Five Phoenix Streets Outkill Every Freeway in the County
Data Desk ยท Arizona
333
people killed on five Phoenix-area streets from 2020 through 2024
Thomas Road, Indian School Road, McDowell Road, Camelback Road, and Bell Road killed more people than I-10, the county's busiest freeway, killed on its own.
Our record, Maricopa County · 2020-2024
Ask most drivers where the danger is in Phoenix, and they will point at the freeways. The record points somewhere else. Five ordinary city streets killed 333 people in Maricopa County. That happened over five years, 2020 through 2024. It is more than double the 163 people killed on I-10. I-10 is the freeway that carries the most traffic through the county. It also beats every other freeway here, on its own or added together.
Thomas Road did the most damage by itself. It killed 80 people in five years, a single city street within nine deaths of I-17's entire county total. Indian School Road killed 76. McDowell Road killed 61. Camelback Road killed 59. Bell Road killed 57. None of these streets is a freeway. Each one is a wide, straight road most Phoenix-area drivers cross every week without a second thought.
The freeways are not safe. I-10 alone killed 163 people over the same five years. The county's four freeways killed 445 people combined. But freeways carry far more cars, at far higher speeds, over far longer distances than five city streets do. Set against that, 333 deaths on five ordinary streets stands out. It is more than double I-10's toll by itself. The place people worry about is not the place doing the most killing.
Five streets, ranked by deaths
Deaths on five Maricopa County streets, 2020-2024
Every bar above sits on the same scale as the freeway chart below. Thomas Road alone nearly closes the gap with I-10, the busiest freeway in the county. No other street on this list comes close to empty.
The county's four freeways, same years, same method
Deaths on the county's four freeways, 2020-2024
I-10 tops this list, and it should. It is the busiest road in the state. Set the two charts side by side and I-10 is still the single deadliest road named here. But the five streets above killed 333 people combined, on roads built for local trips, not freeway speeds. That is more than double I-10's toll, on streets no one thinks of as dangerous. Something about how these five streets are built and driven is doing more harm than their speed limits would predict.
Nearly half of the dead were on foot
The freeways mostly kill people inside cars. These five streets do not. Of the 333 people killed on Thomas, Indian School, McDowell, Camelback, and Bell, 138 were walking when they died. That is more than 4 in 10. No freeway carries a pedestrian death toll anywhere close to it, because freeways are built to keep people out. These five streets were not.
That is the pattern underneath the numbers. These are not backroads and they are not highways. They are wide city streets, often six lanes across, lined with driveways, bus stops, and crosswalks spaced far apart. Cars move at freeway-adjacent speeds next to people trying to cross on foot. The record does not say why any one crash happened. It does say where the deaths keep landing, year after year.
What the record can and cannot say
This record cannot assign fault in any single crash on any of these nine roads. It cannot say what would have prevented any one death. What it can do is name the roads where the deaths pile up, count them the same way on every road, and let anyone check the math. By that count, five ordinary Phoenix-area streets outkill every freeway in the county. Arizona's broader pedestrian-accident picture continues in our other Arizona data. So does how the state compares nationally.
Citation
injured.org, “Five Phoenix Streets Outkill Every Freeway in the County,” analysis of our national crash record, Maricopa County, Arizona, 2020-2024. https://injured.org/data/five-phoenix-streets-outkill-every-freeway-in-the-county/
Methodology
We pulled this from federal fatal-crash records, 2020-2024. Read the full methodology →
Updated July 2026
Full source detail lives on our data sources page. Each crash lists the road it happened on as free text, not a fixed road ID. So we grouped matching entries into one road by name. We did that the same way on both sides of this comparison. Ramps, frontage lanes, and direction prefixes like "W" or "E" fold into the parent road. Look-alike names get dropped: a search for "Bell" does not count Campbell Avenue. That grouping is the one judgment call behind these numbers. It is applied the same way to every road named here.