Dallas-Fort Worth crash statistics and trends

Texas has not gone a single day without a traffic death since November 7, 2000.¹ That streak runs straight through the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, where four counties, Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton, post some of the heaviest crash tolls in the state. The interchanges here were built for a fraction of today's traffic, and the region keeps adding residents faster than it adds lanes.

The numbers behind the wheel

TxDOT's statewide crash database counted 26,109 crashes on Dallas streets in 2024, 210 of them fatal, killing 227 people.² That works out to roughly 72 crashes a day. Fort Worth logged 12,865 crashes the same year, with 116 deaths and more than 6,600 injuries.² Zoom out to the county level and the totals grow further: Dallas County recorded 46,257 crashes in 2024, including 305 fatal crashes and 331 deaths, while TxDOT's county tally puts Tarrant County at 189 fatal crashes and 201 deaths.³

The Tarrant County Sheriff's Office counts fatalities on its own timeline and arrived at a different number, 205 fatal crashes for 2024, then watched the pace worsen through 2025: 151 by September, on track to hit 234 by year's end, a 14 percent increase.¹ That trend pushed Fort Worth police, Arlington police, the Sheriff's Office, and Texas DPS to launch "Operation Safe City, Dangerous Roads" in October 2025, adding state troopers to county highways to target speeding and reckless driving.¹ Arlington broke from the regional trend on its own, reporting a 19 percent drop in fatalities for 2025.¹

Where Dallas crashes cluster

Dallas tracks danger street by street through its Vision Zero high injury network, and the data points to one road more than any other: Buckner Boulevard. Four separate stretches of Buckner rank among the city's ten worst corridors, from Lake June Road down to Forney Road, with as many as 24 people killed or severely injured (KSI, the metric the network runs on) on a single segment.⁴ Loop 12 shows up repeatedly too, and the city has already added new stoplights and removed DART bus stations along it to bring the numbers down.⁵ The rest of the network's worst stretches:

• Buckner Boulevard, Lake June Road to Great Trinity Forest Way: 24 vehicle KSI, 4 pedestrian KSI
• Northwest Highway, Harry Hines Boulevard to Timberline Drive: 17 vehicle KSI, 6 pedestrian KSI
• Storey Road, Irving city limit to Northwest Highway: 18 vehicle KSI
• Second Avenue, Elsie Faye Heggins Street to US-175: 16 vehicle KSI, 4 pedestrian KSI
• Corinth Street, East 8th Street to Stella Avenue: 16 pedestrian KSI

Source: Dallas Vision Zero high injury network database.⁴

Pedestrians carry a disproportionate share of that risk. Dallas counted 73 fatal pedestrian crashes and 151 severe pedestrian injuries in 2024, and pedestrians now make up roughly 30 percent of the city's traffic deaths even though only 2 percent of residents walk to work.⁶ Statewide, pedestrian fatalities have climbed 69 percent over the past decade, according to Texas A&M Transportation Institute research.⁶ There's a brighter trend line too: the city's own Vision Zero dashboard counted 208 fatal crashes in 2024 and has tracked roughly half that pace in 2025, alongside a drop in serious-injury crashes from 935 to 595.⁵ Speeding and impairment remain the two biggest factors behind the crashes that still happen.⁵

Fort Worth's danger zones

Fort Worth mapped its own high injury network back in 2020, and an NBC 5 investigation using TxDOT crash records found the same streets are still killing people four years later.⁷ McCart Avenue tops the list: 15 fatal crashes killed 17 people between 2019 and 2024, and three separate stretches of the road ranked in the city's top six back in the original study.⁷ East Berry Street follows with 10 deaths over the same period, and Park Vista Boulevard remains the worst corridor in the city for bicycle crashes.⁷ Miller Avenue and Eastland Street, near Pate Park, were flagged in a 2022 consultant report that recommended fixes on eight high-injury corridors; some Miller Avenue intersections have since been improved, but the Eastland crosswalks and curb extensions the report called for still haven't been built.⁷ Citywide, the same investigation found traffic deaths and injuries up nearly 30 percent since Fort Worth first mapped its dangerous streets.⁷

The interstates and the price of gridlock

TxDOT and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute rank Woodall Rodgers Freeway in downtown Dallas third on the state's 2025 list of the 100 most congested road segments, trailing only two Houston freeways.⁸ The interchange where I-35W meets US 287 in Tarrant County ranks eighth overall and second in the state for truck delay specifically.⁸ Two segments of US 75 (Central Expressway) in Dallas and the E.R.L. Thornton Freeway/I-30 corridor near downtown fill out the region's other entries in the top 16.⁸

Congestion and crashes feed each other on I-35W through Fort Worth. On February 11, 2021, icy roads triggered a 133-vehicle pileup there that killed at least six people, and the location wasn't an accident of geography. Texas 121 dead-ends into I-35W about two miles south of the crash site, forcing drivers to cross several lanes of traffic in under a mile to reach their exit, and the 2018 toll-lane expansion added a median merge point where TEXpress traffic cuts back across a 75 mph roadway with no shoulder.⁹ State Rep. Ramon Romero called the stretch a "clearly very dangerous trap."⁹

TxDOT has also targeted wrong-way crashes, which account for roughly 1 percent of regional crashes but a much larger share of fatalities, installing detection technology at known trouble spots: I-30 between University Drive and I-820 in Fort Worth, I-30 between Fielder Street and State Highway 360 in Arlington, the SH 114/SH 26 interchange in Southlake, the Dallas North Tollway near Harry Hines Boulevard, Woodall Rodgers Freeway, and Central Expressway.¹⁰ Wrong-way crashes across Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton counties ran between 22 and 26 a year through the early 2020s, most involving alcohol and most happening between midnight and 5 a.m.¹⁰ Farther east, TxDOT's $1.74 billion 635 East project is rebuilding 11 miles of I-635 from US 75 to I-30, a stretch built to carry 180,000 vehicles a day that now handles more than 230,000.¹¹

The regional response

The North Central Texas Council of Governments tracks fatal crashes across its 12-county region and reported real progress: 691 fatal crashes and 734 deaths in 2025, down from 804 fatal crashes and 859 deaths in 2023, a 14 percent drop in both categories.¹² The Regional Transportation Council backed that trend with $57 million in new roadway safety funding as part of a longer-term Roadway Safety Plan aimed at zero traffic deaths by 2050.¹² NCTCOG has also run targeted Road Safety Audits across the metroplex, completed at Vickery Meadow, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and Akard and Ervay Streets in Dallas, Belknap Street in Fort Worth, West Spring Valley Road in Richardson, and Center and Cooper Streets in Arlington.¹³

If you're in a crash

A crash report from Dallas PD, Fort Worth PD, DPS, or a county sheriff's office becomes the foundation for an insurance claim or a legal case afterward. If you're hurt and need help sorting out fault or dealing with an adjuster, the legal directory can connect you with an attorney who handles crashes in your part of the metroplex.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. KERA News, "Tarrant County expects traffic deaths this year to exceed 230. Cops have a plan to stop that." https://www.keranews.org/news/2025-10-30/tarrant-county-expects-traffic-deaths-this-year-to-exceed-230-cops-have-a-plan-to-stop-that

2. Texas Department of Transportation, "Crashes and Injuries Cities and Towns 2024." https://www.txdot.gov/content/dam/docs/division/trf/crash-records/2024/14.pdf

3. Texas Department of Transportation, "Crashes and Injuries by County 2024." https://www.txdot.gov/content/dam/docs/division/trf/crash-records/2024/13.pdf

4. Dallas Observer, "10 Deadliest Roads in Dallas, Texas." https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/deadliest-roads-in-dallas-texas-20088043/

5. Dallas Observer, "Dallas Traffic Fatalities Fall by Nearly Half in 2025." https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-car-crash-fatalities-drop-by-half-40627701/

6. Dallas Observer, "Dallas Has Higher Pedestrian Fatality Rate Than Austin, San Antonio." https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-has-higher-pedestrian-fatality-rate-than-austin-san-antonio-21624164/

7. NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, "Fort Worth streets identified as dangerous years ago are still among the most deadly." https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/fort-worth-vision-zero-most-dangerous-streets/3541761/

8. Texas A&M Transportation Institute / Texas Department of Transportation, "2025 Texas Top 100 Congested Road Segments." https://static.tti.tamu.edu/tti.tamu.edu/documents/TTI-2025-1.pdf

9. Yahoo News, "Why is the spot of the deadly 133-car pileup on I-35W in Fort Worth so dangerous?" https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-spot-deadly-133-car-232557253.html

10. CBS News Texas, "Deadly wrong-way crashes on the rise in Dallas County." https://www.cbsnews.com/dfw/news/deadly-wrong-way-crashes-on-the-rise-in-dallas-county

11. Texas Department of Transportation, "635 East Project (US 75 to I-30)." https://www.txdot.gov/projects/projects-studies/dallas/635-east-us75-i30.html

12. North Central Texas Council of Governments, "North Texas Sees Significant Decline in Traffic Fatalities as Regional Safety Efforts Gain Momentum." https://www.nctcog.org/trans/about/news/north-texas-sees-significant-decline-in-traffic-fatalities-as-regional-safety-efforts-gain-momentum

13. North Central Texas Council of Governments, "Pedestrian Safety Action Plan." https://www.nctcog.org/trans/plan/lumo/bikeped/pedestrian-safety-action-plan