monitored approximately 50,000 vehicles [overall], and the result of monitoring those vehicles was an average speed of 29 mph in the 30-mph zone,” he said, adding the unit was employed at different times of year over the timespan.
He said a “traffic safety committee” comprised of one representative each from Brookfield’s police, fire, community development and public works departments looked at the police department’s data, as well as data collected by village engineers from Hancock Engineering, Brookfield’s contracted engineering firm.
“As a traffic review committee, we looked at what the analysis was from all the different enforcement details that were done there [and] the speed radar analysis along with a village engineering study,” he said. “They looked at accident data from the past three years on Prairie, from 31st Street to the railroad tracks [at Brookfield Avenue], and, as far as the engineer findings, there were no metrics that indicated any additional changes needed in that area as far as infrastructure or any type of speed reduction.”
Despite the pattern residents say they’ve noticed, Schreiber said data showed crashes happened at a similar rate on Prairie Avenue as on other well-traveled “collector routes” in town, like Maple Avenue.
“We even dug into what the reasons for any crashes in that area were, and none of them were indicative of any type of a roadway engineering problem,” he said. “Some of them weren’t even related to speed, actually. It was some things like a DUI [or] the physicality of the actual driver, and having a medical problem is why they crashed. There was nothing area-specific about why the accidents happened.”
Residents remain unsatisfied
Despite the police department’s reasons for not making changes, residents said they felt police haven’t done enough.
“It seems like they’ll do something for a couple of weeks, and we’ll see a [police] car parked there … at the intersections, and then nothing,” Carper said. “Nothing happens, and then there’s another accident.”
Carper’s neighbor said she suggested that police add “Stop for pedestrians” signs at crosswalks along Prairie Avenue, as there are no stop signs on the street from Washington Avenue to Brookfield Avenue, but Schreiber said police haven’t added more signage to avoid overwhelming drivers.
“One of the concerns is that, when you do put up signage like the warning sign,” as opposed to regulatory signs like a stop sign or speed limit sign, “where there’s no metric saying there’s a specific problem, it ends up having the possibility of detracting from what the actual signage is in that area,” he said.
Carper said he felt adding stop signs along Prairie Avenue could reduce the risk of crashes on the street.
“If you look at … how much they’ve done on Grand [Avenue] around the library specifically, that, I’m sure, has resulted in fewer people speeding through there,” he said. “It just doesn’t feel like a big ask to get a stop sign.”
Vernon Avenue, parallel to Prairie Avenue and one block west of it, has stop signs at both Lincoln and Grant avenues. Sunnyside Avenue, one more block west, has stop signs at Washington and Brookfield avenues like Prairie, but it runs one-way north. Forest Avenue, one block east of Prairie, only has stop signs at those intersections, too, but it does not extend past either road. All three roads have speed limits of 25 mph compared to Prairie Avenue’s 30 mph.
Schreiber said the police department will continue to monitor traffic in the area to see if the data changes and starts to show a need for new regulatory signage to slow drivers.
“We understand that people see crashes in close proximity to their residence and, at times, they have the perception that vehicles are speeding,” he said. “We don’t take that concern lightly. That’s why we implement all these issues and tag all the experts in as well, to make sure that we’re comprehensively reviewing all of the data possible for the area to make the right, data-driven approach from there.”
But residents on the block still fear for the safety of their families and neighbors along the street.
“You don’t really, truly experience the depth of the craziness of Prairie unless you actually live on Prairie, unless you are walking up and down and driving up and down the street on a daily basis,” Carper’s neighbor said. “People don’t stop for you when you’re in the crosswalk, even if you have a baby in a stroller. They’ll just fly by.”
