Austin, TX Crash Statistics & Trends

Through July 9, 2026, Austin had logged 44 traffic deaths for the year, a slower pace than the 50 fatal crashes and 54 deaths the city had already recorded by the same date in 2025.¹ That's still 44 families dealing with a loss that didn't have to happen, on streets most Austin drivers use every day.

If you were hurt in a crash here, the numbers below explain which roads and intersections carry Austin's problem, and why the city and the state keep pouring money into a short list of specific fixes.

The 2025 numbers behind the headlines

Austin closed out 2025 with 99 traffic fatalities and 301 serious injuries, according to Austin Transportation and Public Works.² Fatalities ticked up 2% from 2024, but serious injuries fell 28%, for a combined 22% drop in the most severe crashes.² Pedestrian deaths fell from 39 to 30, a 23% drop, and pedestrian serious injuries fell from 59 to 50.² Motorist serious injuries dropped from 264 to 178, motorcyclist injuries from 62 to 44, and bicyclist injuries from 27 to 21; e-scooter injuries were the one category that climbed, from 5 to 7.²

Austin's fatality rate now sits at 37.9 per 100,000 residents, down from 49.3 the year before and well off the 2022 peak of 117 deaths and 540 serious injuries.² FOX 7 Austin's own year-end count landed at 98 deaths across 94 fatal crashes, a small variance from the city's tally that reflects when each source finalizes its numbers.³ A transportation safety officer with Austin Transportation and Public Works, Joel Meyer, told the station the deaths cluster on the same roads year after year: "your I-35s, your US-183s," along with arterials like South Congress and East MLK.³

Where the crashes cluster

Austin has mapped this precisely. Its High Injury Network, the streets responsible for the worst outcomes, covers just 8% of the city's street mileage but accounts for nearly 60% of serious-injury and fatal crashes across every mode of travel.⁴ Two-thirds to three-quarters of Austin's traffic deaths happen on roads TxDOT owns rather than the city, among them I-35, US 183 and US 290.⁵

Vision Zero ATX's tracking names specific hot spots: East Howard Lane and Harris Glenn Drive in North Austin, which logged 57 injuries over four years; East Riverside Drive and South Pleasant Valley Road, where a 2025 motorcycle crash was fatal; and Avenue F at East Koenig Lane, the site of a fatal collision between a motorcycle and a bus.⁶ Other corridors that show up again and again in the fatality log include the North I-35 service roads, US 290 east and west, Ben White Boulevard, South Congress Avenue, William Cannon Drive, MLK Boulevard, Parmer Lane and Braker Lane.⁶¹

Two recent cases show how this plays out on the ground. On December 24, 2025, a driver struck and killed Ariana Deshae Williams at West Slaughter Lane and Francia Trail; the driver stayed at the scene and wasn't impaired, and it was Austin's 93rd fatal crash of the year.⁷ On April 1, 2026, a driver hit and killed Mario Alfonso Garcia Gonzalez at North Lamar Boulevard and Rutland Drive and left the scene; APD's Vehicular Homicide Unit is still investigating.⁸

Pedestrians carry a disproportionate share

A City Auditor's Office review from October 2025, requested by Council Members Zo Qadri and Paige Ellis, found that pedestrians are involved in 3.2% of all Austin crashes, the highest share among comparable Texas cities, and that 27.9% of those crashes end in serious injury or death.⁹ Auditors also found that a lot of crash activity never becomes an official record: between September 2021 and July 2025, Austin logged more than 52,000 crash reports against more than 85,000 crash-related 911 calls, meaning over half of those calls never produced a filed report.⁹

Texas toughened the law around pedestrian crashes with the Lisa Torry Smith Act, in effect since 2021. It amended Transportation Code Section 544.007 so drivers must stop and yield to pedestrians already in an intersection or an adjacent crosswalk; the old law only required yielding.¹⁰ It also added Section 545.428, making it a crime, a Class A misdemeanor or a state jail felony depending on the injury, to strike a pedestrian or cyclist in a crosswalk through criminal negligence.¹⁰ In practice, the auditor's report found that standard hard to meet: Travis County has secured just one conviction under the law, with one more case still pending.⁹

What the money is buying

Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes summed up the city's framing of the problem this way: "Traffic crashes aren't accidents. They are preventable. They are a public health crisis, and like any health crisis, they require direct, holistic response."⁵

Austin has funded Vision Zero through three mobility bonds: $15 million in 2016, with $6 million earmarked for high-crash intersections, $75 million in 2018 and $65 million in 2020, plus roughly $34 million in federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grants since 2022.⁵ TxDOT has put $186 million into Austin-area safety projects over the past five years and plans $135 million more across 65 projects.⁵ TxDOT's Austin district engineer, Tucker Ferguson, points to the same causes agencies cite nationally, speeding, impaired driving and distraction, and calls all of them preventable.⁵

The work is showing results. Protected-intersection redesigns are linked to a 42% drop in fatal and serious-injury crashes, and intersection projects broadly to a 38% drop.² Speed-reduction pilots on South Pleasant Valley, Barton Springs and Bluff Springs cut excessive speeding by 60% to 70%, and a six-month pilot on Barton Springs Road cut the share of drivers going over 40 mph by 65%.⁵

The biggest structural change is still years away. TxDOT's I-35 Capital Express Central project, a $4.5 billion rebuild of the interstate through downtown, includes reconstructing the Lady Bird Lake bridge, adding managed lanes along an 8-mile stretch, and building a new interchange at Riverside Drive, one of the corridors with the worst crash history in the city.¹¹ The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization adopted its 2050 Regional Transportation Plan in May 2025, built around a state goal of zero traffic deaths by that year; Austin's own transportation commission has pushed CAMPO toward an earlier regional target of 2045.¹²

If you've been hurt on one of these roads

The pattern in Austin's own data is consistent: the worst outcomes cluster on a small number of state-owned corridors and a short list of repeat intersections, not randomly across the map. If you were hurt in a crash on one of them, the roadway design, the posted speed and whether it sits on the High Injury Network can matter to what happened and why. An attorney familiar with this data can use it on your behalf. You can find one through the legal directory.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. 2026 Fatalities, Vision Zero ATX

2. Severe crashes show downward trend in 2025, AustinTexas.gov

3. 94 fatal crashes in Austin leave 98 dead in 2025: report, FOX 7 Austin

4. Vision Zero, Austin Transportation and Public Works, AustinTexas.gov

5. A decade of Vision Zero shows progress on crashes and injuries, not on deaths, Austin Monitor

6. Vision Zero ATX

7. Traffic Fatality in the Intersection of W. Slaughter Lane and Francia Trail, AustinTexas.gov

8. Traffic Fatality in the Intersection of North Lamar Boulevard and Rutland Drive, AustinTexas.gov

9. Report shows pedestrian crash deaths in Austin have not decreased, Austin Monitor

10. S.B. No. 1055, Texas Legislature Online (Lisa Torry Smith Act)

11. I-35 Capital Express Central Project, TxDOT MyMobility35

12. CAMPO 2050 Regional Transportation Plan