258 miles of Central Florida road carry more than half its traffic deaths
A regional planning agency mapped every death in Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties and found 56 percent of them on 2 percent of the streets.
Most people killed on Central Florida's roads die on a handful of wide, fast streets. MetroPlan Orlando — the regional agency that decides where federal road money goes in Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties — mapped every one of those deaths. It found that 258 miles of road carried 638 of the region's 1,143 traffic deaths.
Those 258 miles are about 2 percent of the region's 10,728 miles of surface street. The agency calls them the High Injury Network — its term for the roads where people are most often killed or badly hurt. The list will not surprise anyone who drives here. It runs down John Young Parkway, Semoran Boulevard, Colonial Drive, Kirkman Road, Alafaya Trail, U.S. 192 through Kissimmee and U.S. 17-92 through Sanford.
The concentration changes what a fix costs. A region cannot rebuild 10,000 miles of road. It can rebuild 258. MetroPlan's board adopted the plan on Sept. 11, 2024, and the agency has since won two federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grants worth $5.9 million to act on it. One caution on geography: MetroPlan's region does not include Lake County, so Lake does not appear in any of these figures.
What the data shows
The worst single stretch in the region is John Young Parkway between Colonial Drive and Orange Center Boulevard, a mile west of downtown Orlando. MetroPlan scored every corridor on the deaths and serious injuries packed into each mile. John Young's score of 17,478 is the highest of any road in the three counties. Sand Lake Road and McCoy Road, carrying airport and tourist traffic, come second at 17,104.
The worst intersection is where those two meet. John Young Parkway at Sand Lake Road scored 10,140, ahead of Alafaya Trail at Colonial Drive and Orange Blossom Trail at Holden Avenue. Osceola County's entries cluster on U.S. 192, at Poinciana Boulevard and at Simpson Road.
The roads share a design, not a location: six lanes, long blocks, few crosswalks. The average High Injury Network road is posted at 43 mph. The average driver on it travels 53. And 60 percent of the network belongs to the Florida Department of Transportation rather than a city — which is who a resident has to persuade to change anything.
The squeeze is tightest for people on foot. Walking is rare here — 69 percent of metro workers drive to work alone, the Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey estimates. Yet 576 of the 949 pedestrians killed or seriously injured in the region were struck on the High Injury Network. That is 61 percent of the harm on 2 percent of the pavement.
Cyclists follow the same pattern, with 164 of 327 severe casualties on the network. Motorcyclists account for 416 of 956. Across all road users, 3,378 of 7,146 people killed or seriously hurt were on those same 258 miles. MetroPlan's safety plan states the regional toll plainly.
How we got here
Florida loses more pedestrians than almost anywhere else in the country. Federal crash records counted 771 pedestrian deaths in the state in 2023, third behind California and Texas. Nationally, pedestrians were 18 percent of everyone killed on the road that year — 7,314 people, up by more than a thousand from 2019.
The federal record is also old, and readers should know how old. The Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the government's census of every death on a public road, released its final 2023 file on April 23, 2026. That is a lag of more than two years, caused by the time it takes states to close and verify each case. A provisional 2024 file counts 39,254 deaths nationally and will be revised. NHTSA's preliminary estimate for 2025, published in April 2026, puts the national figure at 36,640 — roughly back to the 2019 level. Florida's 2025 estimate is 3,047 deaths, down from 3,138 in 2024.
Local trends have not improved as neatly. Comparing the past decade, MetroPlan found pedestrian crashes down 11 percent per resident. Deaths moved the opposite way, up 27 percent per resident. The metro area added about 350,000 people between 2019 and 2025, Census Bureau estimates show, and the roads absorbed them without changing shape.
One line in that record separates the problem from the noise. Daytime pedestrian deaths in the three counties fell 23 percent per resident over the decade. Nighttime deaths rose 37 percent. The same split shows up nationally: 77 percent of pedestrians killed in the United States in 2023 died in the dark, against 19 percent in daylight.
What it means
A problem this concentrated is a spending problem more than a mystery. The agency's own numbers point at the same short list of arterials, at the hours after sunset, and at the crossings people make where no crosswalk exists — 74 percent of pedestrians killed nationally in 2023 were struck away from an intersection.
The burden is not evenly shared either. MetroPlan reports that 53 percent of the High Injury Network runs through neighborhoods the federal government classifies as disadvantaged. Those are the streets where people walk to a bus stop at 9 p.m.
What the data cannot yet tell a driver is whether any of this is turning. The corridor rankings come from a plan adopted in 2024, and the newest verified federal counts are from 2023. If the preliminary 2025 estimates hold, deaths are falling nationally and in Florida. Whether they are falling on John Young Parkway is a question the next release will answer.
- 638 of 1,143 traffic deaths occurred on the 258-mile High Injury Network — MetroPlan Orlando, Regional High Injury Network Fact Sheet, 2024
- 258 miles is about 2 percent of the region's 10,728 miles of surface road — MetroPlan Orlando, 2024
- 576 of 949 pedestrians killed or seriously injured were on that network — MetroPlan Orlando, 2024
- Worst corridor: John Young Parkway, State Road 50 to Orange Center Boulevard, safety score 17,478 — MetroPlan Orlando, 2024
- Worst intersection: John Young Parkway at Sand Lake Road, safety score 10,140 — MetroPlan Orlando, 2024
- 771 pedestrians killed in Florida, third-highest of any state — NHTSA, Pedestrians: 2023 Data, DOT HS 813 727, June 2025
- 40,901 U.S. traffic deaths in 2023, a rate of 1.26 per 100 million miles driven — NHTSA, FARS Final File, released April 23, 2026
- 36,640 U.S. deaths estimated for 2025, and 3,047 in Florida — NHTSA, DOT HS 813 800, April 2026
- 355 people killed on the roads of Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Lake counties in 2019 — Florida DHSMV, Traffic Crash Facts 2019, closeout Nov. 6, 2020
- Orlando–Kissimmee–Sanford metro population: 2,608,273 in 2019, 2,957,672 in 2025 — U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program, March 2026
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