Pedestrian and bicycle crash hotspots in the Seattle-Tacoma area

Since Seattle's Vision Zero program began in 2015, the city has lost 224 people and logged 1,643 more seriously injured on its streets, according to the Seattle Department of Transportation's own tracking.¹ The city recorded 30 deaths and 220 more serious injuries in 2022 alone.¹ About 30 miles south, Tacoma's numbers follow the same grim pattern: 384 fatal and serious-injury crashes between 2016 and 2020, resulting in 64 deaths, concentrated on a short list of named streets that carry a wildly disproportionate share of the region's traffic violence.²

If you were just hit while walking or biking somewhere between these two cities, here's what the data actually shows about where these crashes cluster, why they keep happening at the same intersections, and what's being done about it.

Where Seattle's crashes cluster

SDOT's High Injury Network, the tool the department uses to rank streets by crash risk, keeps flagging the same wide, multi-lane arterials year after year: Rainier Ave S, Aurora Ave N, and 4th Ave S, along with much of the downtown grid.¹ Rainier Ave S has been a long-running priority. A 2015 road diet on part of the corridor, which added a center turn lane, tightened signal timing, and lowered the speed limit, cut collisions there by 15%, with injury crashes down 30% and crashes involving people walking or biking down 40%.¹ SDOT is still working through the rest of the corridor: recent projects targeted the intersections of Rainier Ave S and S Sturtevant St, and Rainier Ave S and 54th Ave S, and the MLK Jr Way Safety Project is extending protected bike lanes from Judkins Park Station down to Rainier Ave S.¹

The numbers explain why SDOT keeps coming back to these streets. People walking or rolling made up 38% of all fatal and serious-injury collisions citywide between 2018 and 2022, and people biking made up another 13%, even though walking/rolling and biking together account for only about a quarter of trips in the city.¹ Speed is the single biggest reason those crashes turn fatal: SDOT's own data shows that 9 out of 10 pedestrians survive being hit at 20 mph, only 5 out of 10 survive at 30 mph, and just 1 out of 10 survives at 40 mph.¹

In 2022, SDOT logged 374 pedestrian-involved collisions citywide, including 16 deaths and 84 serious injuries, up from 87 fatal-or-serious crashes in 2019.³ Bicycle collisions totaled 220 that year, with 4 deaths and 24 serious injuries.³ Sixty percent of the pedestrian crashes and 64% of the bicycle crashes happened at intersections rather than mid-block, which is exactly where SDOT is now concentrating leading pedestrian intervals, no-turn-on-red restrictions, and protected left-turn phases.³ Nearly half of all severe crashes over the past five years happened during darkness, dawn, or dusk, a pattern that points to Seattle's long, dark winters as much as to any single stretch of road.¹

The toll isn't spread evenly. Citywide, Black residents make up about 7% of Seattle's population but accounted for 16% of traffic fatalities between 2018 and 2022, and the crash-density maps SDOT publishes show South Seattle and downtown carrying the heaviest concentration of severe crashes in the city.¹ That's also where the federal government is now sending money: SDOT was awarded $25.64 million in Safe Streets and Roads for All funding in 2023, targeted specifically at Rainier Valley, SODO, downtown, and the University District.¹

Both cities' numbers ultimately come from the same well. The Washington State Department of Transportation maintains the state's crash data portal, built from Police Traffic Collision Reports and covering ten full years plus the current year, and it's open to the public, including attorneys and journalists, to search by street or intersection.⁴ Even outside the two cities' limits, the pattern holds: unincorporated King County logged 20 pedestrian-involved collisions and 19 bicycle-involved collisions on county-maintained roads in 2023, out of 1,682 total crashes that year.⁵

Tacoma's high-risk streets

Tacoma's own Vision Zero Action Plan, adopted in 2022, ran the same kind of analysis on state crash data and found that intersections account for 78% of all crashes and 70% of the fatal and serious-injury crashes citywide.² Partial-stop-controlled intersections, basic two-way stops, accounted for the single largest share of severe crashes, 46%, followed by signalized intersections at 38%.²

Speed and street type matter just as much in Tacoma as they do in Seattle. Principal arterials make up only 16% of the city's street miles but produced 57% of its fatal and serious-injury crashes, with corridors like E Portland Ave and S Tyler St called out as examples.² Streets posted at 30 mph, such as Yakima Ave, or 35 mph, such as Pacific Ave, accounted for the majority of severe crashes at both intersections and mid-block locations.² Pacific Ave and Portland Ave, along with S 56th St, S 74th St, S 72nd St, Center St, McKinley Ave, Division Ave, and 6th Ave, all appear on the city's High Risk Network map, the corridor-by-corridor ranking Tacoma uses to prioritize safety projects.²

The single most common crash type behind a serious injury or death in Tacoma is a driver going straight and hitting a pedestrian: 84 such crashes accounted for 23% of all fatal and severe-injury collisions citywide, and nearly a third of those crashes proved fatal or severely injurious.² Pedestrians made up just 3% of all crash victims in Tacoma between 2016 and 2020 but 28% of the people killed or severely hurt, the same vulnerability gap Seattle sees.² Three-quarters of Tacoma's High Risk Network sits in neighborhoods the city's own Equity Index ranks as having low or very low access to opportunity, and American Indian and Alaska Native residents, who make up 1.2% of Pierce County's population, accounted for 3.4% of the county's traffic deaths.²

One corridor shows how this plays out on a single street. The city's most recent road safety audit, finalized in July 2025, examined 6th Avenue between Jackson Ave and Pearl St (SR 163), a 0.98-mile stretch posted at 30 mph that runs past Hunt Middle School and the Swasey branch of the Tacoma Public Library.⁶ It landed on the High Risk Network because of its speed differential and crash history: five people were killed or seriously injured there between 2016 and 2018 alone, most of them pedestrians.⁶ That audit recommended a package of crossing improvements and lane reconfigurations the city is now working through.⁶

What the data means if you're on foot or on a bike

Intersections, not mid-block sections, are where the majority of severe pedestrian and bicycle crashes happen in both Seattle and Tacoma, largely because that's where a driver going straight, turning left, or failing to yield meets someone on foot.^{1 2} Wide arterials posted at 30 mph or higher, like Rainier Ave S, Aurora Ave N, Pacific Ave, and Yakima Ave, carry a share of severe crashes far out of proportion to their share of total street miles.^{1 2} Darkness, dawn, and dusk hours account for close to half of severe crashes regionally, so visibility gear and extra caution at intersections matter most in fall and winter.¹

The pattern in both cities points to street design more than to individual behavior. Wide, high-speed arterials built decades ago for car traffic are only now getting redesigned for people walking and biking, corridor by corridor.

If you or someone you love was hit while walking or biking anywhere in the Seattle-Tacoma area, get medical care documented first, then get the crash report from the responding agency, whether that's the Seattle Police Department, Tacoma Police Department, Washington State Patrol, or a county sheriff's office. An attorney who handles pedestrian and bicycle cases can help you sort out what the underlying data on a specific corridor means for your claim; you can find one through thatcarhitme.com's legal directory.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. Seattle Department of Transportation, "Vision Zero Action Plan, 2024 Update," May 2024. https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/VisionZero/VZ_Action_Plan.pdf

2. City of Tacoma, "Vision Zero Action Plan," September 2022. https://cms.tacoma.gov/PublicWorks/Engineering/VisionZero/FINAL%20Tacoma%20Vision%20Zero%20Action%20Plan%20September%202022.pdf

3. Seattle Department of Transportation, "2023 Traffic Report" (data from January 1-December 31, 2022), released April 2024. https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/About/DocumentLibrary/Reports/2023_Traffic_Report.pdf

4. Washington State Department of Transportation, "Crash Data." https://wsdot.wa.gov/about/transportation-data/crash-data

5. King County Department of Local Services, Road Services Division, "2023 Collision Data Report." https://cdn.kingcounty.gov/-/media/king-county/depts/local-services/roads/plans-reports/2023kingcountycollisiondatareport.pdf

6. City of Tacoma with Toole Design, "Vision Zero Road Safety Audits, Year 2 RSA Technical Memo #2: 6th Avenue," July 2025 (Final). https://cms.tacoma.gov/publicworks/engineering/visionzero/6th_st_tech_memo_final.pdf