The deadliest roads in America
MEMPHIS — After his brother was fatally struck by a vehicle while crossing the seven lanes of Jackson Avenue, Keith Smith found a single clue: a chunk of broken headlight that he suspected came from a utility truck.
The impact separated David Booker’s skull from the bones in his neck, left his brain bleeding, tore a lung and caused internal injuries, according to an autopsy report. Doctors declared him brain-dead a day later. With little sign of a police investigation, Smith fruitlessly sought surveillance video from a nearby McDonald’s. He stood vigil on Jackson Avenue for days, hoping to spot a heavy Ford truck with a shattered headlight — until, Smith said, people started looking at him as if he was crazy.
The case remains listed as an unsolved hit-and-run — written off, in Smith’s view, as just another pedestrian death in a rough part of town.
“Oh, well, another person got hit, but, you know, it’s common,” Smith said. “It’s like it’s part of life right there.”
The stretch of Jackson Avenue is among the deadliest roads in Memphis, itself the nation’s most dangerous metro area for pedestrians. But it’s not just Jackson Avenue, and it’s not just Memphis.
Booker’s death in September 2022 fit an escalating pattern on America’s roads. Between 2010 and 2023, yearly deaths caused by cars and trucks striking pedestrians rose 70%, an examination of federal data and other public records by The Washington Post shows.
City by city across the United States, the surge — from 4,302 deaths in 2010 to 7,314 in 2023 — largely occurred on roads with a few things in common. The deaths were concentrated on multilane roads, with the largest clusters occurring on thoroughfares that cut through economically distressed neighborhoods and had fading commercial strips, according to the Post investigation.
Wide roads and fast-moving vehicles — especially when combined with signs of poverty, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and a lack of pedestrian-focused roadway improvements — produced a pattern of death-by-vehicle that is uniquely American, according to the investigation, which draws on crash data, census records and thousands of pages of police reports, as well as interviews with current and former officials, engineering experts and victims’ families.
More people in these areas lack cars and are forced to walk, while many of those killed tended to be impaired and were taking risks trying to cross, the review found.
The country has become a global outlier, as fatality rates in such incidents have declined almost 30% in other developed countries in the decade ending in 2023.
The Post analysis documents, for the first time, a sharp increase in places with clusters of pedestrian deaths, revealing the deadliest neighborhoods and stretches of road in hundreds of cities. The number of locations with at least three recent pedestrian deaths clustered within a mile of one another tripled during this period, from more than 275 in 2010 to more than 825 in 2023, The Post found. Those hot spots increased most in states in the southern half of the country, such as Tennessee, North Carolina and Arizona.
“It’s just turning into a death trap in some parts of these cities,” said Nick Ferenchak, chairman of the Transportation Research Board’s pedestrian committee, which is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
In addition, more than 3,800 people were killed almost immediately when they were struck in 2023, an indication that high speeds and larger vehicles are making impacts more violent. The rate at which pedestrians are declared dead at the scene of the crash has more than doubled, according to The Post’s analysis.
Despite abundant evidence of dangers, state and city agencies have been slow to invest in improvements such as safer places to cross or take steps to curb vehicle speeds, according to experts and former officials. A priority among local transportation agencies remains avoiding traffic jams rather than responding to concerns of pedestrians in the most danger, who are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods and wield less political influence.
The federal government has urged communities to enhance pedestrian safety and provided some money for solutions, but it has not tied the bulk of funding to better safety outcomes.
While the Biden administration provided modest financial backing to improve pedestrian safety, the Transportation Department under President Donald Trump is trying to claw back some of that money from several cities. A federal official told Boston’s transportation agency in September that the administration was pulling funds for a project it deemed “hostile to motor vehicles,” according to correspondence obtained by The Post.
In a statement, the Transportation Department said the withdrawal of grants was part of a shift away from what it called the Biden administration’s “costly social and climate initiatives that de-prioritized the needs of American drivers and increased congestion risks.”
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The danger zones
The Post investigation used data from police reports and other records collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, focusing from when pedestrian deaths began to climb in 2010 to the most recent year with data available, 2023. It revealed short stretches of road that have become exceptionally deadly. In Albuquerque, 34 pedestrians were killed along a three-mile stretch of Central Avenue between 2010 and 2023. In Los Angeles, 33 people were killed on Western Avenue just south of downtown during that time.
And in Houston, vehicles hit and killed 36 people in a 3½-mile section of Westheimer Road, which runs through the city’s west side. The fatalities included 19-year-old Hailey Reed, who had recently moved to the city to pursue a nursing degree. In the early hours of Oct. 15, 2022, she chased after a drunk friend into the nine-lane road, where a pickup plowed into her, causing Reed to “go airborne approximately 20 feet,” according to a police report. She died at the scene.
“She hadn’t even started life yet,” said Michael Watford, her grandfather.
In Tampa, Hillsborough Avenue cuts a 12½-mile swath across the community’s north side that has seen 67 fatalities from 2010 to 2023. The victims ranged from 11 to 94 years old.
Felix de la Uz was on his regular walk with his wife on a Saturday afternoon in 2018 when a Honda Civic rode up onto the sidewalk. De la Uz, 80, pushed his wife to safety before being hit hard enough to smash a hole in the car’s windshield and be sent sliding across the parking lot of a supermarket. Tampa police said he “died a hero.”
But among the largest metro areas, Memphis’s streets are the most deadly for people on foot, according to The Post analysis. Its fatality rate more than quadrupled between 2010 and 2023. In the city, not including suburbs, deaths peaked at 82 in 2022, dipped to 57 in 2023 and fell to 47 last year. The toll is on course to be similar in 2025, with 42 deaths this year. While deaths remain relatively high, city officials say the recent declines indicate their efforts to redesign streets are paying off.
Booker, 35, was the 11th pedestrian killed in the past decade on a 1½-mile stretch of Jackson Avenue.
The road, seven miles from the city’s heart, has been documented by the city and state as disproportionately lethal but remains mostly unimproved aside from walk signals near where Booker was hit. Cars and trucks roar past apartments, restaurants, corner stores and gas stations, often well above the strip’s 40 mph speed limit. Within two years of Booker’s death, two more people were killed by drivers at the same intersection.
The national data shows how the design of such roads is closely linked to the fatality rate: Those with three lanes or more are by far the most dangerous, because they enable higher speeds. Above 30 mph, fatality risk increases sharply. At 50 mph, someone’s chance of survival when struck is less than 1 in 5.
The family of Dartrail Sherrie Taylor, a 36-year-old mother of three, said her injuries after being hit by two vehicles on a dark Memphis road left her unrecognizable at her funeral, despite efforts to reconstruct her face.
“That’s when I broke down, because I was like, that is not my sister,” Derika Walker said. “I was in denial for a long time, because I didn’t get a chance to really see her and say goodbye.”
Pedestrian fatalities are more common in more heavily Black and Latino neighborhoods and those with higher poverty rates. Black pedestrians died at a rate double that of Whites, while for Native Americans the rate was more than five times as high.
For many people living in the pedestrian death zones identified by The Post, walking is a matter of necessity. On average, nearly a fifth of households in surrounding neighborhoods don’t have access to a car — more than double the rate in other communities — according to a comparison of crash data and Census Bureau records.
“Wherever we have these hot spots, these communities are not getting what they need,” said Robert J. Schneider, an urban planning professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee who has studied how crashes are clustered. “Yes, it’s the design, but it’s more than that. There’s bigger socioeconomic problems, lack of political power, recognition, those are consistent.”
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High speeds, large vehicles
Highway engineers and other specialists said the jump in fatalities has multiple causes. The vehicles on American roads have grown bigger and heavier, and those with tall front ends have been shown to be more deadly for pedestrians, according to an analysis by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Deaths have surged at night, when, research shows, drivers often fail to see someone in the road.
The risk of drivers becoming distracted by increasingly ubiquitous smartphones has been well established by safety researchers. In the overwhelming majority of cases analyzed by The Post, it was not known to investigators whether the driver was distracted, and fatality data shows just a few dozen crashes each year involving a driver distracted by their phone. Also, experts said, widespread cellphone use would not explain why some places have disproportionately higher rates of death.
The most dangerous areas are no longer in congested downtowns but in less dense neighborhoods toward the edges of cities, according to a study by University of New Mexico researchers. Those roads on urban outskirts were constructed decades ago to connect towns before the era of interstate highways. As businesses and residences have sprawled around them, these arteries now feature people walking to fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, liquor stores, supermarkets and more.
“What we’re asking those roads to do for our society is changing as the land use is changing,” said Brian Tefft, who has studied pedestrian deaths in Memphis and other cities for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, a nonprofit research group.
Traffic signals with crosswalks are often up to a mile apart, leaving pedestrians facing the choice between walking far out of their way or attempting a dash through traffic. Wide corners or dedicated lanes that avoid intersections, designed to allow drivers to turn without stopping, pose a risk even where there are crossings.
Road designs enabling high speeds have led to more people being declared dead at the scene, experts say. For example, more than a quarter of victims in the Bakersfield, California, metro area died at the scene in 2010. By 2023, the figure had jumped to more than 70%, coinciding with a sharp increase in the total number of deaths.
In June 2023, 55-year-old Scott Lynn Brown was crossing North Chester Avenue, just outside Bakersfield, with a companion when they were hit by a Ford F-250. The woman with him was knocked to the side, surviving the crash, but Brown was shunted down the road. The driver allegedly fled, leaving behind a 20-by-30-foot field of debris and a “biological fluid trail” extending 10 feet, according to the police report. Brown was the fourth pedestrian to die in that part of North Chester Avenue in just over a year.
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‘The car is king’
Responsibility for improving safety on the deadly routes lies with city and state transportation agencies, which in many cases have been slow to act on evidence of the growing risks.
Officials in Albuquerque, Los Angeles and the Bakersfield area said they had invested millions in safety measures on the dangerous roads identified by The Post. The spending provided for new crossings, upgraded sidewalks and redesigns of traffic lanes. Houston and the Florida Department of Transportation, which controls Hillsborough Avenue, did not respond to requests for comment.
State and local transportation officials in Tennessee have identified danger zones across the city, including on Jackson Avenue. But they have not taken action to tame the most deadly roads.
Longtime observers say the reason is local attitudes and politics. Efforts to make changes lacked support in large part because they would require forcing drivers to slow down, traffic engineers and current and former transportation officials said.
“The car-is-king mentality is pervasive in Memphis,” said Nicholas Oyler, who ran Memphis’s bike and pedestrian program until 2023. “For many people, this is how it has always been. They can’t imagine an alternative.”
While officials are attentive to the needs of drivers, pedestrian deaths rarely attract attention. Police reports and other records identify many of those killed as homeless, drunk or using drugs, or in some way at fault for their own deaths. A third of those killed nationally in 2023 were found to have failed to yield to cars.
For the families of the victims, the losses are painful even years later.
After Keegan White’s father was killed on New Year’s Eve 2022 on North Hollywood Street in Memphis, he noticed how much he missed his phone calls. Anthony White had previously struggled with addiction and been living on the edge of homelessness, but he had always made time to check in with his son.
Anthony White was trying to cross five lanes on a stretch of road near a piping supply yard when he was hit by a vehicle heading south. The police report describes the location as dark and unlit. The driver didn’t stop and has not been identified, police said. White suffered multiple injuries to his head and torso. He was taken to the hospital but was declared dead about 20 minutes after the crash, according to an autopsy report.
Five pedestrians have died since 2021 along the two-mile route where White was killed. North Hollywood Street’s five lanes cut through the middle of a Memphis neighborhood, with a mile gap between stoplights.
Sitting on the stoop of an empty building at the side of the road, Jaymes Claxton said he has seen people get hit. At night, he said, it’s especially dangerous on the dark stretch of road.
“There’s not much light,” Claxton said. “They aren’t going to see you until it’s too late.”
The city said it planned to take measures to slow vehicles and improve the safety of intersections on North Hollywood beginning in 2027, explaining in a statement, “Every life lost is a call to action, and we are committed to making our streets safer through both immediate improvements and long-term redesigns.”
The city noted that White had been not using a nearby crosswalk when he was hit. His son said that appeared to him to be shifting the blame to his father.
“Every statistic has a name behind it, a family member behind it, a loved one behind it,” Keegan White said.
Half a mile from where White was killed, North Hollywood reaches Jackson Avenue. A century ago, Jackson ran outside the city limits, later forming part of Tennessee’s early highway network. Images from the 1960s show trees along the road and a grassy median dividing two lanes in either direction carrying the huge sedans of the era.
Today, that median is gone, replaced by a center turn lane. In the afternoon, elementary school children walk home along narrow, cracked sidewalks where weeds poke through aging concrete slabs.
Workers at businesses lining the road — including supermarkets and auto-parts stores — dash across to grab lunch on their breaks. The calculation is simple, Jay Sams said as he headed back to the phone store where he worked: He knows it’s not safe, but he didn’t want to walk 10 minutes out of his way to the nearest light.
After dark, when most deadly crashes happen, the beer ads plastered in the windows of the Crown Supermarket and the lights of a MAPCO gas station draw a steady flow of people from the homes on neighboring streets. Others come in search of drugs and prostitutes nearby, according to residents and police records. People often cross the road when they see a break in the traffic rather than waiting for the lights to change.
It was there that Booker was trying to cross, on his way to visit his brother and still wearing his work boots after a day at the construction job Smith had helped him land. Booker didn’t have a car, but it was a short walk to where he was meeting Smith.
Smith heard what happened from a friend and rushed to the scene, where traffic was at a standstill and a crowd had gathered. He spotted the broken headlight in the road, as an ambulance crew took Booker away. Memphis police did not respond to requests for information about the investigation.
In the hospital, doctors told Smith that Booker was brain-dead.
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A history of warnings
The Tennessee Department of Transportation has been provided clear evidence of the risks its roads pose by both outside experts and its own staff, according to two agency reports.
A 2022 study that the department sponsored concluded that road designs were driving an increase in the severity of pedestrian crashes and that the state was “disproportionately responsible for a large amount of pedestrian injury and death.” A panel of experts who conducted the study issued six recommendations, including reducing speed limits on roads such as Jackson to 35 mph, and told officials they “should be more aggressive at building safe pedestrian infrastructure.”
The next year, a team within the department studied serious pedestrian crashes between 2018 and 2022 and found that they occurred on less than 1% of the state’s roads. The report labeled the Memphis streets where Booker and White were hit as part of a “high risk network.”
The review also included a note of warning: “Most street users are traveling in private motor vehicles, and any perceived disruption is usually met with resistance.”
The department said it has tweaked rules to allow for lanes to be removed from major roads and for the installation of new crossings, part of a “framework to make Tennessee’s roads safer for everyone who walks on them.”
The department said there are 21 bike and pedestrian projects in Memphis, either planned, under construction or recently completed, and it is planning upgrades on a block of Jackson Avenue 2½ miles southwest of where Booker was killed. It has awarded Memphis grant funding for three pedestrian safety projects on other roads since 2015. But while the state has dedicated some of its own money to such grants in recent years, officials have awarded just $4 million statewide this year, after allocating almost $27 million in 2023. Officials said they spent more coming out of the pandemic, before cutting back close to pre-pandemic levels.
Officials said they had not conducted an analysis of the crashes in the Jackson Avenue danger zone identified by The Post, where Booker was killed, and have no plans to invest in safety projects in the area.
For Natatlia “Nene” Morris, that stretch of road was home. The 46-year-old had suffered multiple strokes and walked with a limp, but her mother, Debra Morris, said she wanted to maintain her independence. Natatlia Morris had found a small duplex on Jackson Avenue in 2014 just across from the McDonald’s where Smith had sought surveillance footage of the vehicle that struck his brother.
But Debra Morris recalled how she worried about the five busy lanes of traffic right outside her daughter’s front door, sensing that the road was “extremely dangerous.” Morris said she urged Natatlia to call someone for a ride if she ever needed to get across Jackson.
“I would tell her that constantly. All the time,” Morris recalled.
One evening in May 2022, Natatlia Morris went to the McDonald’s, walking the 500 feet rather than heeding her mother’s advice. On the way back, carrying her dinner, she walked diagonally through the intersection against the light — a corner-cutting path that would have taken her directly home — and was hit by a Jeep Wrangler.
She died in the hospital four days later.
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Methodology
To analyze pedestrian deaths, we relied on data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) details deaths involving motor vehicles, including the deaths of drivers, passengers, cyclists, people on personal conveyances such as wheelchairs or scooters, and pedestrians.
The data set captures the location of the accident, the geographic coordinates and information on the road where the accident occurred, including the type — interstate, major arterial or local road, for example — number of lanes and which government entity owns it. The data also lists the vehicle make and model; time of day the accident occurred, including whether it was day or night; the weather; and the visibility.
FARS also provides demographic and crash-related information about all the people involved in the accident, including whether they died and whether they died at the scene.
Reporters used data from 2010 to 2023, which is the latest available. It’s impossible using national-level data to say exactly how many pedestrians are hit by cars in the United States, because all accidents that result in a pedestrian injury, regardless of the severity, are not included in FARS or any other single data set.
To identify the most dangerous locations with the highest number of deaths, we drew a hexagonal grid across the U.S., covering the country with nearly 6 million hexagons with a width of a mile. We then plotted pedestrian deaths from 2021 to 2023 onto those hexagons. We were unable to map a very small number of deaths, less than 1%, because of broken latitude and longitude coordinates.
We counted the number of deaths per hexagon, focusing on areas that had three or more deaths, and contiguous hexagons with at least two deaths each. We were then able to count the deaths that occurred on specific roads within those hexagons.
We then looked at the demographic characteristics of the neighborhoods where death hot spots have formed — including race and ethnicity, median family income and vehicle access — by downloading Census Bureau data.