The most dangerous intersections in Louisville

Louisville's crash numbers keep pointing to the same stretches of road. Dixie Highway, Bardstown Road, Broadway, and Preston Highway show up again and again in the city's own safety studies, and a handful of specific intersections along those corridors account for a disproportionate share of the wrecks, injuries, and deaths.

None of this is guesswork. Louisville Metro Government and the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet have spent the past several years building out Vision Zero Louisville, a data-driven traffic safety program, and the crash maps and intersection rankings it has produced are about as specific as local traffic data gets.¹

What the crash data actually shows

Kentucky State Police logged 139,022 total reported collisions statewide in 2023, a 6.9% increase over 2022, including 767 fatal collisions that killed 814 people.² Intersections accounted for 37,013 of those collisions statewide, or 31.5% of the total, along with 153 fatal collisions (20% of all fatal crashes) and 7,123 nonfatal injury crashes (35.1% of that category).² Roughly one in three Kentucky crashes happens at an intersection.

Jefferson County, which is Louisville proper, recorded more collisions than any other county in the state in 2023: 24,678 total, including 130 fatal crashes, 134 people killed, and 6,465 people injured.²

Where Vision Zero found the worst intersections

In November 2023 (revised May 2024), Vision Zero Louisville released a decade-long study of pedestrian crashes across Jefferson County, covering 2011 through 2020 on every public street except the interstates and parkways.¹ The report ranked intersections two ways: a "reactive" approach based on actual crash severity, and a "systemic" approach based on risk factors like intersection size and complexity.

By raw crash severity, the five worst signalized intersections for pedestrians were West Broadway & South 2nd Street, West Broadway & South 26th Street, Bardstown Road & Goldsmith Lane, Dixie Highway & Garrs Lane, and Fern Valley Road & Preston Highway.¹ Among unsignalized intersections, the worst were Dixie Highway & San Jose Avenue, 7th Street Road & Phyllis Avenue, West Market Street & South 41st Street, West Broadway & South 31st Street, and Dixie Highway & Ponder Lane.¹

The systemic approach, which weighs geometry and traffic patterns rather than raw crash counts, turned up a different but overlapping list, including West Market Street & South 2nd Street, Grinstead Drive & Lexington Road, Eastern Parkway & South Preston Street, and Bardstown Road & Buechel Bypass.¹ Dixie Highway shows up more than any other road across the four rankings, and one intersection in particular, Dixie Highway & San Jose Avenue, is flagged by both the reactive and systemic methods: it ranks first on the raw-crash list and second on the risk-factor list, one of the only locations in the county to land on both.¹

The corridors behind the intersections

Zoom out from single intersections and the same corridors reappear. The report's executive summary names Dixie Highway, Bardstown Road, Preston Highway, Southern Parkway, and Broadway as the roads "plagued by pedestrian crashes" in Jefferson County.¹

That matches Louisville Metro's separate High Injury Network, a mapping tool built from 2018-2022 Kentucky State Police data that identifies non-interstate roadway segments with a disproportionate share of fatal and serious injury crashes.³ The network covers just 152 miles, about 5% of the county's non-interstate roads, but accounts for more than half of all fatal and suspected serious injury crashes on those roads, 1,213 of them over the study period, spread across 53 priority corridors.⁴ Reporting on the network named Westport Road, Hill Street in the West End, the Preston corridor, Taylor Boulevard and New Cut Road, and Second Street out to the Clark Memorial Bridge among the specific segments included.⁴

Downtown carries an outsized share of the risk. The pedestrian crash study found downtown Louisville, just 5% of Jefferson County's land area, accounted for about 32% of all pedestrian crashes and 21% of fatal and suspected serious injury crashes between 2011 and 2020.¹

A mixed recent trend

The most recent full-year numbers cut both ways. Louisville Metro Government reported 94 roadway deaths on Jefferson County's non-interstate roads in 2024, a 14% drop from 2023.⁵ Pedestrian deaths moved the opposite direction: 39 pedestrians were killed in 2024, a 26% increase and the highest total in more than a decade.⁵ A Louisville Metro survey of more than 1,400 residents that year found 85% wanted the city to do more about speeding.⁵

What's being done about it

Louisville Metro was awarded a $21 million Safe Streets and Roads for All grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, a federal program built to fund exactly this kind of local safety work, to redesign 10 corridors identified through the High Injury Network analysis.⁵⁶ Projects moving forward under that funding include road-diet "rightsizing" on Wilson Avenue, the Louis Coleman Jr. Drive corridor, and South 22nd Street, plus a redesign of Southern Parkway between West Woodlawn Avenue and Taylor Boulevard/New Cut Road that narrows the roadway from four lanes to three and adds lighting.⁵ Louisville Metro also released its first citywide Speed Management Plan in March 2025, aimed at bringing vehicle speeds down through street design and enforcement rather than relying on driver behavior alone.⁵

All of this sits on top of a legal requirement that predates Vision Zero by decades. Kentucky law has required every law enforcement agency to file a collision report with Kentucky State Police within 10 days of investigating a crash since 1974, under KRS 189.635.⁷ That mandatory reporting is what makes intersection-level crash analysis possible in the first place.

If you've been hurt at one of these intersections

Knowing an intersection has a documented history of severe crashes doesn't help much in the moment, but it can matter afterward. Prior crash data and the specific design problems Vision Zero has already documented, like turn-lane conflicts or uncontrolled pedestrian crossings, can become relevant evidence in a claim, especially when a road's design contributed to what happened. If you were hurt in a crash at one of these locations, or anywhere else in the Louisville area, an attorney who handles Kentucky crash claims can help you sort out what the police report, the road design, and the other driver's conduct actually mean for your case. You can find one through our legal directory.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. Vision Zero Louisville, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, "Understanding Pedestrian Crashes Report 2011-2020" (prepared by Palmer Engineering and HDR), published November 29, 2023, revised May 10, 2024. https://louisvilleky.gov/sites/default/files/2024-05/vzl-understanding-pedestrian-crashes-2011-2020-november-2023_rev-1.pdf

2. Kentucky State Police / Kentucky Transportation Center, University of Kentucky, "Kentucky Traffic Collision Facts, Calendar Year 2023" (Report No. KTC-25.05). https://wp.kentuckystatepolice.ky.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Kentucky-Crash-Facts-2023-FY2024.pdf

3. Louisville Metro Government, "Louisville Metro KY - High Injury Network" dataset, data.gov. https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/louisville-metro-ky-high-injury-network

4. Louisville Public Media, "Louisville's High Injury Network could help prioritize improving safety on certain roads," March 5, 2024. https://www.lpm.org/news/2024-03-05/louisvilles-high-injury-network-could-help-prioritize-improving-safety-on-certain-roads

5. Louisville Metro Government / Vision Zero Louisville, official bulletin, April 2025. https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/KYLOUISVILLE/bulletins/3d7dbec

6. U.S. Department of Transportation, Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) Grant Program. https://www.transportation.gov/grants/SS4A

7. Kentucky Revised Statutes 189.635, Kentucky Legislature. https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id=54793