New Orleans Crash Statistics & Trends

Orleans Parish logged 53 fatal crashes in 2025, a 14 percent drop from 2024, alongside 4,126 injury crashes, down that same 14 percent. Fatal pedestrian crashes fell 20 percent to 24, but that's still nearly half of every deadly wreck in the parish that year. City engineers built those numbers into a $171 million safety proposal covering 66 miles of streets, and they're blunt about the reason: more than 8,000 serious crashes piled up in New Orleans in just the two years before the plan was released.¹

NOPD's own count, tallied separately by the department's Traffic Division, tells a similar story from a different angle. Sixty-four people died in city traffic crashes in 2024. That fell to 56 in 2025, and by July 9, 2026, the department had logged just 21 deaths for the year, putting it on pace for roughly 40, a 38 percent drop from 2024.² Citations climbed as fatalities fell: officers wrote 5,212 tickets in 2023, 30,940 in 2024, and 35,098 in 2025.² DUI arrests went from 191 in all of 2023 to 219 in barely half of 2026.² Traffic Commander Capt. Buddy Micheu has run enforcement details on Elysian Fields Avenue, North Robertson Street, Claiborne Avenue, St. Claude Avenue, Chef Menteur Highway, Leon C. Simon Drive, and General De Gaulle Drive, the same corridors that keep showing up in crash reports.²

None of that puts New Orleans ahead of the curve nationally. Louisiana's statewide fatality rate was 16.4 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2024, 43 percent above the U.S. rate of 11.5, and its rate per mile driven, 1.36 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, also runs above the national figure of 1.19.³ The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development maintains the state's official crash database, the Louisiana Crash Data System, through LSU's Center for Analytics and Research in Transportation Safety, and it's the source city and state planners pull from when they build corridor-level numbers like these.⁴

Where the crashes cluster

New Orleans hasn't published a fresh citywide intersection ranking in years, but the last one built from Department of Transportation and Development crash data still shapes how the city talks about danger spots. The 2014 Pedestrian Safety Action Plan ranked intersections by a combined score of crash frequency and severity using 2008 through 2012 data, and Claiborne Avenue owned the top spot: South Claiborne Avenue (US 90) at Gravier Street saw only four crashes in five years, but three were fatal or left someone with a severe injury.⁵

Eight more intersections rounded out the city's top nine, all pulled from the same DOTD data:

• Poydras Street and Camp Street, 11 crashes, 2 fatal or severe
• Iberville Street and North Peters Street, 11 crashes, 2 fatal or severe
• Canal Street at Bourbon Street/Carondelet Street, 10 crashes, 2 fatal or severe
• South Peters Street and Poydras Street, 8 crashes, 2 fatal or severe
• Esplanade Avenue and North Claiborne Avenue (LA 46), 7 crashes, 2 fatal or severe
• Read Boulevard and the I-10 westbound on-ramp, 4 crashes, 2 fatal or severe
• South Carrollton Avenue and Ulloa Street, 4 crashes, 2 fatal or severe
• Martin Luther King Boulevard and South Claiborne Avenue, 3 crashes, 2 fatal or severe

The corridors haven't changed much since. Claiborne Avenue, Broad Street, Chef Menteur Highway, Hayne Boulevard, and Elysian Fields Avenue are the five streets named specifically in the city's 2025 safety plan as priorities for curb extensions, speed cushions, separated pedestrian crossings, better lighting, and lower speed limits.¹ DPW engineer Jennifer Ruley put it plainly to the City Council: "If we're not addressing the problem, then we're sort of continuing the problem."¹ The trouble is money. The city has $750,000 in federal planning funds toward the $171 million project, no construction start date, and is now asking the state to cover roughly 19 miles of the plan that fall under state, not city, jurisdiction, all while the city itself faces a projected $222 million budget deficit.¹

Pedestrians carry the heaviest toll

New Orleans has ranked among the most dangerous places in Louisiana for people on foot for well over a decade, and the numbers back it up. Between 2008 and 2012, Orleans Parish accounted for 22.7 percent of every pedestrian crash in the state despite holding just 8 percent of its population. The parish's annual pedestrian crash rate, 78 per 100,000 residents, ran three times the statewide rate of 26, and its pedestrian fatality rate, 2.6 per 100,000, beat both the state rate (2.3) and the national rate (1.4).⁵ Pedestrians made up 25.7 percent of all Orleans Parish traffic deaths in that stretch, compared with 13.3 percent statewide and 12.9 percent nationally.⁵ The city set a goal in that same plan: cut pedestrian deaths in half by 2030, down to an average of four a year from the 2011-2012 rate of eight.⁵

That goal looks distant. Twenty-four of the parish's 53 fatal crashes in 2025 involved a pedestrian, a smaller raw number than in 2024 but still 45 percent of all fatal wrecks, well above the historical share.¹ Out east, the trend has run the other direction entirely. Along the I-10 Service Road between Dwyer Road and Paris Road, fatal pedestrian crashes climbed from 11 in 2019 to 34 by 2023, while serious-injury crashes rose from 53 to 82 over the same stretch, on a corridor that carries roughly 700 pedestrians and cyclists and nearly 7,000 vehicles every day, much of it without sidewalks or lighting.⁶ U.S. Rep. Troy Carter secured federal Reconnecting Communities funding for a $61 million fix: three new pedestrian bridges over I-10 near Mayo, Wright, and Bundy roads, plus shared bike and vehicle lanes and new lighting at Crowder Boulevard, Read Boulevard, and Bullard Avenue. Construction is slated for 2026 through 2029, pending City Council sign-off on the grant.⁶

The Claiborne Expressway problem

Running above much of this is the elevated section of I-10 known as the Claiborne Expressway, carrying upward of 130,000 vehicles a day through Treme on a structure Louisiana DOTD Secretary Shawn Wilson called "past its useful life" and "riddled with potholes."⁷ In 2022, DOTD submitted a $95 million plan, split between a federal request of $47 million and matching state funds, to retrofit a four-block section of the elevated structure and remove as many as four ramps, including at Orleans Avenue and Esplanade Avenue, while adding elevated crosswalks, better lighting, and upgraded signals at street level.⁷ The project was pitched as a two-to-three-year build once funding cleared. A separate, smaller state study is now underway looking at removing the overpass altogether and rebuilding Claiborne Avenue as a street-level boulevard.

What this means if you're in a crash here

Every number above, the ranked intersections, the pedestrian rates, the fatal-crash counts, traces back to a specific crash report filed by NOPD or Louisiana State Police and entered into the state's crash database. If you're hurt in a wreck along Claiborne, Chef Menteur, or the I-10 Service Road, that report becomes the foundation of any insurance claim or legal case that follows, so get a copy from NOPD or DOTD and hold onto it. An attorney who works these corridors regularly can help you figure out what a claim is actually worth; you can find one through the legal directory.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. nola.com, "After fatal hit-and-run, New Orleans unveils $171M road safety plan. The question is how to fund it." https://www.nola.com/news/new-orleans-roads/article_a19c3e0f-8c2c-4c0b-a9c5-ac514b22e223.html

2. WGNO, "Fatal crashes down, citations up in 2025, according to NOPD Traffic Division." https://wgno.com/traffic/fatal-crashes-down-citations-up-in-2025-according-to-nopd-traffic-division/

3. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, "Fatality Facts 2024: State by state." https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state

4. LSU Center for Analytics and Research in Transportation Safety (CARTS), Louisiana Crash Data Reports. https://carts.lsu.edu/datareports/

5. City of New Orleans and Regional Planning Commission, "City of New Orleans Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, Part I: Engineering Strategies" (July 2014), prepared with Louisiana DOTD crash data. https://www.norpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/City-of-New-Orleans-Pededtrian-Safety-Action-Plan-Part-1.pdf

6. nola.com, "$61M project would bring new bike paths, pedestrian walkways over I-10 in New Orleans East." https://www.nola.com/news/new-orleans-east-project-road-improvements/article_67ee6252-ce08-11ef-8b2a-cf5b79f52df4.html

7. FOX 8 (WVUE), "State submits plan for revitalizing Claiborne Expressway, potentially knocking down ramps in Treme." https://www.fox8live.com/2022/10/20/state-submits-plan-revitalizing-claiborne-expressway-potentially-knocking-down-ramps-treme/