It's a long-shot safety campaign known in shorthand as "zero
deaths." Cutting the death toll to zero in crashes across all
forms of transportation is an aggressive and perhaps unrealistic
goal, but Illinois and more than half of the other states are
working on it. The long-sought target has been virtually
achieved over the last four years by U.S. commercial aviation.
Airlines operating in the U.S. have not suffered a fatal
accident since the crash of a Colgan Air commuter jet near
Buffalo, N.Y., on Feb. 12, 2009. But over the same four-year
period, more than 100,000 people have perished in wrecks on
highways and other roads across America. The death toll has
exceeded 32,000 people each year nationally in recent years and
peaked at 43,510 in 2005, according to the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration. Almost 1,000 fatalities occurred
in Illinois in 2012. Totally eliminating vehicle crashes is not
practical, at least not unless technology ever reaches the point
of removing driver behavior and human er