Crash Atlas · Northern Virginia · Data study
Every road death in Northern Virginia, 2018–2024
Seven years of fatal crashes in Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax County, Fairfax city and Falls Church — mapped by corridor, hour, and who died.
What the file says
- More than a third of the dead were pedestrians. 154 of 428 people killed across the five jurisdictions were walking. Nationally, pedestrians are about 18% of traffic deaths. Northern Virginia runs at double that share.
- 77% of pedestrian deaths happened after dark — 119 of 154, and 42 of those on roads FARS recorded as unlit. The single worst hour of the day for people on foot is 21:00.
- 58% were killed away from an intersection. 89 of 154. In 84 cases the report noted no crosswalk at all. That is a question about how far apart the crossings are, not about who was careless.
- Richmond Highway is the deadliest surface road in the region. 29 deaths on US-1 across Fairfax County and Alexandria, and 19 of the 29 were pedestrians — 65.5%, against 36% region-wide. See the corridor study →
- Half the dead pedestrians were 55 or older (75 of 153 whose age is recorded), in a region whose median age is under 40.
The map
400 of 405 fatal crashes carry coordinates (98.8%). Filter by who died, narrow the years, or show only crashes involving a truck. Click any point for the date, road, posted speed limit and light condition.
… / … fatal crashes
Circle size is the number of people killed in that crash. A dashed ring marks a location where two or more separate fatal crashes happened within 150 m of each other.
Static downloads: points.csv · points.json
By jurisdiction
Fairfax County dominates the raw counts because it holds roughly three quarters of the region’s population and the longest stretches of high-speed arterial. Per resident the spread is much narrower, and Alexandria — the smallest of the three with a page here — carries the highest pedestrian share of the five.
| Jurisdiction | Population | Fatal crashes | Killed | Pedestrians | Ped share | Deaths / 100k / yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arlington County | 238,643 | 32 | 34 | 11 | 32.4% | 2.04 |
| Alexandria city | 159,467 | 36 | 37 | 17 | 45.9% | 3.31 |
| Fairfax County | 1,150,309 | 328 | 348 | 121 | 34.8% | 4.32 |
| Fairfax city | 24,146 | 8 | 8 | 5 | 62.5% | 4.73 |
| Falls Church city | 14,658 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0% | 0.97 |
| All five | 1,587,223 | 405 | 428 | 154 | 36% | — |
A caution about small numbers
Arlington and Alexandria each average around five road deaths a year. At that scale a two-year-versus-two-year comparison is noise, not a trend: Arlington's pedestrian deaths fall "80%" from the 2018–19 average to the 2023–24 average, and that is 2.5 deaths becoming 0.5. Everything on this page therefore uses seven-year totals, or pooled three-year blocks where a direction matters. Anyone quoting a year-on-year percentage for a jurisdiction this size should say what the underlying counts are.
Year by year
Regional totals. Pedestrian deaths are drawn on top of the bar, not beside it — the dark band is the share of each year's dead who were walking. 2024 is preliminary.
| Year | Fatal crashes | Killed | Pedestrians | Cyclists | Truck-involved deaths |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 54 | 56 | 23 | 0 | 3 |
| 2019 | 59 | 62 | 25 | 0 | 8 |
| 2020 | 48 | 50 | 19 | 0 | 7 |
| 2021 | 64 | 67 | 21 | 3 | 11 |
| 2022 | 71 | 76 | 36 | 0 | 5 |
| 2023 | 48 | 51 | 11 | 0 | 4 |
| 2024* | 61 | 66 | 19 | 1 | 5 |
* FARS 2024 is the preliminary Annual Report File and will revise when the final file is released.
The corridors
Every road that took six or more lives across the five jurisdictions. Route names are taken from the street names FARS itself records alongside each route number, not from a hand-built gazetteer. The interstates carry the largest raw totals; the arterials carry the pedestrians.
| Roadway | Killed | Pedestrians | Ped share | Jurisdictions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I-495 | 40 | 10 | 25% | Alexandria city, Fairfax County |
| US-1 Richmond Hwy | 29 | 19 | 65.5% | Alexandria city, Fairfax County |
| I-95 | 21 | 4 | 19% | Alexandria city, Fairfax County |
| I-66 | 19 | 3 | 15.8% | Arlington County, Fairfax County |
| US-50 Arlington Blvd | 16 | 10 | 62.5% | Arlington County, Fairfax County, Fairfax city |
| SR-286 Fairfax Co Pkwy | 16 | 0 | 0% | Fairfax County |
| SR-7 Leesburg Pike | 15 | 7 | 46.7% | Alexandria city, Arlington County, Fairfax County |
| SR-123 Ox Rd | 15 | 3 | 20% | Fairfax County, Fairfax city |
| US-29 Lee Hwy | 13 | 7 | 53.8% | Fairfax County, Fairfax city, Falls Church city |
| SR-236 Duke St | 12 | 8 | 66.7% | Alexandria city, Fairfax County, Fairfax city |
| I-395 | 11 | 0 | 0% | Alexandria city, Arlington County, Fairfax County |
| CR-644 Old Keene Mill Rd | 10 | 5 | 50% | Fairfax County |
| SR-267 Dulles Toll Road | 7 | 1 | 14.3% | Fairfax County |
| SR-28 Sully Rd | 7 | 1 | 14.3% | Fairfax County |
of the people killed on Richmond Highway were on foot — 19 of 29. On I-495, which killed more people over the same seven years, the pedestrian share is 25%. A road that people have to cross is a different kind of problem from a road they cannot. The Richmond Highway study →
Who was killed walking, and under what conditions
Drawn only from the 154 pedestrian deaths. Crossing location and crosswalk presence come from the FARS pedestrian file, joined back to the person record so that only the people who died are counted — the raw file also contains pedestrians who survived.
Light condition
| Dark, lighted | 77 | 50% |
| Dark, not lighted | 42 | 27% |
| Daylight | 31 | 20% |
| Dusk | 2 | 1% |
| Dawn | 2 | 1% |
Was there a crosswalk?
| None noted | 84 | 55% |
| Yes | 68 | 44% |
| Unknown | 2 | 1% |
Where on the road
| Not At Intersection | 89 | 58% |
| At Intersection | 45 | 29% |
| Intersection-Related | 19 | 12% |
| Non-Trafficway Location | 1 | 1% |
Age of the person killed
| 0-17 | 6 | 4% |
| 18-34 | 26 | 17% |
| 35-54 | 46 | 30% |
| 55-69 | 38 | 25% |
| 70+ | 37 | 24% |
Age is recorded for 153 of the 154.
By hour of day
Fatal crashes cluster in the evening and the small hours. For people on foot the concentration is sharper still, and it tracks darkness rather than traffic volume — the morning commute, the busiest hours on these roads, is among the safest.
Hour is unknown for a small number of crashes; those are omitted from this chart only.
Places where it happened more than once
28 locations recorded two or more separate fatal crashes within 150 metres of each other. These are the addresses where the road design, not the individual driver, is the common factor.
| Location | Jurisdiction | Fatal crashes | Killed | Pedestrians | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US-1 | Fairfax County | 5 | 5 | 4 | 2020, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 |
| US-1 | Fairfax County | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2020, 2020, 2022, 2024 |
| US-50 | Fairfax County | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2018, 2019, 2021 |
| CR-650 ANNANDALE RD | Fairfax County | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2021, 2022, 2022 |
| I-495/RAMP | Fairfax County | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2018, 2018, 2023 |
| US-1 RAMP | Alexandria city | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2021, 2024, 2024 |
| I-495-95 | Alexandria city | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2022, 2024 |
| CR-602 | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2018, 2023 |
| CR-0606 | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2018, 2023 |
| US-50 | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2019, 2022 |
| US-1 | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2023, 2024 |
| CR-644 OLD KEENE MILL RD | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2018, 2024 |
| US-50 ARLINGTON BLVD | Arlington County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2019, 2021 |
| SR-7/LEESBURG PIKE | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2019, 2022 |
| CR-789 | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2019, 2020 |
| US-1 | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2020, 2024 |
| SR-244/COLUMBIA PIKE | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2020, 2023 |
| SR-236/ LITTLE RIVER TPKE | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2021, 2023 |
| SR-7 LEESBURG PIKE | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2021, 2024 |
| I-495 | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2023, 2024 |
| CR-674 HUNTER MILL RD | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2024, 2024 |
| CR-789 | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2018, 2020 |
| SR-286 FAIRFAX CO PARKWAY | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2018, 2022 |
| SR-286/FAIRFAX COUNTY PKWY | Fairfax County | 2 | 3 | 0 | 2018, 2024 |
| SR-123/CHAIN BRIDGE RD | Fairfax city | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2019, 2022 |
| I-495 | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2021, 2021 |
| I-644 RAMP | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2021, 2024 |
| SR-28/SULLY RD | Fairfax County | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2021, 2024 |
Clustering is single-link at a 150 m radius on the FARS coordinates. Two crashes on opposite sides of a wide interchange can fall into one cluster; the coordinates are published so anyone can re-cluster at a different radius.
Methodology
- Source. NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), National CSV downloads for 2018 through 2024, accessed 2026-08-30. nhtsa.gov. FARS is a census, not a sample: every crash on a US public road in which someone died within 30 days is in it.
- Jurisdictions are keyed on COUNTY, not CITY. This is
the detail that makes Northern Virginia look absent from FARS when it
is not. Arlington County and most of Fairfax County are unincorporated
and file the FARS
CITYfield as "not applicable", so a city-keyed query returns zero rows for them. Keyed onSTATE = 51andCOUNTYin{13, 510, 59, 600, 610}, all seven years are present. Our own Vision Zero report card keys on city and therefore shows nothing here; that limitation is now noted on it. - What counts as a death. Every person killed, in every
fatal crash, in those five jurisdictions — not only truck crashes.
The truck columns are a subset, defined as any crash involving a
vehicle with FARS
BODY_TYP60–69 (medium and heavy trucks over 10,000 lbs GVWR, excluding passenger pickups). - Pedestrians and cyclists. Counted from the person
file where
INJ_SEV = 4(killed) andPER_TYPis 5 or 8 for pedestrians, 6 or 7 for cyclists. Crossing location and crosswalk presence come from the FARS pedestrian/bicyclist file, joined on(ST_CASE, VEH_NO, PER_NO)and restricted to the people who died — that file also holds rows for pedestrians who survived, and counting them would overstate every share here. - Corridors. A crash is assigned to a route when either
the roadway or the cross-street field carries a route designation
(
I-,US-,SR-,CR-); otherwise the cleaned street name is used. Friendly names such as "Richmond Hwy" are derived from the street names FARS itself records next to each route number, taking the most frequent — so nothing here depends on a hand-typed gazetteer that could drift. - Geocoding. Coordinates are the ones supplied on the FARS record. 98.8% of crashes carry usable ones; FARS not-reported sentinels are dropped rather than plotted.
- Limits. FARS is fatal-only. It will not show you serious injuries, near-misses, or the crashes that a corridor redesign would have prevented before anyone died. For injury data, Virginia DMV’s crash records are the right source. 2024 is the preliminary Annual Report File and will revise.
- Reproducibility. Every figure here is generated by a single script from the unmodified FARS downloads. Nothing on this page is typed in by hand.
Cite this study
Republish freely under CC BY 4.0. No permission needed, no conditions attached. A link back lets readers verify the numbers and see corrections.
AccidentLawyerReview, "Northern Virginia Crash Atlas: Every Road Death, 2018-2024," 2026-08-30. https://accidentlawyerreview.com/research/crash-atlas/virginia/northern-virginia/
Need a cut we have not published — a single corridor, a council district, a particular intersection, a year-by-year series for a board packet? Email research@accidentlawyerreview.com. It is free and it stays free; we are not selling anything on the back of it.
Download the data
- points.csv — all 405 fatal crashes, one row each: date, hour, jurisdiction, roadway, cross street, route, road class, people killed, pedestrians killed, cyclists killed, truck involvement, light condition, posted speed limit, coordinates.
- points.json — the same rows for direct import into a mapping library.
- jurisdictions.json — per-jurisdiction totals and the year series.
- region_corridors.json · corridors.json — fatalities by roadway, region-wide and per jurisdiction.
- hotspots.json — the 28 repeat locations with coordinates.
- summary.json — headline figures and the methodology notes in machine-readable form.
Licensed CC BY 4.0. FARS itself is US federal public-domain data.
Update log
- 2026-08-30 — first publication, FARS 2018–2024.
- Planned — refresh when NHTSA releases FARS 2025 and finalises 2024.
AccidentLawyerReview is an independent public-data directory of US personal-injury law firms. We are not a law firm and do not give legal advice. This study aggregates public crash records for journalists, advocates, and residents; it does not interpret any specific legal claim.