Pedestrian and bicycle crash hotspots in the Las Vegas Valley

If a car hit you while you were walking or riding a bike in the Las Vegas Valley, you are part of a pattern Nevada has fought for years. This is one of the hardest places in the country to cross a street on foot, and the crash data says so plainly.

In 2023, 106 pedestrians were killed in Nevada traffic crashes. Pedestrians made up 27.2 percent of every traffic death in the state that year, a share tied among the highest in the nation and well above the 17.9 percent national figure.¹ Nevada's pedestrian death rate was 3.32 per 100,000 residents, compared with 2.18 nationwide.¹ Almost all of that harm lands in Clark County.

Federal analysts rank the metro without much ambiguity. From 2020 through 2024, the Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise area recorded 361 pedestrian deaths, which placed it 23rd among large U.S. metros for danger to people on foot, at roughly 3.1 deaths per 100,000 residents a year.² Then came 2024, the deadliest year Clark County has on record. The Nevada Office of Traffic Safety counted 293 people killed on county roads, including 95 pedestrians and 11 bicyclists.³ Statewide, traffic deaths have climbed 45 percent over the past decade, and Nevada's 2024 fatality rate ranked sixth worst in the country.⁴ The state now puts the cost of its fatal and serious crashes at $18.1 billion in societal harm for 2024 alone.⁴

Why the wide roads do the damage

The valley was built around fast, wide arterials with long gaps between signals, and that design shows up in how people die. Nationally in 2023, 74 percent of pedestrians killed died somewhere other than an intersection, and 77 percent were killed in the dark.¹ Close to two-thirds of pedestrian deaths happened where there was no sidewalk at all.⁵ That describes a typical Las Vegas fatal crash almost exactly: someone crossing a six-lane road mid-block, after sunset, where the nearest signal sits a quarter mile away. Clark County added hundreds of thousands of residents while many of its arterials kept the geometry they were handed decades ago, and pedestrians pay for that gap.

Timing matters too. The evening hours from 6 p.m. to midnight carry the heaviest share of pedestrian deaths, which lines up with commute traffic meeting darkness on unlit stretches.¹ Speed does the rest. A person struck at 40 miles per hour rarely survives, and many valley arterials are posted at 45 with real traffic running faster. Hit-and-run makes it worse. Nearly one in four pedestrians killed on U.S. roads in 2023 was struck by a driver who left the scene.¹

Boulder Highway, the deadliest corridor

No road in Southern Nevada carries a worse pedestrian record than Boulder Highway. From 2006 through 2018, nearly one in ten of all pedestrian deaths in the entire state happened on this single corridor.⁶ The Nevada Department of Transportation flagged eight locations along it with repeated pedestrian fatalities and spent $1.5 million upgrading a 14-mile stretch, adding mid-block crossings with rectangular rapid-flashing beacons, median improvements, and new crosswalks by May 2019.⁷ In Henderson alone, a quarter of all traffic deaths over a recent six-year span happened on Boulder Highway.⁸

A far larger fix is underway. The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada is leading Reimagine Boulder Highway, a $173 million rebuild of 15.4 miles between Charleston Boulevard in Las Vegas and Wagon Wheel Drive in Henderson.⁹ The plan cuts the road from six lanes to four, adds a center transit lane, lifts the bike lanes off the roadway, widens the sidewalks, and puts in median refuge islands, more crossings, and brighter lighting.⁹ The work is a partnership with Henderson, Las Vegas, NDOT, and Clark County.⁸

The other corridors that keep showing up

Boulder Highway is the extreme case, but the same handful of arterials appear over and over in state crash data: Charleston Boulevard, Sahara Avenue, Tropicana Avenue, Flamingo Road, and Las Vegas Boulevard.¹⁰ These roads form the City of Las Vegas High Injury Network, the small set of streets responsible for a large share of the region's serious and fatal crashes. The city won a $2.5 million federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grant to install more than 3,500 LED streetlights along those corridors, after finding that most serious pedestrian injuries and deaths in the city occur on poorly lit roads.¹¹ The RTC and Clark County are also building a regional Safe Streets action plan meant to steer future spending toward these high-crash locations.¹¹

Cyclists deal with a narrower version of the same problem. Bike lanes on these arterials often vanish at the intersections where riders are most exposed, and Nevada's bicyclist deaths have stayed in the double digits statewide in recent years.³ A rider following the painted line is safe only until the paint stops.

If a car hit you here

Call 911 and let officers document the scene. In the city core that is usually the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; on state highways it may be the Nevada Highway Patrol. A crash report with the responding agency's findings matters later, especially when a driver claims you stepped out unexpectedly. Get checked by a doctor even if you feel fine, because head and internal injuries from a vehicle strike often hide for hours.

Preserve what you can. Photos of the crossing, the lighting, any missing crosswalk or signal, and the exact spot all help show what actually happened. Nevada uses a modified comparative negligence rule, so a driver's insurer has every reason to shift blame onto the person who was walking or riding. If you are trying to work out whether the crash was preventable and who is responsible, you can find an attorney who handles pedestrian and bicycle cases in the valley.

The roads that hurt the most people here are known, mapped, and slowly being rebuilt. That work cannot undo an injury that already happened. But it does mean the crash you were in was rarely just bad luck. It usually happened where the road itself made it likely.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts 2023 Data: Pedestrians (DOT HS 813 727). https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813727

2. Smart Growth America, Dangerous by Design 2026, metro rankings (data years 2020-2024). https://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/signature-reports/dangerous-by-design/rankings/

3. Nevada Office of Traffic Safety and Zero Fatalities Nevada, 2023-2024 preliminary year-end fatality report. https://zerofatalitiesnv.com/app/uploads/2025/04/EOY-2023-2024-STATE-FATEL-REPORT-Preliminary.pdf

4. TRIP, "Addressing America's Traffic Safety Crisis," Nevada news release, July 23, 2025. https://tripnet.org/reports/addressing-americas-traffic-safety-crisis-nevada-news-release-07-23-2025/

5. Governors Highway Safety Association, Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2024 Preliminary Data. https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/pedestrian-traffic-fatalities-2024-data

6. Zero Fatalities Nevada, "Boulder Highway Pedestrian Improvement Projects Scheduled at Eight Locations," 2017. https://zerofatalitiesnv.com/2017/04/12/boulder-highway-pedestrian-improvement-projects-scheduled-eight-locations/

7. Nevada Department of Transportation, "NDOT Finishes $1.5 Million in Boulder Highway Safety Upgrades in Clark County." https://www.dot.nv.gov/travel-info/news-list/-item-4468/-cftype-News

8. Las Vegas Sun, "$173 million overhaul envisions a safer Boulder Highway for Las Vegas drivers," July 16, 2024. https://lasvegassun.com/news/2024/jul/16/173-million-overhaul-envisions-a-safer-boulder-hig/

9. Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, Reimagine Boulder Highway. https://www.rtcsnv.com/boulderhighway/

10. Nevada Department of Transportation, Crash Data and Tools. https://www.dot.nv.gov/safety/crash-data-and-tools

11. U.S. Department of Transportation, Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) grant program. https://www.transportation.gov/grants/SS4A