Austin's deadliest highways and corridors

Ninety-nine people died in traffic crashes on Austin streets in 2025, and most of those deaths happened on roads the city doesn't actually control.¹ Interstate 35, US 183, MoPac Expressway (Loop 1), US 290, State Highway 71, and State Highway 130 all belong to the Texas Department of Transportation, not the City of Austin, and TxDOT-owned roads account for 65% to 75% of the fatal and serious-injury crashes recorded inside city limits in a typical year.¹² The pattern isn't random. A handful of corridors show up over and over in the city's own crash logs, year after year.

Interstate 35 is the deadliest corridor by far

No road in the Austin area comes close to I-35's death toll. Working through the city's 2025 fatality log, I-35 or one of its frontage roads shows up in roughly one out of every seven fatal crashes reported that year, more than any other single corridor.³ The worst single incident came on the night of March 13, 2025, when a tractor-trailer failed to slow for stopped traffic on the northbound service road near the 12900 block and plowed into a line of cars, killing five people.³

That crash wasn't an outlier for that stretch of highway. After the wreck, Austin police pulled the numbers on the segment of I-35 between Wells Branch Parkway and Tech Ridge Boulevard in north Austin: 14 deaths in 10 fatal crashes since 2022, including eight vehicle occupants, five pedestrians (two killed by hit-and-run drivers), and one motorcyclist.⁴ Halfway through 2026, the pattern hasn't broken. Of the 44 fatal crashes Vision Zero ATX had logged by mid-July, nine happened on or along I-35, again the single most common location on the list.⁵

TxDOT has targeted at least one especially dangerous stretch directly. Along the 3.3 miles of I-35 between 51st Street and Rundberg Lane, homeless pedestrians once accounted for 80% of deaths, largely from people crossing 15 lanes of highway on foot to reach food or shelter.⁶ After the Mobility35 program installed median barriers, "no pedestrian crossing" signage, and reflective safety bags starting in 2017, pedestrian deaths on that stretch fell 64% by the summer of 2023 compared with 2019, with fatalities among homeless pedestrians down 89%. The fix earned TxDOT a 2023 National Roadway Safety Award.⁶

That's a narrow success inside a much larger, messier project. TxDOT's $4.5 billion I-35 Capital Express Central project, underway since August 2025 and not scheduled to finish until 2033, will rebuild the highway's bridges over Lady Bird Lake and add two non-tolled HOV lanes in each direction between US 290 East and SH 71/Ben White Boulevard.⁷⁸ Until then, drivers should expect years of shifting lane closures through downtown.

Other Austin roads with the same pattern

US 183, MoPac, Research Boulevard, Parmer Lane, East Riverside Drive, William Cannon Drive, and East Ben White Boulevard all reappear again and again in the city's fatality records, both in 2025 and through the first half of 2026.³⁵ So does the intersection of East Riverside Drive and South Pleasant Valley Road, which has been on the city's radar for close to a decade. Local reporting identified it in 2017, citing Austin-Travis County EMS data, as one of the city's five worst intersections for injury crashes, alongside Ed Bluestein Boulevard at Loyola Lane (79 crashes in a single year), Slaughter Lane at Manchaca Road, and Parmer Lane at both Dessau Road and North Lamar Boulevard.⁹ Riverside and Pleasant Valley is still active: a motorcyclist died there on April 15, 2025, when a pickup truck collided with his bike.¹⁰³

Outside the Austin city line, the danger shifts to rural highways in eastern Travis County. FM 969 and FM 973, both near Del Valle, turn up repeatedly in 2025's fatality reports. County officials say 31% of Travis County's fatal and serious-injury crashes between 2019 and 2023 happened outside Austin, which is part of why the county adopted its first standalone road-safety plan.¹¹ Commissioners Court approved that Safe Streets for All plan on June 10, 2025, setting a goal of cutting fatal and serious-injury crashes in half by 2035 and eliminating them entirely by 2050, with 59 priority project locations already identified.¹¹

What's driving the numbers

Two factors show up disproportionately in Travis County's fatal crashes: speed and impairment. The city's traffic-calming push, which lowered speed limits to 25 mph on more than 850 miles of residential and downtown streets starting in 2020, is tied to an 86% reduction in serious and fatal crashes on those specific streets.¹² Individual pilot projects have moved the needle further: speeding dropped 60% to 70% on South Pleasant Valley Road, Barton Springs Road, and Bluff Springs Road after the city added speed cushions and lane changes, and a six-month pilot on Barton Springs Road cut the share of drivers going over 40 mph by 65%.¹³ On the impairment side, the Travis County Medical Examiner found drugs or a blood alcohol concentration of .08 or higher in 77% of fatal crash victims tested between 2018 and 2022.²

Intersection design matters just as much. Austin's High Injury Network, just 8% of the city's total street mileage, accounts for nearly 60% of all serious and fatal crashes citywide.² Where the city has rebuilt intersections on that network, protected left-turn signals installed at 73 intersections cut opposite-direction left-turn injury and fatal crashes by 72%, and separate treatments at 16 more intersections cut crashes involving left-turning vehicles and pedestrians by 46%, with injury crashes down 56%.² Twenty-nine major intersection safety projects completed since 2016 are linked to a 38% drop in serious and fatal crashes at those locations and roughly $78 million a year in avoided crash costs.¹²

None of it has been enough to make Austin's roads safe. Fatalities fell from a high of 117 in 2022 to 99 in 2025, and severe crashes per capita dropped from 64.7 per 100,000 residents to 37.9 over that span, real progress by any measure.¹ But Austin's death count still ticked up 2% between 2024 and 2025 even as serious injuries kept falling, and the state around it hasn't had a single day without a traffic death since November 7, 2000, a streak that has now claimed more than 91,000 lives statewide.¹⁴ "It's devastating thinking of all the families and communities that have lost loved ones in the last 25 years," TxDOT Executive Director Marc Williams said when the agency marked that anniversary.¹⁴

If you've been hurt on one of these roads

Because so much of Austin's traffic risk sits on state highways the city can't unilaterally redesign, a crash on I-35, US 183, or MoPac often touches more than one jurisdiction: Austin police, TxDOT maintenance and construction records, and sometimes the Texas Department of Public Safety. That can complicate a claim, particularly when a state agency's road design, signage, or construction zone is part of what went wrong. If you've been in a wreck on one of these corridors, it's worth talking to an attorney who has handled a highway crash claim before. You can find one through the legal directory.

This is general information about Austin-area traffic safety data, not legal advice.

Sources

1. City of Austin Transportation and Public Works, "Severe crashes show downward trend in 2025," https://www.austintexas.gov/transportation-public-works/mobility-matters/severe-crashes-show-downward-trend-2025

2. City of Austin Transportation and Public Works, "Vision Zero," https://www.austintexas.gov/transportation-public-works/programs/vision-zero

3. Vision Zero ATX, "2025 Fatalities," https://www.visionzeroatx.org/2025-fatalities/

4. Yahoo News, "Stretch of I-35 in Thursday night's crash has seen 14 traffic fatalities since 2022," https://www.yahoo.com/news/stretch-35-thursday-night-crash-173723004.html

5. Vision Zero ATX, "2026 Fatalities," https://www.visionzeroatx.org/2026-fatalities/

6. Austin Monitor, "TxDOT lauded for curbing pedestrian fatalities along I-35," https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/whispers/txdot-lauded-for-curbing-pedestrian-fatalities-along-i-35/

7. City of Austin, "TxDOT's I-35 Capital Express Central project to impact Lady Bird Lake access, Hike-and-Bike Trail and several city parks," https://www.austintexas.gov/news/txdots-i-35-capital-express-central-project-impact-lady-bird-lake-access-hike-and-bike-trail-and-several-city-parks

8. Texas Department of Transportation, "I-35 Capital Express Central Project," https://www.txdot.gov/mymobility35/projects/capex-central.html

9. CBS Austin, "Some Austin intersections top the list for injury crashes," https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/some-austin-intersections-top-the-list-for-injury-crashes

10. City of Austin Police, "Traffic Fatality in the Intersection of East Riverside Drive and South Pleasant Valley Road," https://www.austintexas.gov/news/traffic-fatality-intersection-east-riverside-drive-and-south-pleasant-valley-road

11. Travis County, "Safe Streets for All (SS4A) Safety Action Plan," https://www.traviscountytx.gov/tnr/safety-action-plan

12. Vision Zero 10-Year Report (October 2025), https://publicinput.com/visionzero10

13. Austin Monitor, "A decade of Vision Zero shows progress on crashes and injuries, not on deaths," https://austinmonitor.com/stories/2025/10/a-decade-of-vision-zero-shows-progress-on-crashes-and-injuries-not-on-deaths/

14. Yahoo News, "TxDOT: 25 Consecutive Years of Traffic Fatalities in Texas," https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/txdot-25-consecutive-years-traffic-223707481.html