MINNEAPOLIS — Darian Keezer walks his kids to their bus stop on the corner of Lowry Avenue N & Colfax Avenue N on weekday mornings, but Wednesday morning, someone beat them there.
"There was a car right on their bus stop," he said. "If we would have sent them out a minute or two early, they would have been standing there."
Keezer called his children's school and the bus company, and says they told him they'd start picking the kids up in front of his house, instead.
But Keezer says this isn't the first time he's had concerns about the intersection just down the street from his home.
"Just in the last couple months, we've seen the two accidents up on the curb," he said. "Last winter, a car came and smashed up some cars right here."
Records from Minneapolis Police show there have been at least five crashes with injuries at the intersection in the last year, but those are only the crashes to which police responded.
"Oh, I'm sure there's more," Keezer said.
Those crashes include one in August, in which a truck slammed into an apartment building, leaving 12 people with minor injuries. Police say the driver in that case was heading down Colfax Ave. and had a medical emergency.
But for the many other crashes he's seen, Keezer points to another cause.
"The problem is right here it goes from two lanes and then all of a sudden it goes to one lane." he said. "A lot of people, I don't know if they don't notice the merge sign, or what ... there's a lot of high-speed driving, people drive pretty crazy."
The City of Minneapolis has labeled Lowry Avenue a "high injury" street, as part of their Vision Zero plan to eliminate deaths and serious injuries on Minneapolis roads.
After analyzing a decade of reported crashes, the city mapped which streets see the most serious crashes. They found that within that 10-year span, just 9 percent of city streets saw 70 percent of the serious crashes. They labeled those streets, including Lowry, "high injury" streets. The city says they hope to make improvements within the next three years.