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How the series came together

Saturday, April 12, 2008 11:00 PM CDT

THE SOUTHERN

Hardly a day goes by without an accident being reported somewhere in Southern Illinois.

Many residents, especially those who have spent most of their lives in the region, can point to high-frequency accident locations. Details and specifics relating to the causes and conditions of the accidents, however, are often not as commonly known.

A Southern Illinoisan team including reporters, photographers, copy editors and online staff began investigating Southern Illinois' top 10 deadliest roads last fall. The process began by using the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Fatality Analysis Reporting System Database.

The massive database includes information on every fatal accident in the United States for more than the past three decades.

To start our localized analysis, we narrowed the information down to only those fatal accidents occurring in Franklin, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, Perry, Randolph, Saline, Union and Williamson counties.

Initially, the team based the top 10 rankings off the total number of accidents occurring on each road, and Interstate 57 topped the list by a large margin. After determining the numbers may be skewed because of the high number of drivers traveling the interstate, the team decided to take its analysis one step further.

Using information from a 2005 Illinois Department of Transportation study regarding the average number of daily drivers on given roads, the team paired the number of fatal accidents with the average daily traffic. This led to the availability of the number of fatal accidents in the past 10 years per 1,000 average daily riders.

Once the team had the list of the 10 roads in this category (which did not even include I-57), the members went about further analyzing the data, looking for oddities, trends and surprises. They then took that information and planned how to best present it to you, the readers.

The result of this effort is the three-day, 10-article series that begins in today's issue of The Southern. The first day focuses on the roads themselves, while Monday and Tuesday will focus on the fatal accidents and the people involved, respectively.

The Southern staff hopes you will find the final product useful, enjoyable and enlightening. The countless hours that went into this project were done for you and your knowledge.