Pedestrian & Bicycle Crash Hotspots in New York City

New York City just posted its safest year for traffic deaths since anyone started counting, in 1910. Total fatalities fell to 205 in 2025, the lowest annual figure in the city's recorded history.¹ That milestone hides an uneven split, though: people walking accounted for 111 of those 205 deaths, 54 percent, and that share hasn't moved much even as the citywide number keeps dropping.¹ Cyclists on traditional bikes did better, three deaths in 2025 versus five in 2024 and seven in 2023, but riders of e-bikes, scooters, and mopeds are trending the other way.^{1 2}

None of this is spread evenly across five boroughs and thousands of miles of city streets. The city's own crash tally for April 2026 alone counted 6,625 reported crashes of all kinds in New York, NY.³ A small number of corridors and intersections absorb a wildly disproportionate share of the people hurt or killed in that pile of numbers, and the city has spent more than a decade methodically identifying exactly which ones.

How the city ranks its worst streets

Vision Zero began in January 2014 at Northern Boulevard and 61st Street in Woodside, Queens, where 8-year-old Noshat Nahian had just been struck and killed walking to school. Mayor de Blasio stood at that intersection to announce the interagency working group that became Vision Zero.⁴ Since then, NYC DOT has kept a running list of Priority Corridors, Intersections, and Areas: every corridor in a borough gets ranked by pedestrian deaths and severe injuries per mile, and corridors get added to the priority list starting from the top of that ranking until the cumulative total covers half of the borough's KSI (killed or severely injured) count.⁵

The February 2023 update to that plan added 349 new Priority Corridors and Intersections citywide.⁵ Brooklyn alone now carries 49 Priority Corridors, 91 Priority Intersections, and 18 square miles of Priority Areas; the Bronx carries 25 corridors, 46 intersections, and 8 square miles.⁵ The payoff shows up in the numbers: measured against a 2019 baseline, pedestrian fatalities on Priority Corridors fell 45 percent in Manhattan, 40 percent in the Bronx, 38 percent in Brooklyn, and 25 percent in Queens.⁵ Zoomed out over the full Vision Zero era, DOT's own dashboard shows citywide traffic deaths down 15.6 percent compared with the pre-Vision Zero years of 2009 to 2013. Total injuries, though, are actually up 5.8 percent over that same stretch. Fewer deaths hasn't meant fewer crashes.⁶

Where the worst corridors sit today

Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn is the name that shows up most in local crash data. The 1.15-mile stretch between Grand Army Plaza and Livingston Street, running past the Tillary Street intersection near the Brooklyn Bridge approach, logged 1,143 reported crashes and 596 injuries over five years, including 78 cyclists and 89 pedestrians, plus 140 people killed or severely injured in that same span.⁷ It's a designated Priority Corridor, and in 2026 DOT started a major rebuild adding center-running bus lanes and new pedestrian islands to serve the corridor's 132,000 daily bus riders.⁷

Queens Boulevard earned the nickname "Boulevard of Death" the hard way: 18 pedestrians died on the 7.5-mile arterial in 1997 alone. Since Vision Zero began in 2014, the corridor has recorded 10 total traffic deaths, including three full calendar years with none, after a six-phase redesign added protected bike paths and shortened crossings.⁸

The Grand Concourse in the Bronx, one of the city's four original "Great Streets," saw total injuries between 161st Street and Fordham Road fall from 286 to 210, and severe injuries drop from 28 to just 4, between 2014 and 2017 after its safety redesign.⁹

Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn's East New York and Cypress Hills neighborhoods reopened in 2020 after a $48 million Great Streets rebuild of the 1.2 miles between Pennsylvania Avenue and Logan Street, finished six months ahead of schedule. Pedestrian injuries there dropped 39 percent and cyclist injuries 14 percent.¹⁰

Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island, between Satterlee Street and Narrows Road South, carried 7 pedestrian fatalities and 2.8 pedestrians killed or severely injured per mile between 2012 and 2016, among the worst rates on the island. A road diet added conventional bike lanes and left-turn bays, and KSI counts fell 28 percent from 2017 to 2021.⁵

The e-bike and moped problem nobody has solved yet

Traditional bicycle deaths hit a record low in 2025, but that's not the whole cycling story. Riders of e-bikes, stand-up scooters, and mopeds accounted for 18 deaths in the first half of 2026, up from 16 in the same period of 2025, though still below the 23 recorded at this point in both 2024 and 2023.² E-scooter deaths specifically jumped from three to six.² Injuries among these riders are actually down 7 percent year over year, to 1,036 through May 30, 2026, and down a third from 1,539 over the same window in 2023.² The trend lines here are genuinely mixed, not uniformly worse, but the city Comptroller's office has flagged the broader shift toward e-bikes and delivery mopeds as a safety category that crash reporting is still catching up to.¹¹

What's changing on the ground

Beyond the marquee corridor rebuilds, DOT has leaned harder on "daylighting": clearing parking near corners so drivers and pedestrians can actually see each other before someone steps into the crosswalk. It's part of the design toolkit on newer projects like the Flatbush Avenue reconstruction.⁷ The underlying data driving these decisions isn't hidden behind an agency firewall. NYPD's raw collision reports, the same records that feed DOT's corridor rankings, are public through the Motor Vehicle Collisions dataset covering every pedestrian or cyclist injured or killed citywide.¹²

If you were hit walking or on a bike

New York's comparative negligence rules mean a driver who hit you can still be held liable even if you weren't following every traffic rule perfectly yourself. Proving what happened at a chaotic intersection takes documentation: photos of the scene, contact information for witnesses, and the police report number if one was filed. If you're trying to figure out next steps after a crash on one of these corridors, the legal directory is a place to start looking for an attorney who handles pedestrian and bicycle cases in New York.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. NYC DOT, "Traffic Deaths Reach All-Time Low: New York Ends Year With Fewest Fatalities Ever Recorded" - https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2026/traffic-deaths-reach-all-time-low.shtml

2. NYC DOT, "Vision Zero: Mamdani Administration Announces Pedestrian Deaths at Historic Low and That First Half of 2026 Among Safest Years on Record" - https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2026/vision-zero-pedestrian-deaths-at-historic-low.shtml

3. thatcarhitme.com, "New York Crash Report - April 2026" - https://thatcarhitme.com/crash-data/new-york/new-york/april-2026-report

4. Office of the Mayor, City of New York, "Mayor de Blasio Launches Interagency Working Group to Implement 'Vision Zero'" - https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/023-14/mayor-de-blasio-launches-interagency-working-group-implement-vision-zero-prevent-pedestrian

5. NYC DOT, "Vision Zero: DOT Releases Update to Borough Pedestrian Safety Action Plans, With Targeted Analysis of Priority Corridors and Intersections" - https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2023/vision-zero-borough-pedestrian-safety-action-plan.shtml

6. NYC DOT / NYPD, Vision Zero View - https://vzv.nyc/

7. NYC DOT, "Fast Buses: NYC DOT Begins Reconstruction of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn With New Bus Lanes, Safety Upgrades" - https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2026/nyc-dot-begins-reconstruction-of-flatbush-avenue.shtml

8. NYC DOT, "NYC DOT Completes Final Phase of Queens Boulevard Redesign" - https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2024/complete-queens-boulevard-redesign.shtml

9. NYC Department of Design and Construction, Grand Concourse press release - https://www.nyc.gov/site/ddc/about/press-releases/2020/pr-081220-Grand-Concourse.page

10. NYC DOT, "NYC DOT, DDC, and DEP Announce Completion of First Phase of Atlantic Avenue" - https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2020/pr20-029.shtml

11. Office of the New York City Comptroller, "Street Safety in the Era of Micromobility" - https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/street-safety-in-the-era-of-micromobility/

12. NYC Open Data, "NYPD Motor Vehicle Collisions - Pedestrian or Cyclist Injured or Killed" - https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehicle-Collisions-Pedestrian-or-Cyclis/tc4p-tmf7