Where are the most dangerous streets near you?

This interactive map plots every pedestrian fatality from 2008-2019. Zoom in and drag, or search for any U.S. address (or city/state) by clicking on the magnifying glass on the left side of the map. You can also use the other tools in the toolbar with the search button to draw a shape around a particular area to isolate the deaths in a specific area. Problems viewing the map? View it in a new page here. If the map appears small on your desktop/laptop, click the second icon from the right on the bottom of the map to convert to a larger desktop view.

Go a little deeper into the data with this more sophisticated look. You can filter by age, race/ethnicity, state and other criteria, and then see a year-over-year chart of fatalities by those filters below the map. Problems with the map? View it in a new page.

These maps were generated using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, provided by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. *A total of 564 fatalities from 2008-2019 were excluded due to poor location data.

Metro-area rankings and data

This table shows the Pedestrian Danger Index (PDI) and other fatality statistics for each of the 100 largest metro areas (defined by the U.S. Census Bureau) in the country.

• The higher a metro area’s PDI, the more dangerous it is for people walking.
• Tables are sortable by any column, but default to the highest PDI (most dangerous) first.
• These table are also available in the appendix of the full report.

State rankings

In addition to metro areas, Dangerous by Design also examines statewide PDI. After that table, brief state reports provide yet another layer of state-level data.

This table below shows the PDI for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as change since the last report

• More information on change in PDI since Dangerous by Design 2019 and other pieces of state-level data are available in the appendix of the full report.

What else can be done?

We have the recipe in our hands. At the federal level, we need a strong, federal Complete Streets policy as a first major step, but here are nine other concrete actions that policymakers, local leaders, engineers, and others can take at the state, metropolitan, or local level.

State actions

1. Set performance targets that will improve safety. State DOTs must be held accountable for making reductions in serious injuries and fatalities and should be penalized for failing to meet those targets. They certainly shouldn’t receive funding for plans to increase fatalities. Read more in the full report on page 11.

2. Prioritize safety over vehicle movement. Though states might have a long list of goals or objectives for their transportation system, moving vehicles quickly and efficiently and maintaining pavement conditions generally take precedence. One way to make safety a higher priority is to get rid of the “level of service” design metric. Level of service, used by nearly all transportation agencies, measures the success of a street solely based on vehicle speeds, versus how many different users it is moving, and to where. All roadway design rules and guides should be revamped to make building safe roads for all users the standard in developed urban and rural areas, where people will be — as opposed to the current approach that requires costly and lengthy processes to get exempted from a vehicle only approach.. 

3. Provide state transportation officials and engineers with the most up-to-date training and education on implementing Complete Streets. In states that have made a policy commitment to Complete Streets, often the professional staff tapped to implement changes lack the knowledge required, or the policies and decision-making frameworks already in place need to be updated to support Complete Streets. At the request of state or city DOTs, the National Complete Streets Coalition (and other programs within Smart Growth America) have provided staff with the training needed to embed Complete Streets in their day-to-day work and make safer projects a reality.

State or local actions

1. Prioritize projects that will benefit those who suffer disproportionately. Some groups, including people of color and people walking in lower-income communities, are disproportionately struck and killed while walking. To address this, decision-makers should prioritize the projects that would benefit these vulnerable users. For example, the Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, when deciding which projects to fund in their selection process, awards extra points to projects that will improve safety for people walking or biking in certain disadvantaged areas.

2. Embrace the flexibility provided by FHWA to design safer streets. Updated design guidance from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in 2016 gave states and cities wide latitude to design streets to best suit local needs and rolled back old regulations that treated all streets and roads like highways. This cleared the way for states, metro areas, and local communities to use federal dollars to design safer streets, yet many states falsely claim that federal guidelines continue to restrict innovative street design.

3. Design roads to reduce speeds wherever possible. For people on foot, the likelihood of surviving a crash decreases rapidly as speeds increase past 30 mph. The federal government already knows that excessive speed is a deadly problem in our nation’s transportation system—the National Transportation Safety Board recently acknowledged this in a powerful report to FHWA. The current practice of measuring how fast most traffic travels on a road and then setting speed limits so that only 15 percent of the drivers are exceeding that limit results in artificially high speed limits—and unsafe streets for everyone. Rather than designing roads that encourage speeding and then relying upon enforcement, states and cities should design roads to encourage safer, slower driving speeds in the first place.

4. Pass actionable Complete Streets policies that lay the groundwork for implementation. The National Complete Streets Coalition’s policy framework provides guidance on how to craft a strong policy that sets up clear next steps to embed Complete Streets in routine transportation planning. A policy that never gets implemented produces the same outcomes as never passing a policy in the first place.

5. Stop referring to pedestrian fatalities as unavoidable “accidents.” City and state leaders should set an example by replacing the word “accident” with “crash” when discussing these preventable deaths. It’s a small change that can make a big difference. NHTSA in particular needs to revisit its communications to the public and the press. The agency should stop their victim blaming approach that focuses on how the most vulnerable users should prevent being hit and transition to a new approach that reminds roadway owners that their designs should naturally encourage safe behavior and that communicates to drivers how seriously they need to take driving. 

6. Test out bold, creative approaches to safer street design. Poor street design is neither an insurmountable nor expensive problem. Some cities have found success by testing out low-cost, short-term interventions to create safer streets and then measuring the results to gauge the impact of their projects to work toward permanent solutions.

Latanya Byrd tells a personal story of loss and grief on Roosevelt Boulevard, the most deadly street in Philadelphia, PA. With 12 lanes through most of its length, 700+ crashes per year, and several deaths of people walking each year, it’s a prime example of a street designed for speed over safety, and Latanya tells the personal story of how this dangerous street affected her family.

Advocates Dr. Scott M. Crawford and Gladys Bunzy give a ground-level perspective on what it’s like to rely on transit, walk and get around using a motorized wheelchair and other assistive devices in Jackson, MS, the #7 most dangerous large metro area in this year’s Dangerous by Design report.