New Orleans' Deadliest Highways and Corridors

NOPD enforcement data and a decade of state crash studies point to the same New Orleans corridors, from Chef Menteur Highway to the Claiborne Avenue underpass and the Canal Street tourist grid.

ThatCarHitMe.com Editorial
Jul 7, 2026
5 min read

Sixty-four people died in traffic crashes in New Orleans in 2024. That number fell to 56 in 2025, and by July 9, 2026, the city had logged 21 deaths for the year, a pace that would put the full-year total near 40 if it holds.1 The New Orleans Police Department ties the decline partly to a jump in enforcement: officers wrote 5,212 traffic citations in 2023, 30,940 in 2024, and 35,098 in 2025, with 17,486 more by early July 2026. DUI arrests are already ahead of pace too, 219 through the first half of 2026 against 191 for all of 2023.1

Captain Buddy Micheu, the department's traffic commander, named the streets his officers are told to watch under Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick's enforcement push: General De Gaulle Drive, Elysian Fields Avenue, North Robertson Street, Claiborne Avenue, St. Claude Avenue, Chef Menteur Highway, and Leon C. Simon Drive.1 City Council member Eugene J. Green pointed to the city's Safe Streets for All plan as part of why the numbers are moving.1 Those corridors line up closely with what more than a decade of state and local crash data already show.

Chef Menteur Highway

Chef Menteur Highway (US 90) cuts through New Orleans East as a wide, high-speed arterial with long gaps between signals, and it remains one of the seven corridors NOPD has flagged for targeted enforcement.1 It has shown up in the city's crash data for years. In the last full engineering-level study of pedestrian crashes, a joint 2014 analysis by the City of New Orleans, the Regional Planning Commission, and the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, the intersection of Press Drive and Chef Menteur Highway ranked among the twenty most dangerous locations in the city, with two crashes there resulting in a death or serious injury over the five years studied.2

Claiborne Avenue, above and below the interstate

That same 2014 study ranked South Claiborne Avenue at Gravier Street as the single most dangerous intersection in New Orleans. Only four crashes were recorded there over five years, but three of them killed or seriously injured someone, the highest severity score of any location in the analysis.2 Claiborne Avenue at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Claiborne at Leonidas Street both made the top twenty as well.2

Part of what makes the corridor dangerous sits overhead. The elevated I-10 Claiborne Expressway has run above the avenue since it opened in 1968, after construction cleared roughly 500 homes along what had been one of the city's earliest Mardi Gras parade routes.3 In October 2022, the state and city announced a $94.7 million plan to rework the corridor: $60.1 million for highway drainage and lighting, $11.4 million for a "Claiborne Innovation District" of green space and landscaping beneath the highway, and $23.1 million to study removing the Esplanade Avenue and Orleans Avenue ramps.4 Full removal of the expressway has been estimated at more than $4 billion, which is why DOTD Secretary Shawn Wilson described the smaller plan as "doing a little bit of everything to help everyone, as opposed to trying to fund all of any one thing."4

Canal Street and the French Quarter grid

The densest cluster of dangerous intersections in the 2014 study sits where Canal Street meets the Quarter and the Central Business District. Poydras Street at Camp Street ranked second citywide, with eleven crashes and two deaths or serious injuries. Iberville Street at North Peters Street tied for third with the same crash count. Canal Street at Bourbon Street and Carondelet Street, and South Peters Street at Poydras Street, both ranked in the top five.2 These are slow, narrow streets by highway standards, but heavy foot traffic from tourism and the streetcar lines concentrates risk at a handful of crossings instead of spreading it out.

The I-10 corridor and beyond the parish line

Inside the city, the interstate itself is part of the pattern. Read Boulevard's interchange with I-10 in New Orleans East ranked in the study's top ten locations for pedestrian deaths and serious injuries.2 Outside the parish, the region's worst single crash in recent memory happened on I-55 near Manchac, in St. John the Baptist Parish. On October 23, 2023, wildfire smoke combined with overnight fog into what Louisiana State Police called "superfog," cutting visibility to as little as ten feet. A chain-reaction pileup involving 168 vehicles killed eight people and injured 63; a tanker truck carrying hazardous liquid was among the wreckage.5

Commuters heading to the North Shore face a different risk profile on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which logged 103 crashes across nearly 10 million crossings in 2025. General manager Carlton Dufrechou attributed close to 60% of those to inattentive driving, while noting the bridge still ranks among the safest major roadways in the state.6

Why pedestrians carry so much of the risk

Orleans Parish's numbers explain why the city built its safety plan around walking, not just driving. From 2008 through 2012, the parish accounted for 22.7% of all pedestrian crashes recorded statewide despite holding just 8% of Louisiana's population. Its average annual pedestrian crash rate ran 78 per 100,000 residents, three times the statewide rate of 26. Pedestrians made up 25.7% of all Orleans Parish traffic deaths in that period, against 13.3% statewide and 12.9% nationally.2 More recently, the DOTD district covering greater New Orleans recorded 35 pedestrian deaths and 124 serious pedestrian injuries in 2023 alone, out of 183 pedestrian deaths statewide that year.7

If you're hurt in a crash on any of these corridors, get medical attention and a police report first. If you need help figuring out what comes next, the legal directory can connect you with an attorney who handles Louisiana crash claims.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

  1. NOPD traffic crackdown cuts fatalities as tickets rise, nola.com, https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/new-orleans-traffic-enforcement-nopd/article_1619a332-aa88-4820-af26-98087bac3748.html

  2. City of New Orleans Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, Part I: Engineering Strategies, City of New Orleans / Regional Planning Commission / Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, July 2014, https://www.norpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/City-of-New-Orleans-Pededtrian-Safety-Action-Plan-Part-1.pdf

  3. Claiborne Expressway campaign, Congress for the New Urbanism, https://www.cnu.org/highways-boulevards/campaign-cities/new-orleans

  4. Louisiana touts $95 million plan to spruce up Claiborne Expressway, remove ramps in Treme, nola.com, https://www.nola.com/news/politics/louisiana-touts-95-million-plan-to-spruce-up-claiborne-expressway-remove-ramps-in-trem/article_3ac873a8-4bf6-11ed-a01a-833f97e55c0d.html

  5. 8 killed, 63 injured in 168-vehicle pileup on Louisiana highway, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/louisiana-i55-pileup-deaths-superfog/

  6. After fatal crash, Causeway manager warns most wrecks are due to 'inattentive driving', nola.com, https://www.nola.com/news/traffic/causeway-crash-st-tammany-fatal/article_5c6070e2-c3f8-48ee-ab3f-521c7d53d7db.html

  7. 2025 Complete Streets Update / Performance Measure Report, Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, https://dotd.la.gov/media/f01b51xc/cs_pms_2025_report.pdf

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Written by: ThatCarHitMe.com Editorial

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