Today I’ll look at where the most vehicle crashes happen in New York City. About 93% of crash reports include a GPS location (longitude & latitude).189% of the reports had GPS coordinates. For the remainder, a street intersection was often listed, and I was able to use the Google Maps Geocoding API to determine the precise coordinates. That works out to about 2.1 million incidents over the timeframe available (July 2012 – March 2026, 5,022 days).
Which location had the most crashes? Here are the top ten:
| Rank | Borough | Intersection | Crashes | Injuries | Fatalities |
| 1 | Brooklyn | Flatbush Avenue Extension and Tillary Street | 1445 | 288 | 1 |
| 2 | Bronx | West Fordham Road and Major Deegan Expressway | 1268 | 588 | 0 |
| 3 | Brooklyn | Atlantic Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue | 1096 | 390 | 2 |
| 4 | Brooklyn | Flatbush Avenue and Grand Army Plaza | 1009 | 228 | 0 |
| 5 | Queens | Rockaway Boulevard and Brookville Boulevard | 992 | 537 | 6 |
| 6 | Brooklyn | Pennsylvania Avenue and Linden Boulevard | 988 | 448 | 2 |
| 7 | Manhattan | 2 Avenue and East 59 Street | 971 | 133 | 2 |
| 8 | Queens | Queens Boulevard and Woodhaven Boulevard | 882 | 184 | 0 |
| 9 | Brooklyn | Jamaica Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue | 881 | 383 | 0 |
| 10 | Brooklyn | Eastern Parkway and Buffalo Avenue | 840 | 403 | 0 |
Here’s a map of the Top Ten. You can click on each pin to get some details, including a satellite view.
Number one on the list is this intersection in Brooklyn, Tillary Street & Flatbush Avenue Extension:
Yeesh, what a mess. Three to five lanes in each direction. I can see why it tops the list. It averages 2 crashes a week.
Most of the other top ten are similar – two big multi-lane streets intersecting. One, however, is different (#5 on the list):
Brookville Blvd merging into Rockaway Blvd. One of those nasty right-turn merges where you wait at a stop sign for an opening. Hateful, and it’s the most dangerous of the top 10 – a 60% higher injury rate compared to the other top 10 locales. And 8x the number of fatalities! If you backtrack a couple blocks, there’s an intersection with a traffic light – I would definitely use that route rather than risk the merge.
Unless you zoomed into the main map, you might not have noticed that #3 and #9 are quite close. That’s right, in a city as large as New York, two of the top ten most dangerous intersections are within 300 yards:
I would think twice before making that stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue part of my daily commute.
So that’s the top ten by sheer volume of crashes. But which intersections are the most dangerous? I’ll measure injuries per crash, and limit it to only those locations that total at least 100 crashes over the 13+ years of data. Here are to top five:
| Borough | Intersection | Crashes | Injuries | Injuries/Crash |
| Bronx | West Gun Hill Road and Mosholu Parkway | 106 | 107 | 1.01 |
| Brooklyn | 3 Avenue and 60 Street | 281 | 227 | 0.81 |
| Bronx | Washington Avenue and Claremont Parkway | 128 | 102 | 0.80 |
| Brooklyn | Utica Avenue and Clarendon Road | 276 | 218 | 0.79 |
| Brooklyn | Atkins Avenue and Linden Boulevard | 113 | 89 | 0.79 |
These intersections are significantly more dangerous than normal: crashes here result in injuries at a rate of 2 – 3 times average. There are two causes that contribute to this: Failure to Yield Right-of-Way, and Traffic Control Disregarded. Both are similar – they are in the “not waiting your turn” category. It turns out that at these intersections those causes contribute to higher injury rates in two ways: they happen more frequently than expected, and when they do happen, the result is more more dangerous than average. Something about these intersections contributes to both the frequency and seriousness of not waiting your turn.
Next time: one last look at when accidents occur, specifically the pre- and post-COVID numbers.
