River News: Our View

Every year we have come to expect the news stories that document the ongoing parade of car crashes, injuries, and deaths that occur along the two-lane stretch of U.S. Hwy 51 south of Minocqua to Hwy. 8.

It’s sad that these very real human tragedies have become routine in the Northwoods, and this year it was sadder still as two of our most cherished and beloved long-time residents — Greg and Audrey Bohn — became the latest victims.

They weren’t the first, and, if the state doesn’t do something to make Hwy. 51 south of town safer, they won’t be the last.

As our story in today’s newspaper documents, the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office has responded to nearly 1,000 multi-vehicle crashes along that stretch of highway since 2010, and that figure does not include incidents handled by the state patrol.

Again as our story reports, Oneida County’s top three most frequently crashed intersections were found between Hwy. D and Hwy. 8 along Hwy. 51, specifically the intersections at Hwy. K and Hwy. 51, Rocky Run Road and Hwy. 51, and Hwy. L and Hwy. 51.

Of those crashes reported by Oneida County, 27 of them have resulted in one or more fatality.

Captain Tyler Young of the Oneida County sheriff’s department has summarized local opinion very straightforwardly: “I would venture to guess that it is probably the deadliest stretch of two-lane highway in the state of Wisconsin.”

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees, and by “not everyone” we mean the state of Wisconsin, and specifically the Evers administration and the state Department of Transportation (DOT).

Speaking to The Lakeland Times about the corridor, the DOT’s Rich Handrick said: “Hwy. 51 in this area is performing on average so it’s not standing out as a safety problem as a corridor.”

So on the one hand we have the county’s sheriff’s department, as well as citizens and first responders from throughout the area, talking about how dangerous the highway corridor is — based on crash data and personal experience and knowledge — while on the other hand we have the DOT shrugging it all off, except for one obvious intersection at Hwy. K and Swamp Lake Road which they say they will get around to fixing — somehow, someway — in 2027.

So what is going on?

Well, on one level, it’s bureaucratic arbitrariness. By their very definition, government bureaucracies exist to enforce regulations. Regulations require rules to live by, and those rules are built upon foundations of arbitrary numbers and constructs.

To function as enforcers, bureaucracies must be rigid in their organization, and they are in turn rigid with their rules. No deviation is allowed from government mandates, or the whole house of cards (meaning government infallibility) falls down.

So, when the DOT says that a highway segment must score at least one standard deviation above the statewide average crash rate for its peer group to earn a danger flag, it means exactly that. If the highway segment scores .99 or .95 — which in the real world means no practical difference in safety — it won’t make the cut. 

And that’s what’s happened on the Hwy. 51 segment that stretches 11 miles from County Hwy. K to just north of County Hwy. D. It scores .96 instead of 1, and so, in the bureaucratic mind, that doesn’t mean it’s just about as dangerous as a flagged roadway segment, it means it’s not dangerous at all, hence Handrick’s assessment that it doesn’t stand out as a safety problem.

They feel confident about that assessment even when they look at the individual 11 segments into which they divided the 11-mile corridor, finding that just two of them, covering about 1.3 miles, score above the one standard deviation threshold.

Now, outside a bureaucracy, where rational people live, the situation would be approached much differently. First, that .96 deviation for the entire stretch would be viewed as a red flag itself because it is so close to the arbitrary line for warranting a “danger” flag. 

So rational human beings would dig deeper by looking at those 11 individual segments, and, because they are not bureaucrats, what they would see — by not looking only for segments that scored at least 1 or higher — is that nine of the 11 segments score above the state’s average crash rate.

Those other segments might not be fully one crash above the state average, but it’s enough that, all totaled, the entire segment is almost 1 above the average, and that should tell officials that something is seriously amiss, especially when the data indicates that the above-average crash rate covers 10 of the 11 miles of that stretch, and when 40 percent of all intersections in that area do earn danger flags.

The DOT is not seeing the forest for the trees, in other words, or perhaps we should say it is not seeing the carnage for the crash numbers. Behind every number, there is a person who wants to live, not an arbitrary data point whose crash just missed the cut off.

There is something else going on, and that is a distinct bias against northern Wisconsin, which the administration of Gov. Tony Evers has taken to a reckless extreme. Since he became governor, our newspaper has been filled with stories about how the Evers administration has short-changed the Northwoods, in everything from tax policy to representation on policy-making councils. 

When it comes to the Northwoods, it seems Evers has two words for us: Drop dead. If so, Hwy. 51 south of town is helping in that respect. The bottom line is, Evers and the Democrats want us to help pay for baseball stadiums and corporate (Fox)cons in southern Wisconsin, but they don’t have any interest in helping us stay alive on our local highways.

This attitude is exactly why we hear DOT officials talk about “fiscal reality” in explaining why they can’t fix this dangerous roadway. The DOT’s Handrick put it this way: “Realistically there’s a lot more traffic in the southern part of the state than there is in the northern part of the state, and so we know we’re always in competition for funding so we fight for what we can get and make the improvements that we can.”

That’s technically true — there’s more traffic in southern Wisconsin than in northern Wisconsin — but that again misses the forest for the trees. It ignores the specific flow of traffic along Hwy. 51 during the tourist seasons, a nonstop line of traffic that clogs that corridor and routinely causes massive congestion.

Indeed, in a recent court ruling, then Oneida County circuit court judge Michael Bloom observed that Hwy. 51 was “not only the main thoroughfare through the town of Minocqua, but also the primary arterial highway for all north central Wisconsin.”

To put that in perspective, Oneida County alone generated $383 million in tourism-generated income in 2023, and literally billions of tourism dollars are flowing up and down that corridor. 

Now that’s fiscal reality. And here’s another reality — letting that highway remain as dangerous as it is threatens the entire infrastructure of northern tourism. It threatens to kill the golden goose that the governor likes to talk about so much.

To be sure, this is not a recent problem. It pre-dates Evers, though he has exacerbated the neglect. But for decades northern Wisconsin has been a second-class citizen when it comes to both parties in Madison.

That politicians have surrendered to inertia and excuses for so long, letting our resident population get maimed and die on dangerous highways while feathering the nests of special interests downstate, is evil enough.

That they continue to do so given the growing influx of tourists and new residents is even more unforgivable.

We call on Gov. Evers to immediately direct the state DOT to re-assess the situation and prioritize fixing this corridor, which returns much more money in tourism spending than the state will ever spend fixing it. We call for the DOT to quit trying to cut corners by focusing on just one intersection or by trying to absurdly add a roundabout on a congested rural highway, as some in the agency have suggested. 

Those aren’t solutions. It’s called cutting corners to try and get the locals to shut up.

And we call upon our state representatives, Rep. Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander) and state Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk), to immediately convene oversight hearings on this matter to galvanize appropriate highway measures.

Many years ago, in 1980, an editorial in this paper issued a call to action about this very same stretch of highway: 

“No more time should be wasted in taking the necessary measures to prevent more fatal accidents, more injuries, more property damage on Hwy. 51,” the editorial stated. 

It’s beyond sad that, 44 years later, we have to write the same editorial again, but we do. The time for action is now. The government must be held accountable. Lives are at stake each and every day, and that’s all that should be necessary to say.