Intersections Are Where Metro Phoenix Crashes Concentrate: What Two Years of Data Show

Intersections are where traffic streams cross — and where Metro Phoenix crashes concentrate. A new analysis of two full years of Arizona Department of Transportation crash-level data, published by our sister outlet AZ Crash Data, puts numbers on just how much of the region's crash problem lives at crossings.

The scale of it

Across 23 incorporated Metro Phoenix cities in 2023-2024, the Metro Phoenix Dangerous Intersections Study counted 161,753 total crashes. Of those, 68,281 — 42.2% — occurred at intersections. Those intersection crashes injured more than 32,000 people and killed 426.

A few patterns stand out in the study:

• 99th Avenue & Lower Buckeye Road in Phoenix recorded the most crashes of any surface intersection in the region — 180 over the two years.
• 47th Avenue & Northern Avenue in Glendale was the deadliest single surface intersection, with three deaths.
• Indian School Road appears on four of the ten deadliest intersections in the study — a single corridor carrying an outsized share of the region's fatal intersection crashes.

The full study includes the top-25 regional table, the deadliest and highest-injury intersections, freeway interchange areas, and per-city top-10 lists for a dozen cities.

Why intersections concentrate risk

Intersections compress the hardest driving tasks into a few seconds: judging gaps in oncoming traffic, reading signal changes, watching for pedestrians in crosswalks, and anticipating other drivers' decisions — all at once, often at speed. Left turns across traffic and red-light entries are consistently associated with the most severe outcomes, because they produce the angle impacts that vehicle safety systems are least able to soften.

Habits that can help

No habit eliminates risk that other drivers create, but a few are worth knowing:

• Taking an extra beat after a light turns green can help, since red-light runners tend to arrive in the first seconds of the new phase.
• Treating a "stale" green light — one that has been green a long time as you approach — as a light that may change can reduce hard decisions at the line.
• On unprotected left turns, waiting for a gap that feels generous rather than merely possible leaves margin for a speeding oncoming vehicle.
• Extra caution at wide, high-speed arterials — the environment where most of the study's worst intersections sit — matches where the data says the risk actually is.

Intersection safety is ultimately an engineering and enforcement question as much as a driver-behavior one, and data like this exists so those conversations can be specific: named crossings, real counts, and measurable change year over year.

Data cited from the AZ Crash Data intersections study, built on ADOT crash-level records for 2023-2024. AZ Crash Data and Safe Roads AZ are both published by Ironwood Media Group LLC.