Hampton Roads is the cluster of cities around the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay that Nielsen groups into the Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News designated market area, the 44th-largest television market in the country with just under 780,000 TV households.1 It's also one of the more crash-prone corners of Virginia. Two long underwater tunnel crossings funnel traffic from several interstates into two lanes each, and a handful of arterial roads built decades ago now carry far more traffic than they were designed for. All of that shows up in the crash data.
How many crashes happen here each year
Statewide, Virginia recorded 129,244 crashes in 2024, up 22% from 105,600 in 2020.2 Fatalities peaked at 1,005 in 2022, eased to 907 in 2023, then ticked back up to 918 in 2024.2 Add up the Virginia DMV's 2024 totals for the market's seven principal cities and the local numbers are stark: Virginia Beach (5,272 crashes, 24 deaths), Norfolk (4,785 crashes, 20 deaths), Hampton (3,590 crashes, 13 deaths), Newport News (3,463 crashes, 19 deaths), Chesapeake (2,459 crashes, 19 deaths), Suffolk (1,707 crashes, 14 deaths) and Portsmouth (1,078 crashes, 6 deaths).2 That's 22,354 crashes and 115 deaths in a single year, before counting the surrounding counties Nielsen also assigns to this market, among them York, Gloucester, Isle of Wight and Williamsburg.1
The intersections that show up again and again
When Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization (HRTPO) engineers studied 1,013 intersections for their Regional Safety Study, one location stood well apart from the rest: I-264 at Independence Boulevard in Virginia Beach, where forced merges across several lanes produced 94 crashes and five serious injuries in a single year.3 The Mercury Boulevard corridor in Hampton is nearly as bad. Mercury Boulevard at Power Plant Parkway logged 79 crashes in 2023 and 267 over the 2017-2021 study window, while Mercury at Coliseum Drive added 226 more crashes over that same stretch.3 By 2024, Power Plant Parkway was still the single worst intersection in the region, with 54 crashes, followed by Armistead Avenue and LaSalle Avenue, also in Hampton, and two Jefferson Avenue intersections in Newport News, one at Oyster Point Road and one at Walmart Way and Brick Kiln Boulevard.4
Not every fix on this list requires new pavement. Roanoke Avenue at 48th Street in Newport News had the highest crash rate of any intersection HRTPO studied for 2017-2021. Converting it to a four-way stop cut that down to a single crash since.3 Copeland Road and Manning Road in Suffolk ranked second in the region for fatal and serious-injury crashes.3 And the deadliest stretch of road that isn't an intersection at all is the S-curve on the Martin Luther King Jr. Freeway in Portsmouth, between High Street and London Boulevard, which HRTPO's data shows carries the highest combined fatality and serious-injury rate of any non-intersection segment in the region.3
Speed and distraction, not weather
Keith Nichols, principal transportation engineer for HRTPO, put the region's fatal-crash problem plainly: "Over half of the people killed in our region, unfortunately, were speeding in the crash."4 He pointed to red-light running and distracted driving as recurring factors at the intersections HRTPO studied.3 The Virginia DMV's own 2024 numbers back that up. Speed was a factor in 25,705 crashes and 410 deaths statewide, and alcohol in 6,767 crashes and 318 deaths.2 In Virginia Beach alone, speed-related crashes killed 14 people in 2024, matching the city's alcohol-related death toll for the year.2 Norfolk saw 12 deaths in alcohol-related crashes and 7 in speed-related crashes that same year.2
Pedestrians and cyclists are absorbing more of the risk
Norfolk's own numbers explain why the city passed a Vision Zero resolution in 2019 and followed it with a Safety Action Plan the City Council adopted on June 24, 2025.5 Crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists made up 28% of the city's crashes in 2024, up from 23% in 2020, even as the share of people who walk or bike to work in Norfolk hasn't grown.5 Norfolk Police responded to 26 pedestrian crashes between January and the fall of 2025, and five were fatal.6 The city's new 20-mph neighborhood speed limits are built on a simple piece of math: a pedestrian struck at 40 mph is roughly eight times more likely to die than one struck at 20 mph.7 Norfolk has added protected bike lanes on Boush Street and Llewellyn Avenue and is installing enhanced, flashing-light crosswalks at roughly $100,000 apiece.6 Statewide, pedestrian deaths have climbed 52.1% since 2010, and 2023 was a 15-year high for fatal crashes in Virginia.6
The tunnels are their own hazard
Two of the region's busiest crossings, the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel on I-64 and the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel on I-664, squeeze traffic from multiple interstates into two lanes underwater in each direction. A single crash there can back up traffic for miles on both sides of the water. One Wednesday morning in January 2025, a four-vehicle crash near Settlers Landing Road left Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel backups approaching three miles eastbound and nearing five miles westbound, while a separate crash closed the Monitor-Merrimac's southbound lanes entirely.8
What cities are doing about it
Federal Safe Streets and Roads for All money is starting to reach the region. In December 2023, Virginia Beach received $14.9 million to build the Virginia Beach Trail, an active-transportation link between downtown Norfolk and Virginia Beach Town Center meant to give people a way through some of the area's crash-heavy corridors without driving.9 Norfolk used its own federal planning grant to write the Safety Action Plan its council adopted in 2025, targeting zero traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2050.5 HRTPO has adopted that same 2050 target for fatalities, serious injuries, and pedestrian and bicycle deaths across the whole region, with year-by-year reduction goals meant to get there.10 The four-way stop at Roanoke Avenue and 48th Street shows the fix doesn't always require a big budget; the next round of state and regional funding is aimed at costlier problems, including the Mercury Boulevard corridor and the I-264 interchange at Independence Boulevard.3
If you've been in a crash on one of these roads
The public crash-cluster data VDOT and HRTPO maintain can show how a specific intersection or curve has behaved over years, evidence that reaches beyond what happened in any one crash. That history can matter when it comes time to establish how a crash happened and who bore responsibility for the conditions that led to it. An attorney familiar with the region can pull that record and put it to use; you can find one through the legal directory.
This article is general information, not legal advice.
Sources
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ustvdb.com, "Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News, VA Media Market" - https://ustvdb.com/markets/norfolk-portsmouth-newport-news/
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Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, "2024 Virginia Traffic Crash Facts" - https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/sites/default/files/documents/VA-traffic-crash-2024.pdf
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WAVY-TV, "Danger Ahead: A look at the most dangerous roads in Hampton Roads" (via Yahoo News) - https://www.yahoo.com/news/danger-ahead-look-most-dangerous-195917806.html
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WAVY-TV, "WRECK WATCH: Top 5 crash-prone intersections in Hampton Roads" (via Yahoo News) - https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/wreck-watch-explores-five-worst-195725805.html
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City of Norfolk, "Norfolk Safety Action Plan" - https://www.norfolk.gov/6139/Norfolk-Safety-Action-Plan
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WTKR, "Norfolk wants to eliminate all traffic fatalities. Here's how the plan works." - https://www.wtkr.com/news/in-the-community/norfolk/norfolk-wants-to-eliminate-all-traffic-fatalities-heres-how-the-plan-works
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City of Norfolk, "Vision Zero Fact Sheet" - https://www.norfolk.gov/DocumentCenter/View/68056/Vision-Zero-fact-sheet
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13News Now, "MMMBT, HRBT both seeing crashes, delays Wednesday morning" - https://www.13newsnow.com/article/traffic/alerts/mmmbt-hrbt-both-seeing-crashes-delays-wednesday-morning/291-2ae53c61-3714-4398-b1ce-d08b0b3f6c44
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U.S. Senators Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, press release on Safe Streets and Roads for All funding - https://www.warner.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/u-s-sens-mark-r-warner-and-tim-kaine-announce-over-25-6-million-in-funding-for-safety-improvements-in-virginia-beach-and-richmond/
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Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization, "Roadway Safety" - https://www.hrtpo.org/444/Roadway-Safety