Crash statistics and trends in Buffalo, New York

Buffalo drivers cross a lot of different kinds of roads in a single trip: rebuilt urban boulevards, a handful of 1960s-era expressways that still cut through parks and neighborhoods, and residential streets that were never designed for the traffic they carry now. That mix shows up in the crash data. Between 2017 and 2021, the city logged 35,151 police-reported crashes, including 1,098 that involved someone walking and 524 that involved someone on a bike, according to a High-Injury Network analysis GObike Buffalo built from city crash records.¹ If you were just in one of these wrecks, here's what the numbers and the recent history say about why it happened where it did.

Where the crashes cluster

Crashes aren't spread evenly across Buffalo's nine council districts. Fillmore, on the city's East Side, recorded the most of any district over that five-year span: 6,196 crashes, including 18 that were fatal.¹ Ellicott, downtown and the Central Business District, followed with 5,288 crashes and 8 deaths.¹ Lovejoy, a smaller district along the William Street corridor, saw far less overall traffic (3,482 crashes) but a comparable death toll of 13, a severity rate that outpaces districts like Delaware, where 3,201 crashes produced 4 deaths.¹ Raw volume doesn't predict how bad a crash turns out. Road design and speed do.

Buffalo's Complete Streets response

Sections 413-68 through 413-70 of Buffalo's city charter require the Department of Public Works to design and maintain streets for pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and drivers, not just cars passing through.² That policy sits behind reconstruction work on Middle Main Street, Jefferson Avenue, Allen Street, and Niagara Street, plus the Gates Circle roundabout and Parkside Avenue upgrades.² Most of those projects sit inside or near Fillmore, Masten, and Delaware, the districts carrying the heaviest crash counts.

Beyond the city limits

Zoom out to the wider Erie-Niagara region and the pattern holds. Since 2019, one person has died in a motor vehicle crash and nearly twenty people have suffered serious injuries every single week across the two counties, according to the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council's Roadway All-User Crash Elimination (RACE) Plan.³ Fatalities measured against vehicle miles traveled have climbed faster here than in the rest of New York State.³ The RACE Plan's goal, tied to the state's Vision Zero push, is to eliminate roadway deaths and cut serious-injury crashes in half by 2050.⁴

Two expressways, two different fights

No corridor illustrates the region's crash problem better than the Scajaquada Expressway, State Route 198. Built in the early 1960s, the 3.6-mile highway carries between 37,600 and 65,000 vehicles a day as it bisects Delaware Park, the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed green space it was cut through decades ago.⁵ In May 2015, a driver who fell asleep left the expressway and killed 3-year-old Maksym Sugorovsky in the park; the state cut the posted speed from 50 mph to 30 mph and built a guardrail between the road and the park afterward.⁶ It didn't end the danger. In October 2022, four teenagers ages 14 to 19 died when a stolen car left the road at excessive speed near the Scajaquada's interchange with the Kensington Expressway, ejecting five of the six occupants through the vehicle's glass roof.⁷

A long-discussed plan to convert the Scajaquada into an at-grade parkway with crosswalks, stop signs, and traffic lights lost its dedicated funding in the draft 2026-2030 Transportation Improvement Plan, downgraded to an unfunded "illustrative" project.⁸ Senator Chuck Schumer has pushed federal regulators to approve the reclassification anyway.⁹ In the meantime, NYSDOT started a $4.65 million resurfacing project on the expressway in mid-2026, repaving more than 20 lane-miles without changing the road's high-speed design.¹⁰ A few miles north, the $1 billion Kensington Expressway project broke ground in fall 2024 to cap part of that highway and reconnect the neighborhood it cut through decades ago; a second-phase study due at the end of 2027 will weigh options for the Scajaquada itself.⁶

Recent crashes behind the numbers

Two cases from the past year show how these statistics play out on ordinary streets, not just expressways. On January 9, 2026, an off-duty Erie County Sheriff's Office deputy pulled out of a parking lot on Elmwood Avenue just south of Allen Street and struck 82-year-old Carl Slone, who was crossing mid-block. Slone died early the next morning. Because the crash involved a peace officer, the Attorney General's Office of Special Investigation reviewed it under Executive Law Section 70-b and released security-camera footage of the collision in April 2026.¹¹ On July 17, 2025, a Tesla Cybertruck struck and killed 37-year-old Paache Spikes-Redding at William and Benzinger Streets and fled the scene.¹² The driver, Wendell Brooks, later pleaded guilty to killing her.¹³

After a crash

If you're hurt in a Buffalo crash, get medical care first and make sure police file a report, since that report becomes the record insurers and any potential defendant will rely on later. Given how much of the city's serious-injury data traces back to specific, well-documented corridors rather than random bad luck, it's often worth having a lawyer look at whether a road design problem, an impaired or distracted driver, or a hit-and-run charge changes what you're owed. Buffalo's Department of Public Works and the GBNRTC both publish the corridor-level data behind these numbers, so a claim tied to a known high-injury street doesn't rest on guesswork. You can find an attorney through the legal directory.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. GObike Buffalo, "High-Injury Network & Crash Statistics by City of Buffalo Council District," Appendix A. https://gobikebuffalo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/RPT_Appendix_Summaries-and-Maps.pdf

2. City of Buffalo, "Complete Streets." https://www.buffalony.gov/1566/Complete-Streets

3. Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council, "Roadway All-User Crash Elimination (RACE) Plan: The Process." https://www.gbnrtc.org/safetyactionplan/theprocess

4. Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council, "Safety." https://www.gbnrtc.org/safety

5. Congress for the New Urbanism, "Buffalo: Scajaquada Expressway." https://www.cnu.org/highways-boulevards/campaign-cities/buffalo-scajaquada

6. WKBW, "Phase two study on enhancements along Kensington Expressway; options for reimagined Scajaquada Expressway." https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/phase-two-study-on-enhancements-along-kensington-expressway-options-for-reimagined-scajaquada-expressway

7. The Buffalo News, "Four teens killed when stolen Kia crashes at Kensington and Scajaquada." https://buffalonews.com/news/local/four-dead-in-rollover-crash-at-kensington-and-scajaquada/article_b0101614-53b4-11ed-9b47-331b0927de8a.html

8. Buffalo Rising, "NYSDOT just wiped away over a decade of community collaboration and hard work." https://www.buffalorising.com/2025/05/nysdot-just-wiped-away-over-a-decade-of-community-collaboration-and-hard-work/

9. Office of U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, "Schumer says converting Scajaquada high-speed expressway to parkway... would increase safety." https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schumer-says-converting-scajaquada-high-speed-expressway-to-parkway-with-calmer-traffic-patterns-crosswalks-stop-signs-and-street-lights-would-increase-safety-urges-feds-to-approve-plan-to-reclassify-road-as-a-parkway

10. Spectrum News 1, "Scajaquada Expressway resurfacing project begins." https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/buffalo/news/2026/07/03/scajaquada-expressway-resurfacing-project-begins

11. New York State Office of the Attorney General, "Attorney General James Releases Footage from Investigation into Death of Carl Slone." https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2026/attorney-general-james-releases-footage-investigation-death-carl-slone

12. WIVB News 4, "Woman killed in hit-and-run at William and Davey Streets." https://www.wivb.com/news/crime/woman-killed-in-hit-and-run-at-william-and-davey-streets/

13. WIVB News 4, "Buffalo man pleads guilty to killing woman in Cybertruck hit-and-run." https://www.wivb.com/news/crime/buffalo-man-pleads-guilty-to-killing-woman-in-cybertruck-hit-and-run/