Columbus crash hotspots: where rollovers, T-bones, and head-on wrecks happen

Ohio lost 1,156 people to traffic crashes in 2024, across 1,076 fatal wrecks, according to the Ohio State Highway Patrol.¹ Central Ohio carries a share of that toll, and the deaths fall into patterns. A rollover on a curved freeway ramp and a broadside at a downtown light are different crashes with different causes. If you drive Columbus regularly, it helps to know where each one tends to happen and why.

This page covers three of the most damaging crash types in the Columbus market: T-bone (angle) collisions at intersections, head-on and wrong-way wrecks on the freeways, and rollovers. Each has its own map.

T-bone crashes at Columbus intersections

An angle crash, the kind people call a T-bone or a broadside, happens when the front of one vehicle strikes the side of another. Only a door stands between an occupant and the striking bumper, so these wrecks injure at a high rate. In Columbus they cluster at wide, high-volume intersections.

At Governor Mike DeWine's request, ODOT ranked Ohio's 150 most dangerous intersections, and 19 of them sit in Franklin County.² The one ODOT described in the most detail was East Broad Street at James Road on the east side, which recorded 183 crashes and 49 injuries from 2016 to 2018. Angle and lane-change crashes there ran at double the state average for signalized urban intersections.² ODOT flagged four more Franklin County crossings on the same list: State Route 161 at Cleveland Avenue, SR-161 at Karl Road, Morse Road at Westerville Road, and East Broad Street at McNaughten Road.² If you drive the north side or the east side, you know these lights.

ODOT's preferred fix for the worst of them is the roundabout, which removes the crossing paths that make a T-bone possible. In a September 2025 review of 76 Ohio intersections converted to roundabouts, single-lane roundabouts had cut injury crashes by 69 percent and multi-lane roundabouts by 25 percent.³⁴ Central Ohio has been converting problem intersections to roundabouts for years.

Head-on and wrong-way wrecks on the freeways

Head-on crashes are rare on surface streets with a median or a turn lane. On Columbus freeways they show up in one specific and lethal form: the wrong-way driver. Someone enters I-70, I-71, or I-670 against traffic, usually late at night, and meets oncoming cars at a closing speed no seatbelt was built for.

Statewide, ODOT counted wrong-way crashes climbing from 63 in 2013 to 105 in 2022, and the 2022 crashes alone killed 12 people and seriously hurt 35.⁵ Wrong-way wrecks are a small fraction of all Ohio crashes but roughly 40 times more likely to be deadly.⁵ Recent Columbus cases show why. In February 2026 a driver headed south in the northbound lanes of I-71 near East Broad Street hit a pickup head-on and set off a chain-reaction crash that killed a 53-year-old man.⁶ In September 2023 a wrong-way driver on I-70 near State Route 33 in east Columbus struck a car head-on, killing one person and seriously injuring three.⁷

ODOT is spending to bring those numbers down. The agency is putting about $2.7 million into wrong-way detection on 31 interstate ramps across the Columbus metro, building on radar it first installed on the I-670 ramp near Neil Avenue after flagging that spot in 2015.⁸ The systems catch most wrong-way drivers early. In 2024, ramp detectors were triggered 354 times, and 83 percent of those drivers turned around before reaching the highway.⁹

Rollovers

A rollover is the crash that most often turns a survivable wreck into a fatal one. Nationally, rollovers made up 28 percent of passenger-vehicle occupant deaths in 2023 despite being a small share of crashes, and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety counted 6,250 rollover deaths among passenger-vehicle occupants in 2024.¹⁰¹¹ Taller vehicles tip more easily. Among occupants killed, the rollover share was highest for pickups at 38 percent, then SUVs at 33 percent, vans at 25 percent, and cars at 20 percent.¹⁰ Most fatal rollovers involve a single vehicle running off the road: 47 percent of single-vehicle occupant deaths involved a rollover, against 13 percent in multi-vehicle crashes.¹⁰

In the Columbus market, the rollover risk lives on the outerbelt. The curved connector ramps where I-270 meets I-70, I-71, and State Route 161 ask a driver carrying too much speed to hold a tight arc, and trucks in particular lose it there. The ramp from I-70 to I-270 on the west side has had semis tip onto their sides more than once and shut the interchange for hours.¹² A ramp rollover rarely involves a second car. It's usually one vehicle, one driver, and speed.

What Columbus is doing about it

The city runs a Vision Zero program, started in 2020, aimed at ending traffic deaths and serious injuries. Its central finding is that the danger is concentrated. When the program began, about 65 percent of fatal and serious-injury crashes were happening on just 10 percent of city streets; five years in, that had shifted to 52 percent on 7 percent.¹³ Those streets make up the High Injury Network, and in Columbus they include Morse Road, East and West Broad Street, North High Street, South Hamilton Road, Refugee Road, and Livingston Avenue.¹³ Drive those corridors and you are on the roads the city's own data flags as the worst.

The clearest proof the fixes work is East Broad Street. The city cut a two-mile stretch from six lanes to two and added protected bike lanes. Crashes fell by more than half and excessive speeding dropped 89 percent.¹⁴ The Columbus Division of Police, whose Accident Investigation Unit works more than 16,000 crashes a year, has focused enforcement on the same High Injury Network corridors.¹⁵

If you were in one of these crashes

Angle, head-on, and rollover crashes tend to cause serious injuries, and fault often turns on a police report, camera footage, or the physical evidence at the scene. Get the crash report number before you leave, photograph the vehicles and the roadway, and see a doctor even if you feel fine, because spine and internal injuries from side impacts and rollovers can take days to surface. If another driver caused the wreck and you are weighing a claim, you can find a personal injury attorney who handles Ohio crash cases.

Roads change and projects open, and crash patterns move with them. The intersections and interchanges above are where Columbus's own agencies say the risk sits today.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. Ohio State Highway Patrol, Statewide and County Statistics. https://statepatrol.ohio.gov/dashboards-statistics/statistics/statewide-and-county-statistics

2. WSYX ABC6, "ODOT releases 150 most dangerous intersections amid gas tax debate." https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/odot-releases-150-most-dangerous-intersections-amid-gas-tax-debate

3. Ohio Department of Transportation, Roundabouts. https://www.transportation.ohio.gov/roundabouts

4. WYSO, "ODOT says roundabouts are improving intersection safety across Ohio" (Sept. 18, 2025). https://www.wyso.org/news/2025-09-18/odot-says-roundabouts-are-improving-intersection-safety-across-ohio

5. WTVG 13abc, "ODOT: Wrong-way crashes make up 0.01% of all crashes Ohio" (Feb. 6, 2025). https://www.13abc.com/2025/02/06/odot-wrong-way-crashes-make-up-001-all-crashes-ohio/

6. NBC4 WCMH, "Wrong-way driver located hours after fatal I-71 crash in downtown Columbus." https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/wrong-way-driver-located-hours-after-fatal-i-71-crash-in-downtown-columbus/

7. 10TV WBNS, "1 killed, 3 critically injured in crash involving wrong-way driver on I-70 west in east Columbus." https://www.10tv.com/article/traffic/west-columbus-crash-i-70-westbound-james-road/530-3f1d3900-2fbb-44ad-99e8-70678cfc3577

8. 10TV WBNS, "$2.7 million investment hopes to prevent wrong-way crashes on Columbus highways." https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/ohio-wrong-way-crashes-odot-technology-columbus-safer-roads-highways/530-5f55b83e-f9b2-404f-85ec-ba97f9fbebae

9. 10TV WBNS, "More wrong-way driver cameras go live across central Ohio entrance and exit ramps." https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/wrong-way-driver-cameras-central-ohio-entrance-and-exit-ramps/530-0f3e3824-7c0b-4cb4-a3c5-7a1d19ae12e8

10. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts: Passenger Vehicles (2023 data). https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813723.pdf

11. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Fatality Facts: Passenger vehicle occupants. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/passenger-vehicle-occupants

12. NBC4 WCMH, "Semi truck overturned on I-270 ramp to I-70 in Columbus." https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/semi-truck-overturned-on-i-270-ramp-to-i-70-on-west-side/

13. City of Columbus, Vision Zero Columbus. https://www.columbus.gov/Business-Development/Design-Construction/Street-Road-Projects/Vision-Zero-Home

14. NACTO, "Vision Zero improvements on Columbus' East Broad Street decrease crashes, reduce speeds." https://nacto.org/latest/vision-zero-improvements-on-columbus-east-broad-street-decrease-crashes-reduce-speeds/

15. NBC4 WCMH, "In Columbus, across US, hit-and-run crashes at an all-time high." https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/in-columbus-across-us-hit-and-run-crashes-at-an-all-time-high/