The Deadliest Highways and Corridors Around Columbus, Ohio

Columbus drivers already know which stretches of pavement make them grip the wheel a little tighter. The data backs up the instinct. Franklin County logged 94 fatal traffic crashes in 2025, according to the Ohio State Highway Patrol, most of them on urban roads inside the county rather than out in the rural fringes.¹ That's up from 83 in 2024 but still below the 118 recorded in 2023, and it tracks a state where fatal crashes have fallen for four straight years even as officials call the numbers still too high.² Statewide, Ohio logged 264,954 crashes in 2025, an average of roughly 726 a day.³

A handful of specific corridors carry a disproportionate share of the risk, and Columbus and state agencies have spent the last few years trying to document exactly where.

The interchange everyone in Columbus has to use eventually

If there's one place in central Ohio where the danger is baked into the pavement itself, it's the I-70/71 split downtown. The interchange, where the two interstates run together for about a mile and a half through the central business district, is described by the engineering firm that helped design its rebuild as one of the state's highest crash locations.⁴ It's also enormous: the reconstruction, known as the Downtown Ramp Up, involves more than 25 lane miles of pavement, 18 interchange bridges, and 250,000 square feet of new retaining walls, plus six ramps rebuilt to connect to city streets like the new Mound Street and Fulton Street urban avenues.⁴

Construction started back in the summer of 2010, and ODOT now puts the total project cost at $1.4 billion, with work expected to continue past 2030. The current active phase, rebuilding I-70 eastbound, began in February 2024. A separate ramp-reconstruction phase that was originally supposed to wrap up in 2027 got pushed back and is now targeted for 2025-2026.⁵ For anyone driving through downtown Columbus, that means years more of shifting lane patterns, narrow shoulders, and the kind of merge-heavy geometry that produces rear-end and lane-change crashes.

Broad Street tells two different stories

Broad Street runs across the entire width of Franklin County, and depending on which end you're on, it's either a safety success story or a cautionary one.

On the east side, the city used federal Safe Streets and Roads for All money to convert a two-mile demonstration stretch of East Broad Street from six vehicle lanes down to two, adding a protected bike lane in each direction. Crashes on that segment fell from 28 in the first half of 2024 to 13 in the same period of 2025, and the share of drivers going 55 mph or faster in the 35 mph zone dropped 89%. No bike or scooter crashes have been reported since the change, even as more than 12,000 biking and scooter trips have been logged on the corridor.⁶

West Broad Street, also signed as US 40, is a different picture. A 12.74-mile stretch of it recorded 25 fatalities between 2018 and 2022, a fatality rate of 1.96 per mile, according to an analysis of NHTSA and Ohio State Highway Patrol crash data.⁷ Posted at 45 mph, significant portions of that stretch have no sidewalks at all, forcing anyone on foot onto grass or dirt shoulders, and long sections lack street lighting.⁷ The city has started adding sidewalks and lighting as part of a planned bus rapid transit line for the corridor, but much of the west side of Broad Street still doesn't have the basic infrastructure that separates people walking from traffic moving at highway speed.

Where Vision Zero has mapped the risk

The city adopted its Vision Zero policy in 2020, aiming to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries. Since then, Columbus has cut fatal crashes from a peak of 73 in 2021 to 48 in 2025, though officials note that overall crashes and serious injuries have trended upward even as fatalities have come down.⁸ The city's high-injury network, the roughly 7% of Columbus streets that now account for 52% of fatal and serious injury crashes (down from 65% of crashes on 10% of streets when the program began in 2020), is concentrated on a specific set of corridors:

• Morse Road
• High Street
• Sullivant Avenue
• Livingston Avenue
• State Route 161
• Broad Street
• The freeway segments of I-70, I-670, and I-315

Pedestrians bear an outsized share of that risk. They make up only about 3.5% of road users in Columbus but account for 28% of traffic deaths, a gap that shows up clearly on wide arterials like High Street and Livingston Avenue, where multiple travel lanes and long crossing distances give drivers more room to speed and pedestrians less time to clear the road.⁸

Refugee Road and Hamilton Road get extra patrols

On the southeast side, the Columbus Division of Police paired with Vision Zero Columbus to launch a monthly enforcement push in August 2025 targeting Refugee Road, South Hamilton Road, and several other high-crash corridors. Seven people had already died in crashes along those streets earlier in the year before the crackdown began.⁹ Columbus police sergeant James Fuqua, who helped run the effort, put it plainly: officers would be visible on those corridors whether or not every stop ended in a ticket, because late summer is historically the peak season for crashes that cause injury or death as students head back to campus and kids return to school.⁹

What's worked when the city has tried it

The clearest before-and-after case in Columbus so far might be downtown itself. In February 2023, city council voted 7-0 to drop speed limits on 11 downtown streets from 35 mph to 25 mph, a change that took effect the following month alongside more than 100 new speed limit signs and the retiming of 134 traffic signals.¹⁰ The move followed a five-year stretch in which speeding incidents downtown had risen 40%, part of a longer trend that saw Columbus's annual traffic deaths roughly double, from 37 in 2015 to 73 in 2021, even excluding highway fatalities.¹⁰

In the 11 months after the change, total crashes downtown fell from 479 to 407, a 15% drop, and crashes involving a fatality or serious injury fell from 19 to 9, more than cutting that number in half.¹⁰ It's a small sample from one part of one city, but it's the kind of specific, measured result that Vision Zero planners point to when arguing the rest of the high-injury network needs the same treatment.

If you're hurt on one of these roads

None of this data changes what to do in the moment if you're in a crash on the I-70/71 split, Broad Street, Refugee Road, or anywhere else in central Ohio: call 911, get medical attention even if you feel fine, and get a copy of the police report once one exists. If a corridor's crash history feels relevant to your case, a road with a known pattern of speeding, poor lighting, or a design the city itself has flagged as high-risk can matter for how liability gets sorted out. It's worth raising with whoever handles your claim, and you can find local help through the legal directory if you need it.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. Ohio State Highway Patrol, "Franklin County Fatal Traffic Crashes 2023 to 2025," Statistical Analysis Unit, March 30, 2026. https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/statepatrol.ohio.gov/statistics/statdocs/Fatals_25/Franklin_Fatals_25.pdf

2. Richland Source, "Ohio State Highway Patrol says traffic fatalities decline for fourth straight year," March 1, 2026. https://www.richlandsource.com/2026/03/01/ohio-state-highway-patrol-says-traffic-fatalities-decline-for-fourth-straight-year/

3. ThatCarHitMe.com, "Ohio (Statewide) Crash Report, 2025." https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/ohio/statewide/2025-annual-report

4. ms consultants, inc., "I-70/I-71 Columbus Crossroads" project overview. https://www.msconsultants.com/project/i-70-i-71-columbus-crossroads/

5. Nathan Hart, Columbus Dispatch via USA Today Network, "I-70 and I-71 construction around Columbus to extend into the 2030s, according to ODOT," April 19, 2024. https://www.aol.com/70-71-construction-around-columbus-100827630.html

6. NACTO, "Vision Zero improvements on Columbus' East Broad Street decrease crashes, reduce speeds." https://nacto.org/latest/vision-zero-improvements-on-columbus-east-broad-street-decrease-crashes-reduce-speeds/

7. Greater Ohio Policy Center, "Spooky Streets 2025: Our Annual Look at Ohio's Dangerous Roadways and the Risks They Pose," October 22, 2025, citing NHTSA and Ohio State Highway Patrol OSTATS Crash Dashboard data. https://www.greaterohio.org/blog/2025/10/22/spooky-streets-2025-our-annual-look-at-ohios-dangerous-roadways-amp-the-risks-the-pose

8. WOSU Public Media, "Is enough being done to prevent serious traffic crashes in central Ohio?," May 28, 2026. https://www.wosu.org/show/all-sides/2026-05-28/is-enough-being-done-to-prevent-serious-traffic-crashes-in-central-ohio

9. myfox28columbus.com, "Columbus launches traffic enforcement to curb deadly accidents," August 2025. https://myfox28columbus.com/newsletter-daily/columbus-traffic-deaths-vision-zero-initiative-speeding-crackdown-police-enforcement-august-2025-accidents-fatalities-refugee-road-hamilton-road-city-safety-effort-bike-patrol-speed-limits-warnings-school-return-crash-prevention

10. Greater Ohio Policy Center, "Columbus Lowers Speed Limits in Downtown Center," February 7, 2025. https://www.greaterohio.org/good-ideas/2025/2/7/columbus-lowers-speed-limits-in-downtown-center