San Diego's Most Dangerous Intersections, By the City's Own Numbers

San Diego's roads killed or seriously injured someone almost every eight hours, on average, between 2018 and 2022. That's SANDAG's own count: 4,433 people dead or permanently injured region-wide over five years, nearly three a day.¹ The City of San Diego's Transportation Department has a narrower answer to where that risk concentrates. Every year the department runs the numbers on intersections across the city and ranks them by crash rate, not raw crash count alone. The most recent version, a memorandum dated March 24, 2026 and covering calendar year 2025, names names.²

How the city defines "dangerous"

City traffic engineer Phil Rust's memo looked at 40 intersections that each logged five or more reported injury crashes in 2025, then calculated a crash rate for every one: the number of crashes times one million, divided by daily entering traffic times 365 days.² Property-damage-only collisions don't count toward the total. Only injury and fatal crashes make the list, on the theory that those are the crashes worth spending engineering dollars to prevent first.²

The average crash rate across those 40 intersections came out to 0.43. One standard deviation above that, 0.58, became the cutoff for "high crash rate." Five intersections cleared it in 2025.

The five highest crash-rate intersections in 2025

All five, straight from the city's memo:²

• Judicial Drive at Nobel Drive (signalized): crash rate 0.82, 5 crashes, 16,689 vehicles entering daily
• 26th Street at Florida Drive (signalized): crash rate 0.76, 9 crashes, 32,594 vehicles daily; also the top site on the city's Signalized Left Turn Crash Frequency list
• Imperial Avenue at 53rd Street (two-way stop): crash rate 0.71, 5 crashes, 19,379 vehicles daily
• Imperial Avenue at San Jacinto Drive (signalized): crash rate 0.67, 5 crashes, 20,448 vehicles daily
• 54th Street at University Avenue (signalized): crash rate 0.65, 9 crashes, 38,055 vehicles daily

Low daily traffic volume actually works against a street in this math. Five crashes on a road carrying under 17,000 cars a day produces a higher rate than nine crashes on 54th Street, which carries more than double that volume. The formula rewards streets that would look calm by traffic-count alone but still manage to hurt people.

Raw frequency tells a different story

Rate isn't the only lens the city applies. Two intersections tied for the most injury crashes in the city regardless of traffic volume: 47th Street at Imperial Avenue and Palm Avenue at Saturn Boulevard, nine each.² Pedestrians get their own list. Fifth Avenue at Broadway, downtown in the Gaslamp Quarter grid, logged four pedestrian crashes in 2025, more than any other intersection in the city.² One street segment also made the report: University Avenue between Chollas Parkway and 54th Street racked up three injury crashes in under a mile.²

The same corridors keep coming back

Pull an earlier edition of the same city analysis, this one covering calendar year 2023, and a pattern shows up. That report named seven high-crash locations: Art Street at El Cajon Boulevard, Kurtz Street at Rosecrans Street, Miramar Road at Nobel Drive, Briarwood Road at Paradise Valley Road, Pacific Highway at Taylor Street, and two segments, one on El Cajon Boulevard and one on Market Street.³ Nobel Drive shows up in both years' reports, once at Judicial Drive and once at Miramar Road. El Cajon Boulevard shows up twice in the same year's report, at two separate points along the same corridor.

That's consistent with SANDAG's regional numbers. Six percent of San Diego's roads account for 54% of the region's fatal and serious-injury crashes.¹ A small set of corridors carries most of the risk, year after year, which is why the same street names keep resurfacing on the city's own lists.

Why Vision Zero hasn't caught up

San Diego adopted Vision Zero in October 2015, with a goal of eliminating traffic deaths and severe injuries by 2025.⁴ That deadline passed without the goal. Per a City Auditor analysis cited in a May 2025 report from the Office of the Independent Budget Analyst, San Diego's average annual pedestrian fatality rate rose 53.9% after the city adopted Vision Zero, from 1.95 before adoption to 3.01 after, among the steeper increases of the 24 cities the Vision Zero Network tracks nationally. Only two of those 24, San Francisco and New York, saw their rates go down instead.⁴

The city's 2016 pedestrian safety audit found more than 8,000 pedestrians injured and 270 killed between 2001 and 2015, with 66 of those deaths packed into 2013 through 2015 alone, the worst three-year stretch on record at the time.⁴ A November 2024 report from Circulate San Diego, covered by KPBS, tied the continued rise partly to bigger vehicles and higher speeds nationally, and singled out Palm Avenue, the six-lane corridor connecting San Diego to Imperial Beach, as a road still missing basic bike infrastructure.⁵ "Good job, but not good enough," Circulate San Diego policy counsel Will Moore told KPBS. "We need to redouble our efforts and implement the good plans that we've made."⁵

Where San Diego lands against comparable cities

The California Office of Traffic Safety ranks cities against others of similar size every year, and a rank of 1 means the worst record, not the best. Against 14 other California cities in its population bracket for 2023, San Diego ranked 13th of 15 for total fatal-and-injury crash victims (4,861), meaning most peer cities fared worse. Motorcyclists told a different story: San Diego ranked 4th of 15 for motorcycle victims (349), among the worst few in its class. Pedestrian victims put the city in the middle of the pack: 522 victims, 10th of 15.⁶

The fix already showing up on street corners

Some of these same intersections are getting a specific, low-cost treatment: red curb paint pulled back from the crosswalk. That's California's "daylighting" law, Vehicle Code section 22500(n), amended into the code by AB 413 in 2023.⁷ It bars parking within 20 feet of the approach side of any marked or unmarked crosswalk (15 feet where a curb extension exists), whether or not the curb is painted red. The law took effect January 1, 2024, but cities could only issue warnings for unmarked violations until January 1, 2025, when citations became enforceable everywhere.⁷ The city's high-crash memo lists daylighting, upgraded signal heads, pedestrian countdown timers, and flashing beacons as the standard toolkit engineers are told to weigh at every location on the list.²

If you're hurt at one of these intersections

A crash at an intersection the city has already flagged as high-risk can matter later, particularly if a design issue such as a missing countdown timer, an obscured signal, or a crosswalk without daylighting played a role alongside driver error. A few things help preserve that record:

• Get the police report number at the scene, and request the full California Crash Reporting System (CCRS) record once it's finalized.
• Photograph the intersection itself, including signal heads, sight lines, crosswalk markings, and any parked cars close to the corner.
• Note the exact date, time, and location before conditions change; the city revisits and modifies these intersections on its own budget cycle.

An attorney familiar with San Diego's roads can help sort out whether a design issue contributed alongside driver error. You can find one through thatcarhitme.com's legal directory.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. SANDAG, "Vision Zero." https://www.sandag.org/projects-and-programs/regional-initiatives/vision-zero

2. City of San Diego Transportation Department, "High Crash Locations for Calendar Year 2025" (memorandum from Phil Rust, Senior Traffic Engineer, March 24, 2026). https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2026-04/2025-high-crash-locations.pdf

3. Inside San Diego, "Safety Improvements Identified for High Crash City Locations." https://www.insidesandiego.org/safety-improvements-identified-high-crash-city-locations

4. Office of the Independent Budget Analyst, City of San Diego, Report No. 25-15, "Response to Resolution R-315764 Affirming Safety as the Highest Transportation-Related Priority" (May 12, 2025). https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2025-05/25-15-making-safety-a-top-transportation-priority-final.pdf

5. KPBS, "Report suggests bigger vehicles, slow construction timelines led to San Diego's 'Vision Zero' failure" (Nov. 13, 2024). https://www.kpbs.org/news/public-safety/2024/11/13/report-suggests-bigger-vehicles-slow-construction-timelines-led-to-san-diegos-vision-zero-failure

6. California Office of Traffic Safety, "San Diego 2023" crash rankings. https://www.ots.ca.gov/?p=41487

7. Cal. Veh. Code § 22500(n), amended by Stats. 2023, ch. 652 (AB 413). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=VEH&sectionNum=22500