Los Angeles's deadliest highways and corridors

Los Angeles doesn't have one deadliest road. It has a network of them, spread from the Figueroa corridor in South LA to Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, and the city's own crash data can point to almost exactly where they are.

In 2025, 290 people died in traffic collisions in the city of Los Angeles, a 6 percent drop from 2024 but still roughly 60 more deaths than the year's homicide count.¹ More than 150 of those deaths were pedestrians, over half the total.¹ Los Angeles adopted Vision Zero in 2015, pledging to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. It missed that deadline by a wide margin.¹²

The 6 percent that kills

LADOT maps every severe and fatal collision onto what it calls the High Injury Network: roughly 6 percent of the city's street miles that account for more than 70 percent of severe and fatal injury collisions involving people walking and biking.³ The network reads like a tour of LA's busiest boulevards: Vermont Avenue, Figueroa Street, Western Avenue, Sepulveda Boulevard, Avalon Boulevard, Olympic Boulevard, Pico Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, Normandie Avenue, and Venice Boulevard.³

Two intersections on that network stand out in the city's own crash data. Figueroa Street and Slauson Avenue, in South LA's Vermont-Slauson neighborhood, recorded 66 serious collisions, 17 felony hit-and-runs, and seven pedestrians struck between February 2021 and February 2025.⁴ Sepulveda Boulevard and Roscoe Boulevard in Panorama City wasn't far behind, with 65 serious collisions over the same stretch, including a fatal hit-and-run that killed a 38-year-old cyclist.⁴

An independent audit released in April 2025, ordered by the City Council and costing $500,000, explains part of why Vision Zero stalled. The steering committee overseeing the program stopped meeting by mid-2018, the action plan was never revised after that, and half of the 56 safety projects due by the end of 2020 were still unfinished three years later.² "As a governing body, this city does not treat traffic violence as the public health crisis that it has become," Damian Kevitt, executive director of the advocacy group Streets Are For Everyone, said.²

The city has since put close to $350 million into Vision Zero projects and set aside $13.5 million for LAPD speed enforcement overtime. Speed safety cameras are scheduled to go live citywide in 2026, with locations announced in February.¹

Pacific Coast Highway's 21-mile problem

No corridor in the LA area has pulled in more state money or attention than Pacific Coast Highway through Malibu. Between 2011 and 2023, the highway's 21-mile stretch through the city saw 58 deaths and more than 100 injuries.⁵ In 2023 alone, three crashes killed seven people and 93 more crashes caused injuries.⁵

The turning point came on October 17, 2023, when a driver going faster than 100 mph struck a group of Pepperdine University seniors walking along PCH about four miles from campus, killing Niamh Rolston, Peyton Stewart, Asha Weir, and Deslyn Williams.⁶ The driver, Fraser Bohm, was charged with four counts of murder and is set to stand trial in September 2026.⁶ Malibu declared a local emergency on the highway less than a month after the crash.⁵

That emergency produced measurable results. A coalition of Caltrans, the CHP, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, and local police issued 3,404 speeding citations on PCH between January and June 2024, an 82 percent jump over the same period in 2023, and injury crashes on the corridor fell 36 percent over that window.⁵ Separately, state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1297, effective January 1, 2025, authorizing Malibu to install five automated speed cameras at the highway's worst crash locations. The data behind the bill showed 134 fatal or serious-injury crashes on Malibu's stretch of PCH between 2019 and 2023, the highest rate of any California city its size.⁷

Caltrans has also proposed a $55 million project for western PCH, between Cross Creek Road and the Ventura County line, adding 15 miles of bike lanes, nearly 7,000 feet of new sidewalk, 42 light poles, 19 guardrails, and two realigned intersections.⁸ Malibu's Planning Commission was set to vote on it November 3, 2025, almost exactly two years after the crash that made the case for it.⁸ The project sits inside Caltrans' statewide Strategic Highway Safety Plan, which commits the department to zero traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2050, with an interim target of cutting those crashes 30 percent by 2035.⁹

The freeways carry their own risk

Surface streets dominate LA's public crash data because that's where LAPD and county sheriffs log most serious-injury reports, but the region's freeways produce a steady toll of their own. Before dawn on February 11, 2025, a wrong-way driver going 60 to 70 mph in the southbound carpool lanes of the 405 caused a multi-vehicle crash in the Sepulveda Pass near Getty Center Drive, killing the wrong-way driver and critically injuring another motorist.¹⁰ The crash shut down every southbound lane for hours and backed up traffic across the San Fernando Valley.¹⁰

Citywide, LAPD logged 364 fatal collisions in 2023, up from 303 the year before, and every patrol bureau saw an increase. The South Bureau, which covers stretches near the Harbor Freeway along with South LA's arterial streets, hit an all-time high of 116 fatal collisions that year, while the Valley Bureau logged 123.¹¹ Officers point partly to enforcement: Valley Traffic Division staffing dropped from 288 officers to 189 between 2015 and 2023.¹¹ "It's really speed," LAPD South Bureau Traffic Detective Ryan Moreno said. "If people slow down a lot of these collisions maybe could be avoided."¹¹

Beyond the city limits

Los Angeles County's unincorporated communities, the pockets of the county with no city government of their own, average 100 traffic deaths and 450 severe injuries a year on county-maintained roads.¹² The Board of Supervisors adopted the county's Vision Zero plan in August 2020, aiming to eliminate traffic fatalities on unincorporated roads by 2035, the same interim horizon Caltrans is using statewide.¹² The plan singles out City Terrace Drive, the Florence-Firestone area, the Lennox community, and Mulholland Highway for targeted redesigns.¹²

If you're hurt on one of these roads

If you're dealing with a crash on Figueroa, PCH, the 405, or any other stretch of road in the LA area, get medical care first and request a copy of the CHP or LAPD collision report before you talk to an insurance adjuster. A local attorney who already knows which agency investigated your stretch of road, and how these specific corridors tend to get litigated, is worth talking to early. You can find one through the legal directory.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. LAist, "Once again, more people were killed in collisions on LA streets than by homicide last year," https://laist.com/transportation/traffic-collisions-vision-zero

2. LAist, "Lack of political will and poor coordination hamper LA goal to eliminate traffic deaths, audit finds," https://laist.com/news/transportation/lack-of-political-will-and-poor-coordination-hamper-la-goal-to-eliminate-traffic-deaths-audit-finds

3. Los Angeles Department of Transportation, "LADOT and Metro Celebrate the Completion of the Venice Blvd Safety and Mobility Project," https://ladot.lacity.gov/dotnews/ladot-and-metro-celebrate-completion-venice-blvd-safety-and-mobility-project

4. Crosstown LA, "The most dangerous intersections in Los Angeles," https://xtown.la/2025/10/15/most-dangerous-intersections-in-los-angeles/

5. Go Safely PCH (a coalition of Caltrans, CHP, California OTS, the City of Malibu, LA County Sheriff's Department, LAPD, and Santa Monica PD), "About," https://gosafelypch.org/about/

6. ABC7 Los Angeles, "Driver Fraser Michael Bohm ordered to stand trial in PCH crash that killed 4 Pepperdine University students," https://abc7.com/post/driver-fraser-michael-bohm-ordered-stand-trial-pch-crash-killed-4-pepperdine-university-students/16288105/

7. California State Senate, Office of Senator Ben Allen, "Speed Safety Improvements Coming to Malibu's Pacific Coast Highway," https://sd24.senate.ca.gov/news/press-release/speed-safety-improvements-coming-malibus-pacific-coast-highway

8. Streetsblog Los Angeles, "Two Weeks After Anniversary of Fatal Malibu Crash, City Could Reject PCH Safety Improvements," https://la.streetsblog.org/2025/10/31/two-weeks-after-anniversary-of-fatal-malibu-crash-city-could-reject-pch-safety-improvements

9. California Department of Transportation, Strategic Highway Safety Plan, https://dot.ca.gov/programs/safety-programs/shsp

10. KTLA, "405 reopens after fatal wrong-way crash that caused traffic nightmare," https://ktla.com/news/local-news/wrong-way-driver-causes-fatal-crash-shuts-down-sb-405-in-sepulveda-pass/

11. CBS News Los Angeles, "Study shows deadly crashes on the rise across Los Angeles," https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/losangeles/news/study-shows-deadly-crashes-on-the-rise-across-los-angeles

12. Los Angeles County Public Works, Vision Zero, https://visionzero.lacounty.gov/