The most dangerous intersections in Minneapolis and St. Paul

If you've driven through Uptown at rush hour, or sat three cars back from the light at Snelling and I-94, you already know which spots in the Twin Cities make your shoulders tense up. The data backs up that instinct. Minneapolis and St. Paul each track crashes down to the intersection, and a small share of streets carries most of the region's serious wrecks.

Minneapolis calls this its High Injury Network: just 23 streets, about 9% of the city's total street grid, where 66% to 70% of fatal and severe-injury crashes happen¹. From 2020 through 2024, that same slice of streets, roughly 10% of the grid, accounted for 64% of crashes causing death or serious injury². More than half of those high-injury miles aren't even controlled by the city. They're state highways and county roads running straight through Minneapolis neighborhoods¹.

Uptown's Lyn-Lake problem

Ask a longtime Minneapolis driver to name the worst intersection in the city and a lot of them will say Lyndale Avenue South and West Lake Street, known locally as Lyn-Lake. It carries roughly 37,950 vehicles a day, among the busiest crossings in the city, and pedestrians share the corner with bus stops on three of its four sides, according to a Star Tribune review of the city's pedestrian crash data³. The same review found Hennepin Avenue South at West Lake Street, a few blocks east, had four crashes resulting in death or serious injury over a recent 10-year span, with West Franklin Avenue and Lyndale Avenue South also flagged as consistently troublesome corridors³.

The city's own 2017 pedestrian crash study found the pattern holds citywide: 80% of pedestrian crashes cluster on just 10% of Minneapolis streets, and 75% of the crashes that kill or seriously injure a pedestrian happen on only 5% of streets, mostly at signalized intersections on higher-speed, higher-volume roads⁴.

Hennepin Avenue South has been under reconstruction because of this history. The city rebuilt 1.4 miles between West Lake Street and Douglas Avenue in two phases, finishing the Lake Street to 26th Street segment in 2024 and the rest in 2025, and added new signalized crossings at Fremont Avenue South and 25 1/2 Street West after finding that pedestrians and cyclists made up just 11% of crashes on the corridor but 57% of the crashes serious enough to cause injury⁵.

Speed and money behind the numbers

Minneapolis logged 206 fatal or serious-injury crashes in 2022, the peak of a run that's ticked down since, though the average across 2017 to 2025 still works out to about 160 people killed or seriously hurt every year, nearly 1,500 people total². Speeding is doing more of that damage than it used to. It was a factor in 80% of the city's fatal crashes in 2024, up from 43% in 2017². The physics explain why speed matters this much: a pedestrian hit at 30 mph has roughly a 40% chance of death or serious injury, and at 40 mph that jumps to 73%².

In December 2023, the U.S. Department of Transportation put real money behind fixing the worst of it: a $20 million Safe Streets and Roads for All grant to Minneapolis aimed at 25 miles of high-injury streets and signal upgrades at 526 intersections citywide⁶. The city's 2023-2025 Vision Zero Action Plan, adopted that April, targets the three crash types the data says matter most: speeding, left-turn conflicts, and red-light running¹.

St. Paul's numbers tell a similar story

Saint Paul logged more than 16,000 crashes on its surface streets from 2018 through the 2023 completion of its Transportation Safety Action Plan, with 60 deaths and 264 serious injuries in that stretch⁷. The year-by-year count shows the problem getting worse before the plan kicked in: fatalities climbed from 7 in 2018 to 19 in 2021, even as total crash volume fell from about 3,500 to roughly 3,100⁷. St. Paul's crash analysis flags Marshall Avenue, University Avenue, and Selby Avenue, plus the stretch of I-94 running through the city, as recurring problem corridors⁷. The city's goal now is zero traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2045, with a 50% cut in fatal and serious-injury crashes within the first 10 years⁷.

One St. Paul intersection has a longer paper trail than most: I-94 at the Snelling Avenue North ramps. When MnDOT ranked Minnesota's crash-prone intersections using crash data from 2006 through 2010, weighting fatalities far more heavily than fender-benders, that interchange came in second statewide, behind only an intersection in St. Cloud, with three fatalities and two life-altering injuries in the study window⁸. Minneapolis's Hiawatha Avenue, signed as Highway 55, at East 26th Street ranked third in that same analysis, with two fatalities and two life-altering injuries at a spot where light-rail crossings, a state highway, and a busy signal all meet⁸.

Beyond the two downtowns

The same MnDOT ranking reaches well past the city limits. Minnesota Highway 65 at 221st Avenue NE in East Bethel had the highest injury count on the list, eight life-altering injuries alongside two fatalities, in that 2006-2010 window⁸. Minnesota Highway 252 at 66th Avenue in Brooklyn Center also made the list, a spot MnDOT's own traffic studies engineer said carries "a lot more traffic here than the road was designed for"⁸. Farther north in Anoka County, the intersection of Mississippi Street NE and University Avenue NE in Fridley ranked 18th on a separate statewide MnDOT severity list, and Fridley police recorded 26 crashes there since January 2010: 19 property-damage-only, six causing injury, and one fatality, a pedestrian struck crossing the road in May 2010⁹. Anoka County has since studied narrowing that roadway from four lanes to two to slow traffic through the corridor.

Statewide, the trend is at least moving in the right direction. Minnesota recorded 475 traffic deaths in 2024, and that fell to a preliminary 370 in 2025, a 20% drop and the fewest deaths since 2019¹⁰. MnDOT's current five-year safety plan notes that intersections are one of six factors present in 90% of the state's fatal and serious-injury crashes, alongside speed, distraction, lane departure, impairment, and not wearing a seatbelt, and it's pushing roundabouts, J-turns, and restricted-movement intersections as the fixes that change those odds¹¹.

If you're hurt at one of these intersections

None of this data changes what happens in the seconds after a crash. Get medical care first, even if you feel fine; Minnesota crash reports, insurance adjusters, and any future claim will all lean on what a doctor documented that day and in the days after. If the crash happened at a known problem spot like the ones above, that history, crash counts, MnDOT's own severity data, a city's Vision Zero designation, can matter to how a claim gets evaluated. An attorney who handles Minnesota crash cases can help sort out what that history means for your situation; you can find one through our legal directory.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. City of Minneapolis, "2023-2025 Vision Zero Action Plan," https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/RCAV2/31027/18-Vision-Zero-Action-Plan-2023-2025.pdf

2. City of Minneapolis, "Vision Zero Safety Data," https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/programs-initiatives/visionzero/vz-data-stats/

3. Star Tribune, "Minneapolis study: W. Lake Street intersections most perilous for pedestrians," January 2019, https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-study-w-lake-street-intersections-most-perilous-for-pedestrians/460606453

4. City of Minneapolis, "Pedestrian Crash Study, 2017," https://www.minneapolismn.gov/media/-www-content-assets/documents/Peds-Study-2017.pdf

5. City of Minneapolis, "Hennepin Ave S. Reconstruction," https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/projects/hennepin-ave-s/

6. MPR News, "Minneapolis awarded $20 million federal grant to improve traffic safety," December 14, 2023, https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/12/14/minneapolis-awarded-20-million-federal-grant-to-improve-traffic-safety

7. City of Saint Paul, "Transportation Safety Action Plan, Appendix A: Crash Analysis and Evaluation," April 2024, https://www.stpaul.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/FINAL_TSAP_04.30.24_AppendixA.pdf

8. MinnPost, "Where are Minnesota's most crash-prone intersections?," July 2012 (MnDOT crash data, 2006-2010), https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2012/07/where-are-minnesotas-most-crash-prone-intersections/

9. Patch, "Mississippi St., University Avenue In Fridley Is MN's 18th Most Dangerous Intersection," https://patch.com/minnesota/fridley/mississippi-st-university-avenue-in-fridley-is-mn-s-171f1c6eb82

10. Minnesota Department of Public Safety, "New report: Traffic safety programs saving lives, driving down traffic deaths," https://dps.mn.gov/news/ots/new-report-traffic-safety-programs-saving-lives-driving-down-traffic-deaths

11. Minnesota Department of Transportation, "2025-2029 Strategic Highway Safety Plan," July 2025, https://edocs-public.dot.state.mn.us/edocs_public/DMResultSet/download?docId=38995232