The Most Dangerous Intersections in Greenville, Spartanburg, and Asheville

If you drive between Greenville, Spartanburg, and Asheville often enough, you already know which stretches make you grip the wheel a little tighter. This TV market straddles two states and two different transportation departments, South Carolina's SCDOT and North Carolina's NCDOT, but the underlying problem is the same on both sides of the line: wide arterial roads built to move traffic fast that also have to carry local turns, pedestrians, and cyclists. Here's what the agencies' own numbers and city planning studies actually show, not just what feels dangerous.

Three corridors carry an outsized share of Greenville's crashes

The City of Greenville's planning department pulled five years of crash records and found that 41 percent of the city's injury and fatal crashes happened on less than 5 percent of its road miles.¹ Three corridors accounted for most of it:

• Laurens Road from I-385 to Woodruff Road, a 2.7-mile stretch, logged 228 crashes and 8 fatalities, a rate of 86.8 injury or fatal crashes per mile per year.¹
• North Pleasantburg Drive from Lowndes Hill Road to Wade Hampton Boulevard, 1.8 miles, logged 225 crashes and 6 fatalities, the highest per-mile rate of the three at 128.3 a year.¹
• Woodruff Road from Laurens Road to I-385, 2.8 miles, logged 192 crashes and 8 fatalities.¹

Greenville Mayor Knox White signed a Vision Zero proclamation on December 1, 2022, committing the city to eliminating traffic deaths.¹ Assistant engineer Nick DePalma has been leading the follow-through: lower speed limits in neighborhoods, removing unmarked left turns, and wider buffers for bike lanes on the worst corridors.¹ Separately, the nonprofit Bike Walk Greenville built a Vulnerable Road User Map from ten years of SCDOT crash data, tracking every pedestrian and cyclist collision in the county by location and severity.²

Zoom out to the whole county and the picture is choppier year to year. SCDPS tracks fatalities on a rolling January 1 through July 26 basis so different years can be compared fairly.³ Greenville County ran 43 deaths in that window in 2023, 56 in 2024, dropped to 27 in 2025, and sits at 28 so far in 2026.³

Spartanburg is rebuilding its worst intersections one at a time

Spartanburg County Council adopted a countywide Safety Action Plan on April 24, 2024, after county data turned up more than 50,000 crashes over the prior five years, over 1,000 of them serious injuries or deaths.⁴ Nearly 1,500 residents weighed in on a public survey about which roads felt unsafe before the plan was finalized.⁴ The county is now working from a "roundabout first" policy at its worst intersections.⁴

Two projects show what that looks like in practice. Berry Shoals Road at Duncan Reidville Road had 22 crashes over five years; SCDOT is converting the four-way stop there into a roundabout, a project that closed the intersection for roughly 90 days.⁵ Reidville Road at Anderson Mill Road saw about 100 reported crashes between 2019 and 2021, and SCDOT has proposed a new traffic pattern for that intersection as well.⁶

Spartanburg County's own SCDPS fatality counts, same January-to-July window, ran 47 in 2023, 36 in 2024, jumped to 58 in 2025, and stand at 42 through July 26 of this year.³

In Asheville, the arterial roads carry the risk

Merrimon Avenue got the region's most closely tracked fix. NCDOT converted a stretch from four lanes to three between October 2022 and mid-2024, and the agency's own before-and-after count found total collisions down 23 percent and injury collisions down 30 percent.⁷ Frontal-impact crashes, the kind most likely to kill someone, fell 55 percent, even as minor rear-end crashes rose 67 percent.⁷ NCDOT safety evaluation engineer Carrie Simpson has said the drop in frontal-impact crashes is what actually lowers how badly people get hurt.⁷

Not every corridor has been fixed. Patton Avenue at New Leicester Highway logged more than 140 crashes between 2020 and 2024, and Smokey Park Highway at Acton Circle keeps coming up as a high-volume intersection with confusing turn patterns.⁸

Buncombe County took a smaller but telling step this year: NCDOT documented 10 crashes over five years at Aiken Road and New Stock Road and, on April 8, 2026, converted it to an all-way stop.⁹ NCDOT's own data on that kind of conversion shows why: all-way stops cut total crashes by 55 percent and cut fatal or serious-injury crashes by 92 percent.⁹

Cyclists and pedestrians carry a disproportionate share of the risk here. NCDOT crash data from 2015 through 2024, analyzed by Asheville Watchdog and the Citizen Times, found Asheville ranked first per capita among North Carolina cities over 75,000 people for fatal bicycle crashes, and second for cycling crashes overall.¹⁰ Seven cyclists have been killed on Asheville roads since 2021, out of 165 injury crashes and 211 total vehicle-bike collisions logged over that ten-year span.¹⁰

The French Broad River MPO board adopted a five-county Safe Streets for WNC plan on August 21, 2025, covering Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, and Transylvania counties, funded through the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All program.¹¹ The plan exists because the trend line was already bad: WLOS reported that roadway crashes across those five counties rose 50 percent from 2000 to 2020, and 2020 alone was a record year with 14 pedestrian deaths region-wide.¹² Pedestrians and cyclists account for roughly 16 percent of the region's roadway deaths, and motorcyclists another 17 percent.¹²

If you're hurt at one of these intersections

A crash at a known high-crash location doesn't automatically make you the one at fault, and the agency data above is exactly the kind of thing that shows up in a police report or crash reconstruction later. Get medical attention first, even if the pain feels minor at the time. Save the crash report number from responding officers, and if the intersection has recent construction or a known history like the ones above, note it or photograph any signage before it changes again.

If you're dealing with an insurance company after a crash on one of these roads, it helps to talk to someone who handles these cases regularly. You can find local attorneys through the legal directory at thatcarhitme.com.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. Greenville News (via Yahoo News), "These are the three most dangerous roads in Greenville. The city wants to make them safer.": https://www.yahoo.com/news/three-most-dangerous-roads-greenville-170227998.html

2. Bike Walk Greenville, Vulnerable Road User Map: https://bikewalkgreenville.org/remembering-those-who-have-died-on-our-roads/

3. South Carolina Department of Public Safety, Traffic Fatalities by County: https://scdps.sc.gov/fatalities

4. Spartanburg County government, Safety Action Plan adoption notice: https://www.spartanburgcounty.gov/m/newsflash/home/detail/251

5. WSPA 7News, "Busy Spartanburg Co. intersection closing for 90 days as roundabout project begins": https://www.wspa.com/news/roundabout-project-closes-spartanburg-co-intersection/

6. WSPA 7News, "SCDOT proposes new traffic pattern for Spartanburg County road intersection": https://www.wspa.com/news/scdot-proposes-new-traffic-pattern-for-spartanburg-county-road-intersection/

7. Asheville's 828 News NOW, "Fewer crashes, more bicyclists on Merrimon Ave., study says": https://828newsnow.com/news/228822-fewer-crashes-more-bicyclists-on-merrimon-ave-study-says/

8. Asheville's 828 News NOW, "These Asheville roads see the most crashes": https://828newsnow.com/news/228822-these-asheville-roads-see-the-most-crashes/

9. Fox Carolina, "All-way stop coming to Buncombe County intersection to reduce crashes, NCDOT says": https://www.foxcarolina.com/2026/04/07/all-way-stop-coming-buncombe-county-reduce-crashes-ncdot-says/

10. Asheville Watchdog, "Asheville is the most lethal big city in the state for cyclists. Is the city doing enough to address it?": https://avlwatchdog.org/asheville-is-the-most-lethal-big-city-in-the-state-for-cyclists-is-the-city-doing-enough-to-address-it/

11. French Broad River MPO, Safe Streets for WNC Regional Safety Action Plan: https://frenchbroadrivermpo.org/safe-streets-for-wnc-regional-safety-action-plan/

12. WLOS, "50% increase in WNC roadway crashes since 2000; leaders hope new federal program will help": https://wlos.com/news/local/road-crashes-increase-western-north-carolina-safety-federal-program-safe-streets-roads-for-all-french-broad-river-metropolitan-planning-organization-buncombe-henderson-madison-haywood-county