No One Was Seriously Hurt on Four of Jacksonville's Busiest Roads in 2025, Despite 510 Crashes
- April Karaffa
- Jul 17
- 5 min read
By April Karaffa, Director of Business Development and Operations, The Moore Law Firm
Summary
Most crash coverage maps the deadliest roads. We ran the opposite question: where do people crash constantly and still walk away?
Four of Jacksonville's busiest roads - Commonwealth Avenue, Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway, Kernan Boulevard South, and St. Johns Bluff Road South - recorded 510 crashes in 2025 with zero serious injuries and zero deaths.
Citywide, 1.40% of crashes end in serious injury or death; on the eight worst arterials it is 3.43%. These four roads sit at 0%.
What they share is not luck: controlled access, lower speeds, and few people on foot - the conditions that strip the lethal ingredients out of a crash before it happens.
Source: Florida 2025 preliminary FDOT and FLHSMV crash release, Jacksonville (Duval) crashes; severe = incapacitating injury or death under FDOT's KABCO highest-wins rule. Road-design context from the City of Jacksonville's 2025 Vision Zero Action Plan.
Everyone maps the deadliest roads. We asked the opposite.
Almost every story about traffic safety points to the same place: the deadliest intersection, the worst corridor, the road you should avoid. That work matters. But it leaves out the more useful question for a city that wants to get safer - which roads carry heavy traffic and almost never send anyone to the hospital, and what are they doing right?
We pulled every reported Jacksonville crash from Florida's 2025 preliminary FDOT release - 36,176 of them - and ranked the city's busiest roads by how often a crash there ended in serious injury or death. Four roads with well over a hundred crashes each came back with a number that stops you: zero.
Four roads carry the crashes without the carnage
These are not quiet side streets. Each of the four is a working, high-volume road, and together they logged 510 crashes in 2025. Across all of them, not one person was seriously injured or killed.
Set against the rest of the city, the gap is stark:
Road | Crashes (2025) | Serious injuries | Deaths | Severe rate |
Commonwealth Avenue | 145 | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway | 134 | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
Kernan Boulevard South | 126 | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
St. Johns Bluff Road South | 105 | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
All four combined | 510 | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
Citywide average | 36,176 | 508 | 166 | 1.40% |
What these four roads have in common
The data tells us these roads are safe. It does not, on its own, tell us why - so read this part as the most likely explanation, consistent with how the roads are built, rather than a proven cause.
The clearest case is MLK Jr. Parkway. It is a 7.1-mile grade-separated expressway along the edge of downtown, carrying U.S. 1 traffic on elevated lanes with interchanges instead of cross-traffic and driveways. There are essentially no pedestrians and no left turns across oncoming lanes - the two ingredients behind most of Jacksonville's severe crashes are simply absent.
Commonwealth Avenue runs through a heavy-industrial district on the city's west side. Truck-dominated, lower-speed, and thin on foot traffic, it produces plenty of fender-benders and very few high-energy or pedestrian crashes. Kernan Boulevard South and St. Johns Bluff Road South are newer suburban arterials on the Southside, with modern signal spacing, turn lanes, and sidewalks set back from the roadway.
The through-line is the same one Jacksonville's own safety planners have landed on: the deaths in this city are concentrated among people on foot, on bikes, and in high-speed wrecks. Roads that design those situations out - by separating traffic, slowing it down, or keeping pedestrians away from fast lanes - dodge the fatal tail almost entirely.
The contrast: where the same city turns deadly
The safe roads look even more deliberate next to the city's worst arterials, where the severe rate runs well above the citywide average and deaths pile up:
Road (FDOT designation) | Crashes (2025) | Serious injuries | Deaths | Severe rate |
State Road 202 (J. Turner Butler Blvd) | 362 | 13 | 2 | 3.59% |
State Road 115 (Arlington Expressway) | 313 | 12 | 7 | 3.83% |
U.S. Route 1 (Philips Highway corridor) | 299 | 11 | 7 | 3.68% |
Lane Avenue South | 205 | 7 | 3 | 3.41% |
Same city, same year, same weather and drivers - but two to three times the serious-injury rate of the citywide average, and 31 deaths across just these four roads. The difference is not who is driving. It is what the road lets a crash become.
The city reached the same conclusion
In July 2025, Jacksonville adopted its first Vision Zero Action Plan, with the goal of eliminating traffic deaths and cutting serious injuries in half by 2035. The plan's own numbers frame why the safe roads stand out: between 2018 and 2023 the city recorded roughly 200,000 crashes, 921 deaths, and 2,770 serious injuries, and 34% of the killed-or-seriously-injured were vulnerable road users - people on foot, on bikes, or on motorcycles.
The plan ranks Jacksonville as the 15th most dangerous U.S. city for pedestrians and the 3rd most dangerous for bicyclists, and builds a High Injury Network of the corridors where those crashes concentrate. Backed by $300,000 in federal planning money and $1.2 million for quick-build safety projects, its whole premise is that street design - not driver luck - decides who survives. The four roads above are what that principle looks like when it is already working.
What this data can and cannot say
This is a single year of preliminary data, and the coding can shift as the 2025 release is finalized. Zero serious injuries in one year is a strong signal, not a guarantee that these roads are risk-free forever; a single severe crash next year would move the number off zero.
The design reasoning is inference. We can show the safe roads share controlled access, lower speeds, and few pedestrians, and that this is consistent with their outcomes - but we did not run a corridor engineering study, so treat the why as the best available explanation, not proof.
One transparency note on how roads are counted. Two more roads - Dunn Avenue and Old St. Augustine Road - look spotless under one label but pick up a small number of serious crashes once every spelling of their name is merged, landing under 1% rather than at zero. We kept them out of the four-road headline for that reason. The four roads named here hold their zero even after every name variant is combined.
Frequently asked
Are these roads actually safe, or were they just lucky in 2025?
A year with zero serious injuries across 510 crashes is well beyond luck - it lines up with how these roads are built. But one year is a snapshot, not a permanent grade, so we frame it as a strong signal rather than a guarantee.
Why would a busier road have fewer serious crashes than a quiet one?
Severity is about energy and exposure, not volume. A grade-separated expressway or a slow industrial street produces lots of low-speed fender-benders and very few of the high-speed or pedestrian crashes that cause serious injuries.
What makes a road dangerous for people on foot or on a bike?
High speeds, long crossings without protection, and driveways or turns that mix people with fast traffic. Jacksonville's deadliest outcomes cluster exactly where those conditions exist, which is why roads without them stay so safe.
Does it matter for my injury case which road I was hurt on?
It can. Road design, speed limits, signal timing, and prior crash history at a location can all bear on how a crash happened and who is responsible. Those details are worth preserving early, while the evidence is still fresh.
If you've experienced an accident on the road in NE Florida, even on a road that is usually forgiving, the Moore Law Firm treats every case with high importance. We secure the medical evidence, the scene evidence, and the witness work these cases demand. Safer roads are built, not lucky, but when a preventable crash still happens, we'll be ready to fight for you.
