Key Findings

• 1,036 pedestrians were killed in California crosswalks across 1,025 separate fatal crashes between 2019 and 2024.
• Crosswalk deaths account for 15.6% of California’s 6,656 total pedestrian fatalities over those six years.
• Los Angeles has the state’s two deadliest crosswalks: S La Cienega Blvd & Obama Blvd (Baldwin Hills) and S Central Ave & E 89th St, each with 3 pedestrian deaths in recent years.
• Los Angeles County recorded 356 crosswalk pedestrian deaths in six years — 4 times more than any other California county.
• Hesperia, Costa Mesa, and Compton are getting worse: in the last 2 years, each recorded 2 crosswalk fatalities in a single year after a long clean record.
• California ranks among the top 10 states for pedestrian fatality rate, at 2.84 deaths per 100,000 residents — over 1,100 pedestrian deaths per year statewide.

Los Angeles has two of California’s deadliest crosswalks, according to a July 2026 report on pedestrian safety. A new study released by Steven M. Sweat, Personal Injury Lawyers, looked at six years of federal traffic fatality records and pinpointed California counties with the highest pedestrian risks and the most dangerous crosswalks across the state.

S La Cienega Boulevard intersecting with Obama Boulevard and S Central Avenue crossing with E 89th Street have the most dangerous crosswalks in all of California, with 3 pedestrian fatalities in recent years.

In the last 2 years, traffic in Hesperia, Costa Mesa, and Compton has gotten worse, all recording 2 crosswalk fatalities in a year after a long clean record.

Orange County is the second most dangerous California region for pedestrians, but it still sees 4 times fewer fatalities than Los Angeles.

The study used the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), the US Department of Transportation’s national census of fatal traffic crashes, covering the 2019–2024 timeline, as 2024 is the most recent year with information available. The research examined every fatal crash in California within these years and identified cases in which a pedestrian was killed on a crosswalk. In total, the study identified 1,036 related pedestrian deaths across 1,025 separate fatal crashes.

You can find the full report findings by following this link.

The Deadliest Crosswalks in California

Los Angeles has two of the most dangerous crosswalks in California. The intersection of S La Cienega Boulevard and Obama Boulevard in Baldwin Hills had 3 pedestrian deaths in recent years directly on the crosswalk, the same as at the junction of S Central Avenue and E 89th Street. Cities of Hesperia, Costa Mesa, and Compton also experienced the worsening of pedestrian safety, as all of them recorded 2 fatal crashes involving people on foot in 2024.

These findings echo a pattern our firm has documented before: fatal pedestrian crashes in Los Angeles cluster on a small number of high-volume arterial corridors. For a street-by-street breakdown, see our companion analyses of the 25 most dangerous intersections in Los Angeles and the most dangerous streets in Los Angeles.

High-Risk Counties for Pedestrians

Los Angeles County is the most dangerous for pedestrians, recording 356 deaths at crosswalks in 6 years. For scale, the Orange County that follows 2nd has 4 times fewer fatal accidents. The statistics are still too high, and Orange County and San Diego County almost match in risk profile, with 89 and 86 fatalities, respectively. Santa Clara and Alameda counties follow, with 53 and 51 fatalities, or around 8–9 crosswalk deaths a year.

Los Angeles County’s dominance in the rankings is consistent with what we found in our Los Angeles pedestrian safety report: the city’s pedestrian fatality rate is roughly three times New York City’s, and traffic deaths in L.A. have exceeded homicides for three consecutive years.

What the Numbers Say About Pedestrian Safety Across California

California ranks among the top 10 states with the highest pedestrian fatality rate per population, at 2.84 per 100K residents. These numbers seem low, but that translates to over 6.6K deaths across the state in the last 6 years, or 1.1K+ annually. Crosswalk deaths account for 15.6% of those, showing a huge issue with traffic control and management of different modes of transportation.

That last figure deserves emphasis. A marked crosswalk is precisely where the law places pedestrians and where drivers are legally required to yield — yet more than one in seven California pedestrian deaths happens there. When a pedestrian is killed doing everything the law asks of them, the question shifts from pedestrian behavior to driver conduct and roadway design.

Methodology

This study analyzed six years (2019–2024) of records from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), the U.S. Department of Transportation’s national census of fatal traffic crashes. 2024 is the most recent year for which data is available. Researchers examined every fatal crash recorded in California during the study period and isolated cases in which a pedestrian was killed on a crosswalk. Fatalities were then aggregated by intersection, city, and county to produce the rankings above. In total, the analysis identified 1,036 crosswalk pedestrian deaths across 1,025 separate fatal crashes. The full dataset and complete findings are available in the full report.

Expert Takeaway

Steven M. Sweat commented on the study:

Who Is Liable When a Pedestrian Is Killed or Injured in a California Crosswalk?

California Vehicle Code § 21950 requires drivers to yield the right-of-way to pedestrians crossing within any marked crosswalk — or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection. We break down exactly how these rules operate in our explainer on California’s pedestrian right-of-way laws.

Liability is not always all-or-nothing. California follows a pure comparative fault system, established in Li v. Yellow Cab Co. (1975) 13 Cal.3d 804, meaning an injured pedestrian can recover damages even if they were partially at fault — their recovery is simply reduced by their percentage of responsibility. And where a dangerous intersection design, missing signal, or poor lighting contributed to a crash, a city, county, or Caltrans may share liability for a dangerous condition of public property — claims that carry a much shorter six-month government claim deadline.

Our firm has represented pedestrians struck in California crosswalks for over 30 years. Learn more about these cases on our pedestrian accident lawyer page.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the deadliest crosswalk in California?

Two Los Angeles intersections tie for the deadliest crosswalks in California: S La Cienega Boulevard & Obama Boulevard in Baldwin Hills and S Central Avenue & E 89th Street, each recording 3 pedestrian fatalities directly on the crosswalk in recent years, according to a 2026 analysis of FARS data covering 2019–2024.

Which California county has the most crosswalk pedestrian deaths?

Los Angeles County, with 356 crosswalk pedestrian deaths between 2019 and 2024 — four times more than second-ranked Orange County (89). San Diego (86), Santa Clara (53), and Alameda (51) counties round out the top five.

What percentage of California pedestrian deaths happen in crosswalks?

15.6%. Of the 6,656 pedestrians killed in California between 2019 and 2024, 1,036 were killed while in a crosswalk — more than one in seven.

Who is at fault if a pedestrian is hit in a crosswalk in California?

Under California Vehicle Code § 21950, drivers must yield to pedestrians in marked crosswalks and in unmarked crosswalks at intersections, so the driver is usually liable. However, California’s pure comparative fault rule (Li v. Yellow Cab Co. (1975) 13 Cal.3d 804) means fault can be apportioned, and a government entity can share liability if a dangerous roadway condition contributed to the crash.

How long do I have to file a pedestrian accident claim in California?

Generally two years from the date of injury for claims against private drivers. If a government entity may be liable — for example, for a dangerously designed intersection — a formal government claim must usually be filed within six months.

Injured in a Crosswalk? We Can Help.

Steven M. Sweat, Personal Injury Lawyers, APC has represented pedestrians and their families across Southern California for over 30 years. If you or a loved one was struck by a vehicle in a crosswalk — including at any of the intersections named in this study — call us 24/7 at 866-966-5240 for a free consultation. We serve clients in English and Spanish, and you pay nothing unless we win your case.

If using this data, please credit: https://www.victimslawyer.com/

Reading this post does not establish an attorney-client relationship. Laws and regulations may change. For advice specific to your situation, please consult a licensed attorney.

Los Angeles streets kill more people than its criminals do. For three consecutive years, traffic fatalities in the city of Los Angeles have outnumbered homicides — a public health crisis that hides in plain sight behind the city’s headline crime statistics. Pedestrians bear the sharpest edge of that crisis, accounting for more than half of all traffic deaths in the city in recent years.

This report compiles the most current available data on Los Angeles pedestrian fatalities, identifies the corridors and communities where the risk is highest, examines why the city’s landmark Vision Zero program has failed to reverse the trend, and explains what legal protections exist for pedestrians and their families when a negligent driver or a dangerous road condition is responsible.

Steven M. Sweat has represented pedestrian accident victims in Los Angeles for over 30 years. This report is published annually using the most recently available LAPD and CHP data and will be updated each June.

1. Los Angeles Pedestrian Fatalities: The Numbers

City of Los Angeles — Annual Fatality Trend (LAPD Data)

Sources: LAPD Traffic Collision Records; CHP SWITRS; LAist review of LAPD data (February 2026); Crosstown LA; Streets Are For Everyone annual reports.

Los Angeles County — 2025 Data (CHP/SWITRS)

Source: California Highway Patrol SWITRS 2025. LA County accounts for approximately 26% of all California crashes statewide.

2. Ten Years of Vision Zero: What the Data Actually Shows

In 2015, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti adopted Vision Zero — a public safety framework originating in Sweden — with a stated goal of eliminating all traffic deaths in Los Angeles by 2025. The city has invested nearly $350 million in the program over the past decade. The result has been the opposite of the goal.

Why Vision Zero Failed: The April 2025 Audit Findings

An independent audit released in April 2025 identified the core reasons the program missed its targets:

• Lack of cohesion across departments. Vision Zero spans LADOT, LAPD, public works, and public health — but these agencies operated with insufficient coordination. Enforcement, engineering, and education initiatives were not synchronized.
• Insufficient political will. Despite $350 million in nominal investment, the program has been consistently underfunded relative to its scope and deprioritized when competing with other city initiatives.
• Imbalanced approach. From approximately 2019 onward, the city shifted emphasis heavily toward engineering (road redesign) and away from enforcement. Traffic enforcement declined sharply during and after the pandemic, and fatalities rose in parallel.
• Scale problem. LADOT’s 7,000+ safety treatments work on the specific streets where they are deployed. But Los Angeles has 6,500 miles of streets. Treating 6% of them effectively cannot eliminate deaths on the other 94%.
• Post-pandemic behavioral shift. Traffic speeds increased dramatically when roads emptied during the pandemic. Those habits persisted. LA’s wide lanes and infrequent signals reward high-speed driving while punishing the pedestrians who must cross it.

3. The High Injury Network: Where Pedestrian Deaths Concentrate

Los Angeles pedestrian deaths are not randomly distributed across the city’s 6,500 miles of streets. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s own data establishes that just 6% of LA street miles account for 65% of all pedestrian and cyclist deaths and serious injuries — a concentrated danger zone the city calls its High Injury Network (HIN).

High Injury Network Street Characteristics

The streets that make up the HIN share a consistent set of features that traffic engineers call ‘stroads’ — hybrids of residential streets and high-speed arterials that combine pedestrian activity with multi-lane vehicle speeds:

• Wide multi-lane design. Streets like Sepulveda Boulevard, Vermont Avenue, Western Avenue, Figueroa Street, and Avalon Boulevard carry high-speed through traffic through areas where people live, shop, and walk. Wide lanes signal to drivers that high speed is acceptable.
• Long crossing distances and signal spacing. Pedestrians on many LA arterials must cross five to seven lanes of traffic with limited refuge islands and long signal wait times that incentivize risky mid-block crossings.
• Poor lighting. Approximately 75% of pedestrian fatalities in California occur at night or in low-light conditions (NHTSA). Many high-risk HIN corridors have inadequate street lighting.
• Freeway adjacency. Streets near freeway on/off ramps consistently appear in the highest-crash data. Drivers decelerating from freeway speeds or accelerating toward on-ramps pose acute danger to pedestrians crossing nearby intersections.
• SUV and large vehicle prevalence. SUVs and large pickups strike pedestrians in the chest and head rather than the legs, dramatically increasing the probability of fatal injury. A pedestrian struck at 40 mph by an SUV faces approximately a 90% chance of death or catastrophic injury. The share of SUVs and pickups in LA’s vehicle fleet grows each year.

Geographic Concentration: South Los Angeles

Traffic violence in Los Angeles is not only geographically concentrated — it is inequitably distributed. The communities bearing the highest burden are predominantly low-income, Black, and Latino neighborhoods in South Los Angeles, which have historically received less investment in pedestrian infrastructure:

• The LAPD’s 77th Street and Southeast divisions in South LA each recorded 31 traffic deaths in 2024 — among the highest of any LAPD division citywide.
• The concentration of the city’s most dangerous intersections — San Pedro/Washington, Florence/Vermont, Avalon/Manchester — in South LA reflects decades of underinvestment in crosswalk signals, sidewalk maintenance, and lighting on streets that carry both heavy truck traffic and high pedestrian volumes.
• Residents of South LA are more likely to walk and use transit than residents of wealthier neighborhoods, increasing their exposure to streets designed primarily for vehicles, not people.

For the specific intersection data showing which locations recorded the highest crash concentrations over the past four years, see our companion analysis: The 25 Most Dangerous Intersections in Los Angeles Based on Crash Data.

4. What Is Killing Pedestrians: Causes and Contributing Factors

Sources: NHTSA FARS; LAPD Traffic Collision Records; CHP SWITRS; LADOT Vision Zero data; Streets Are For Everyone annual reports.

The Hit-and-Run Epidemic

Los Angeles has a particularly severe hit-and-run problem relative to other major U.S. cities. A disproportionate share of pedestrian fatalities involve drivers who flee — often because they are impaired, uninsured, or both. California Vehicle Code §20001 makes leaving the scene of an injury accident a felony, but prosecution rates remain low when the driver is not identified at the scene.

For California-wide traffic fatality data and context, see our California Car Accident Statistics 2026 Report.

5. Los Angeles vs. Other Major U.S. Cities

Comparing pedestrian fatality rates per capita provides the most meaningful context for evaluating LA’s performance against peer cities.

Sources: NHTSA FARS 2024 preliminary; GHSA Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State 2024; respective city traffic safety reports. Rates per 100,000 residents.

Los Angeles’s pedestrian fatality rate of approximately 4.36 per 100,000 residents is roughly three times New York City’s and nearly twice Chicago’s — cities with comparable or greater density. New York has invested heavily in pedestrian plazas, signal retiming, daylighting at crosswalks, and speed limit enforcement. Los Angeles, despite its $350 million Vision Zero commitment, has implemented fewer of these interventions at meaningful scale.

6. California Statewide Context

• California averages approximately 3 pedestrian deaths per day statewide (NHTSA/OTS).
• California ranks 8th in the nation for pedestrian fatality rate per 100,000 residents.
• Pedestrian fatalities in California have risen more than 25% over the past decade.
• Urban areas — Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco — account for more than 70% of all California pedestrian deaths.
• Approximately 75% of California pedestrian fatalities occur at night or in low-light conditions.
• Non-intersection locations account for roughly 72–80% of fatal pedestrian crashes in California.

7. What Needs to Change: Evidence-Based Recommendations

Engineering Interventions

• Daylighting at crosswalks. Removing parked vehicles from the final 20 feet before crosswalks improves driver sight lines and reduces pedestrian strikes. New York implemented this at scale; LA has done so on a limited basis.
• Leading Pedestrian Intervals (LPIs). Giving pedestrians a 3–7 second head start before vehicles receive a green light reduces conflict and improves visibility. LADOT has installed LPIs at hundreds of intersections; broader deployment is needed.
• Raised crosswalks and speed tables. Physical infrastructure that forces vehicles to slow before intersections reduces both speed and pedestrian deaths. Effective but expensive at scale.
• Lighting upgrades on HIN corridors. The correlation between darkness and pedestrian fatality is the strongest in the data. LED upgrades on the 20 highest-fatality corridors would have an immediate measurable effect.

Enforcement Interventions

• Speed cameras (SB 645). Now deploying in LA. Cities operating speed cameras for 3+ years typically see 20–30% reductions in speeding on monitored corridors — the highest-impact single enforcement tool available.
• Targeted DUI enforcement on pedestrian-heavy corridors. Approximately 30% of pedestrian deaths involve driver impairment. Targeting DUI enforcement on HIN corridors during peak fatality hours (6 PM–midnight) would reduce deaths.

Policy Interventions

• Equity-centered infrastructure investment. South LA communities bear disproportionate fatality rates despite having less political capital to demand infrastructure improvements. Fatality data — not council district political weight — should drive spending.
• Speed limit reductions on HIN corridors. Reducing posted speeds from 35–40 mph to 25–30 mph on the highest-risk corridors, backed by enforcement, would materially reduce fatality severity.

8. Your Legal Rights as a Pedestrian Injury Victim in California

Driver Liability

California Vehicle Code §21950 requires all drivers to yield the right of way to pedestrians at both marked and unmarked crosswalks. Vehicle Code §22350 requires drivers to travel at a speed that is safe for conditions — not merely at or below the posted limit. A driver who strikes a pedestrian in a crosswalk, at a crossing, or at any location where a pedestrian is foreseeably present faces significant liability under California negligence law.

Government Entity Liability

When a dangerous road design — inadequate lighting, a missing crosswalk signal, a defective curb cut, a malfunctioning traffic signal — contributes to a pedestrian fatality or injury, the City of Los Angeles, Caltrans, or another government entity may bear liability under the Government Claims Act. Claims against government entities require filing a government tort claim within six months of the date of injury — far shorter than the standard two-year personal injury statute of limitations. Missing this deadline is typically fatal to the claim.

Comparative Fault and Pedestrian Claims

California follows pure comparative negligence — a pedestrian who was crossing mid-block, against a signal, or otherwise contributing to the accident can still recover compensation, with damages reduced by their percentage of fault. Insurance companies routinely inflate pedestrian fault to minimize payouts. See: California Comparative Fault Law: Pure Comparative Negligence Explained (2026 Guide).

For a complete guide to your legal rights after a pedestrian accident — including what to do at the scene, how liability is established, and when a government entity may share responsibility — see: Pedestrian Accident Lawyer Los Angeles: Rights After Injury.

For settlement values specific to pedestrian accident cases: Average Pedestrian Accident Settlement Values in California.

9. Frequently Asked Questions

Injured in a Pedestrian Accident in Los Angeles? Call Steven M. Sweat.

If you or a family member has been struck by a vehicle anywhere in Los Angeles or Southern California, you have legal rights — and the clock starts immediately. Steven M. Sweat, Personal Injury Lawyers, APC has represented pedestrian accident victims for over 30 years, recovering compensation for medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, and in wrongful death cases, for the full scope of a family’s loss.

We handle pedestrian accident cases on a strict contingency fee basis — no fee unless we recover compensation for you. For an overview of your rights and the legal process, see our Los Angeles Pedestrian Accident Lawyers practice page.

Data Sources and Methodology

All statistics are attributed to their original source. This report is updated annually each June using the most recently available full-year LAPD and CHP/SWITRS data.

• Los Angeles Police Department Traffic Collision Records (via LAist review of LAPD data, February 2026; Crosstown LA analysis)
• California Highway Patrol Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS), 2025
• Los Angeles Department of Transportation Vision Zero Program data and High Injury Network analysis; LADOT Safety Study 2024-2025
• City of Los Angeles Office of the City Administrative Officer Vision Zero investment data
• Streets Are For Everyone (SAFE) annual traffic fatality reports (2021-2024)
• NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)
• Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2024 Preliminary Data
• California Office of Traffic Safety (CA OTS) pedestrian safety program data
• U.S. Department of Transportation / Federal Highway Administration LA High Injury Network documentation

Author: Steven M. Sweat, California State Bar #181867 | First published: May 2026 | Annual update: each June | Informational purposes only; does not constitute legal advice.