On Indian School Road in west Phoenix, walking across the street has quietly turned into one of the riskiest things a person can do in Arizona. The wide east-west arterial that cuts through the Maryvale and Alhambra neighborhoods has become the deadliest corridor for people on foot anywhere in the state, with parts of the roadway responsible for far more pedestrian deaths than almost any other surface street.
Decades of crash records tell the story. An investigation that compiled 25 years of federal and state data, summarized by the Phoenix New Times, found that 118 pedestrians were killed on portions of Indian School Road between 2000 and 2024. That total is higher than any other continuous stretch in Arizona, and five of the state’s 12 deadliest half-kilometer segments are packed into roughly one square mile along this corridor.
City Documents Already Flagged The Danger
The city of Phoenix has known this road is a problem. Its own Road Safety Action Plan ranks several intersections on Indian School Road among the highest crash-risk locations in the city. Phoenix successfully landed a roughly $24.96 million U.S. Department of Transportation Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) grant to overhaul the 91st-to-39th Avenue stretch.
AZ Law Now reported that from 2017 through 2021, the city counted 39 fatal crashes and 85 serious-injury crashes on that same segment. Even with those numbers on the books, construction on the SS4A-funded ReVISIONing project is not expected to begin until 2028.
Statewide Numbers Show A Worsening Trend
The danger on Indian School Road is playing out against a statewide backdrop of rising pedestrian deaths. The 2024 Crash Facts from the Arizona Department of Transportation note a peak of 297 pedestrian fatalities in 2022, the most in recent years…