Mapping LA's Most Dangerous Intersections For Pedestrians

As Los Angeles overhauls its reputation as a car-only city, it's embarked on a series of projects to make streets more welcoming to all people, regardless of whether they're walking, biking, rollerblading, or driving. Those projects make streets nicer, but they also make them safer for everyone using them, and the necessity of those kinds of projects is seriously underscored by this Los Angeles Walks map, appearing in the group's Report On the State of Walking in LA, that shows the locations of 19,000 pedestrian/vehicle crashes that took place between 2003 and 2009.

A few of the worst intersections for collisions on the map (there are many others off-map, like those in the Valley and near LAX) coincide with Metro subway stops—Hollywood and Highland, Hollywood and Western, Vermont and Santa Monica. But not all of them do, and the worst intersection, which saw 51 car/person incidents in a six-year span, is the one at Spring and Seventh Streets, which is more or less just another busy Downtown intersection where plenty of bus traffic, car traffic, and foot traffic all come together. (There are bike lanes now, but they didn't enter the equation until 2011.)

Another Spring Street intersection (Spring and Fifth) showed up on a map from 2013 that showed the most dangerous intersections for car/people collisions. That map also fingered Alvarado and Seventh Street; the LA Walks map says Eighth and Alvarado was the more dangerous spot from 2003 to 2009. The fact that these danger zones keep popping up within a block or two of each other might be a good indication that the areas are primed for some safety upgrades.