Austin pedestrian and bicycle crash hotspots

Getting hit while walking or biking in Austin is not spread evenly across the city. It clusters. A short list of wide, fast roads carries most of the harm, and if you were struck on one of them, you are far from the first person hurt in that spot.

Austin recorded 99 traffic deaths in 2025, along with 301 serious injuries.¹ Thirty of the people killed were pedestrians, down from 39 the year before, and another 50 pedestrians were seriously hurt.¹ People on bicycles accounted for 21 serious injuries that year.¹ The drop in pedestrian deaths is real progress. Even so, 30 families lost someone on foot in a single year.

The high-injury network

Austin Transportation and Public Works tracks what it calls the high-injury network, the roads where the worst crashes concentrate. The split is stark. About 8% of the city's street mileage carries close to 60% of all serious injury and fatal crashes.² The city has flagged 13 high-injury roadway segments for safety work.²

These are not quiet residential streets. They are the multi-lane arterials that move traffic across town, with long gaps between signals and sidewalks that are narrow or missing.

The corridors to know

Six high-injury corridors have already been rebuilt with safety upgrades, and the names will be familiar to anyone who gets around Austin:³

• North Lamar Boulevard, U.S. 183 to Braker Lane
• Cameron Road, E. St. Johns Avenue to Rundberg Lane
• Riverside Drive, Lakeshore Boulevard to Montopolis Drive
• South Pleasant Valley Road, Cesar Chavez Street to Oltorf Street
• William Cannon Drive, Menchaca Road to Elm Creek Drive
• Slaughter Lane, Menchaca Road to Interstate 35

Three more are under construction: East Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard from Airport Boulevard to Johnny Morris Road, Airport Boulevard from Manor Road to Springdale Road, and South Congress Avenue from Ben White Boulevard to William Cannon Drive.³ Parmer Lane, Burnet Road, and South 1st Street are next in line.³ Across the corridors already improved, the city reports a 17% drop in severe crashes.³

North Lamar earns its place on the list. In 2024, pedestrians were killed in both the 10800 block and the 6500 block of North Lamar Boulevard.⁴ Downtown is not immune either. A pedestrian died at East 7th Street and Red River Street that same year.⁴

The deadliest stretches are state roads

Here is the part that catches people off guard. Between 65% and 75% of Austin's traffic deaths happen on roads the state owns, not the city.¹ That puts the Texas Department of Transportation, not Austin, in control of the corridors where most people die.

I-35 is the clearest case. In 2024, pedestrians were struck and killed along North I-35 in the 6600, 5000, and 11000 blocks, near or across the frontage roads.⁴ Ben White Boulevard (U.S. 290) and Ed Bluestein Boulevard (U.S. 183) follow the same pattern. A cyclist was killed on Ed Bluestein Boulevard, and pedestrians died along Ben White.⁴ These are TxDOT highways whose frontage roads act like arterials, wide and fast and difficult to cross on foot.

Riverside Drive pulls heavy foot traffic into that same high-speed environment near I-35 and South Pleasant Valley Road. A pedestrian was killed in the 2000 block of Riverside Drive in December 2024.⁴

What Austin is changing

The fixes are concrete, and several target the exact crash types that hurt people walking and biking.

Left turns are a big one. After the city calmed left turns at a group of intersections, crashes between left-turning drivers and pedestrians fell 46%, and injury crashes there dropped 56%.² A separate program that added protected left-turn signals cut opposite-direction left-turn injury and fatal crashes by 72% across 73 intersections.²

On Bluff Springs Road, the city narrowed the roadway from four lanes to three, added protected bike lanes, and built new pedestrian crossings. Crashes fell about 30%.⁵ The Cameron Road and Dessau Road corridor got similar multimodal treatment.⁵ Over the past decade, Vision Zero has added nearly 500 pedestrian crossings, upgraded more than 320 miles of sidewalk, and built 111 miles of bicycle facilities.⁵ At the sites where the city calmed traffic, serious and fatal crashes dropped 86%.⁵

The newest change sits at the east end of Lady Bird Lake. In February 2026, Austin finished the Wishbone Bridge, a pedestrian and bicycle crossing near Longhorn Dam that lets trail users skip a detour onto South Pleasant Valley Road.⁶ For years, people on the Ann and Roy Butler Trail had to squeeze through a six-foot-wide underpass that flooded and stayed dark, or walk beside fast traffic. The bridge replaced that with a car-free crossing, paired with a wider, brighter Unity Underpass.⁶ The Longhorn Dam work also added a physical barrier between the north and southbound lanes to break up head-on crashes.⁷ The city is reworking Cesar Chavez Street between Pleasant Valley Road and Shady Lane too. That project adds protected bike lanes, a dual-path trail from Longhorn Dam to Shady Lane, and new pedestrian crossings.⁸

Who gets hurt

The burden falls unevenly. Austin's data shows Black residents make up about 15% of people killed or seriously injured in crashes while accounting for 7.5% of the population, and that low-income parts of the city see four times the rate of serious and fatal traffic injuries per capita as wealthier areas.⁵ Between 40% and 60% of people killed while walking or biking are believed to be experiencing homelessness.⁵

If you were hit

If you were hurt walking or riding a bike, get medical care first, even if you feel okay at the scene. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries often show up hours later. Call police so there is an official crash report, and if you can, photograph the crossing, the signal, the lane markings, and any sight-line problems like parked cars or overgrown brush. Those details matter, because a crash on one of these corridors often has as much to do with the road's design as with any single driver.

Get the names and contact information of anyone who saw what happened. Write down the exact block and cross street while it is fresh. The same corridors that fill the city's crash data, North Lamar, Riverside, the I-35 frontage roads, are places where the physical layout can be part of your story.

If you decide you want a lawyer to look at your case, you can start with the legal directory.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. City of Austin, "Severe crashes show downward trend in 2025." https://www.austintexas.gov/transportation-public-works/mobility-matters/severe-crashes-show-downward-trend-2025

2. Austin Transportation and Public Works, Vision Zero program. https://www.austintexas.gov/department/vision-zero

3. Vision Zero ATX, "Major crashes on Austin's high-injury roads are decreasing." https://www.visionzeroatx.org/2021/12/29/major-crashes-on-austins-high-injury-roads-are-decreasing-heres-why/

4. Vision Zero ATX, 2024 traffic fatalities. https://www.visionzeroatx.org/2024-fatalities/

5. City of Austin, Vision Zero 10-Year Report (October 2025). https://publicinput.com/visionzero10

6. City of Austin Capital Delivery Services, Wishbone Bridge: Closing the Loop on the Butler Trail. https://www.austintexas.gov/capital-delivery/building-austin/wishbone-bridge-closing-loop-butler-trail

7. City of Austin Open Data, Longhorn Dam Multimodal Improvements. https://data.austintexas.gov/stories/s/Longhorn-Dam-Multimodal-Improvements/id6g-rfrm/

8. City of Austin, Safety and Mobility Improvements on Cesar Chavez Street and Red Bluff Road. https://www.speakupaustin.org/e75337