Oklahoma City's Deadliest Highways and Roads

Oklahoma City sits where three interstates cross: I-35, I-40, and I-44 converge downtown, stacking commuter traffic, long-haul freight, and cross-country travelers onto a handful of interchanges. That geography shows up directly in the numbers. Between 2017 and 2021, the city logged 75,747 total crashes and 385 fatal crashes, and the fatality rate climbed from 9.4 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2018 to 14.1 in 2021.¹

The city used that five-year window to build its first Vision Zero Action Plan, adopted by the City Council in February 2025 after a year of public workshops and corridor mapping.¹ The plan identifies seven specific road segments, Oklahoma City's "High Injury Network," where fatal and serious-injury crashes happen far more often than the road's traffic volume alone would predict.¹

The worst seven miles

The study corridors range from major arterials to short residential-adjacent stretches, and severity varies a lot by location. Over the 2017-2021 study period, the city tracked KAB crashes, its shorthand for fatal (K), suspected serious injury (A), and suspected minor injury (B) collisions combined:¹

S Mustang Road, from Reno Avenue to SW 59th Street (4 miles): 67 KAB crashes, including 7 deaths, on a road carrying about 24,425 vehicles a day. The highest raw crash total of any corridor studied.
NE 23rd Street, from I-35 to N Bartell Road (1.82 miles): 36 KAB crashes, including 8 deaths, the highest fatality count of any segment despite being under two miles long.
NW Expressway, from N Council Road to N Wilshire Boulevard (2.1 miles): 42 KAB crashes on 18,006 daily vehicles.
SW 44th Street, from the I-44 frontage road to Johnston Drive (1.77 miles): 44 KAB crashes.
NW 23rd Street, from N Ann Arbor Avenue to N I-44 (1.75 miles): 36 KAB crashes.
S Pennsylvania Avenue, from SW Grand Boulevard to SW 59th Street (1.49 miles): 31 KAB crashes.
NW 10th Street, from County Line Road to N Rockwell Avenue (1.96 miles): 25 KAB crashes.

Altogether, these seven corridors cover less than 15 miles of roadway but accounted for 281 fatal or serious-injury crashes in five years.¹

NW Expressway's own study numbers likely understate the current risk to people on foot. In late November 2024, after the study period closed, a pedestrian was struck and killed near N Rockwell Avenue when a driver traveling the wrong way hit them, one in a string of fatal pedestrian crashes reported on that corridor in recent years.²

Why these particular roads

The city's crash analysis found a consistent pattern behind the worst locations: four travel lanes with no center turn lane or median, posted speeds in the 35-40 mph range, and long gaps between streetlights.¹ One of the plan's five crash profiles found that a disadvantaged census tract combined with proximity to a school, within half a mile, was present in 1,350 of the city's KAB crashes from 2017 to 2021, 25 percent of the citywide total, the largest share of any profile the study identified.¹

Statewide, the same patterns show up in the Oklahoma Highway Safety Office's Federal Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Report to NHTSA. Unrestrained occupants accounted for 219 of the state's traffic deaths in 2022, and speed was a factor in 159 more, both well above the state's own safety targets.³ Ninety-six of 2022's fatalities were pedestrians and 15 were bicyclists, both trending upward.³ Oklahoma recorded 706 fatal crashes in 2023, and the state was projected to land at a fatality rate of about 1.69 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled for 2024.³

The interstate corridor

Beyond the city's own arterials, the interstates that gave Oklahoma City its shape are themselves under continued reconstruction. ODOT completed a $105 million rebuild of the I-235/I-44 interchange in March 2022, part of a roughly $400 million investment along the I-235/US-77 Broadway Extension corridor.⁴ The project widened I-235 to six lanes, and eight in spots, between NE 50th and NE 63rd streets, added two flyover ramps, and built 11 new bridges to untangle an aging interchange carrying close to 100,000 vehicles a day, the first four-level interchange on Oklahoma's interstate system.⁴ ODOT's current major-projects list still includes further work at the I-35/I-240 interchange and other metro-area corridors.⁵

The region's planning agency, the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments, covers Oklahoma, Cleveland, Canadian, and Logan counties. It found crashes across that four-county area rose 21 percent from 2020 to 2021, topping 21,000 crashes in a single year, and used that spike to justify a federally funded Regional Safety Action Plan targeting high-crash corridors across the metro, not just inside OKC city limits.⁶

What's supposed to help

ODOT's 2023-2028 Strategic Highway Safety Plan names seven statewide emphasis areas: lane departures, impaired driving, unbelted occupants, unsafe speeds, intersections, work zones and commercial vehicles, and motorcycle crashes, the same list that keeps surfacing in the corridor data above.⁷ TRIP, a nonprofit transportation research group, put a dollar figure on the toll: fatal and serious crashes cost Oklahoma an estimated $17.9 billion in 2023 alone, and highway work zones killed 93 people statewide between 2018 and 2022.⁸

For its own high-injury corridors, Oklahoma City's plan leans on comparatively cheap, well-documented fixes rather than full rebuilds: medians and pedestrian refuge islands, rectangular rapid-flashing beacons at crosswalks, roundabouts, and dedicated turn lanes, each carrying a specific crash-reduction factor from national research.¹ Whether any of it gets built depends on city and state budgets in the years ahead.

If you're hurt on one of these roads

If you're in a crash on Mustang Road, NW Expressway, or any of the other corridors above, get a police report filed and get checked out even if you feel fine. Injuries from these crashes, especially anything involving speed or a busy intersection, don't always show up right away. If you need help sorting out fault or dealing with an insurance company afterward, the legal directory lists attorneys who handle Oklahoma City crash cases.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

City of Oklahoma City, Vision Zero Action Plan (Public Draft, December 2024): https://hdp-us-prod-app-okc-vision-files.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/7517/3456/3123/OKC_VZAP_Chapter_Executive_Summary.pdf
KFOR, "Pedestrian dies after struck by vehicle on NW Expressway in OKC": https://kfor.com/news/local/pedestrian-dies-after-struck-by-vehicle-on-nw-expressway-in-okc/
Oklahoma Highway Safety Office, FFY2024 Annual Report: https://oklahoma.gov/content/dam/ok/en/highwaysafety/documents/the-work-we-do/reports-and-surveys/FFY2024-Oklahoma-Annual%20Report.pdf
Oklahoma Department of Transportation, "Motorists Now 'On Broadway' After I-235/I-44 Opening Celebration": https://oklahoma.gov/odot/about-us/newsroom/2022/motorists-now--on-broadway--after-i-235-i-44-opening-celebration.html
Oklahoma Department of Transportation, Major Projects: https://oklahoma.gov/odot/travel/other/major-projects.html
Association of Central Oklahoma Governments, Transportation Safety: https://www.acogok.org/safety/
Oklahoma Department of Transportation, 2023-2028 Strategic Highway Safety Plan: https://oklahoma.gov/content/dam/ok/en/odot/web-files-2/2023-2028%20Strategic%20Highway%20Safety%20Plan.pdf
TRIP, "Oklahoma Traffic Fatalities Recede from Pandemic-Level Peak, But Still Higher than Decade Ago" (July 2, 2024): https://tripnet.org/reports/addressing-americas-traffic-safety-crisis-oklahoma-news-release-07-02-2024/

Oklahoma City's deadliest highways and corridors