Los Angeles car accident statisticsEvery number checked. What it means for you.

Every row below names the geography, the year, and the organization that published it, and the sources are linked so you can check them. The two we rely on most are UC Berkeley's SafeTREC, which publishes California fact sheets built from federal and state crash records, and Crosstown, which reports City of Los Angeles figures from LAPD Traffic Division data.

Scope of these figures

The figures cover reported deaths, serious injuries and crash rankings for the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California and the nation. They do not rank intersections, do not estimate crash costs, and do not include any figure whose source page we could not load.

Reading these numbers

Four definitions do most of the work. SWITRS, the Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System, is California's collection of collision reports taken by police agencies. FARS, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, is the federal census of fatal crashes. TIMS, the Transportation Injury Mapping System, is the free UC Berkeley tool that makes SWITRS searchable. Victims killed and injured counts people, while collisions counts crashes, so the two numbers are never interchangeable.

One convention is often reported backwards. In the California Office of Traffic Safety rankings, a rank of 1 is the worst. OTS explains its method on its rankings page: an empirical Bayesian ranking method weighs crash counts against population and vehicle miles traveled, cities are sorted into seven groups by population with Group A over 250,000 residents, and in a group of 57 cities a rank of 1 is the worst and 57 of 57 is the lowest rate. OTS also states that rankings are only indicators of potential problems, and that local circumstances can understate or overstate any city's position.

Two more cautions. City, county and state figures are not comparable to each other, which is why every table below names its geography. And crash data is revised: SafeTREC's 2023 county and state figures are drawn from FARS 2023 and provisional SWITRS 2023, so provisional counts can shift when the final files publish.

City of Los Angeles crashes

Crosstown reported that 2024 was the second consecutive year in which the number of people killed in collisions in the city exceeded the number of murder victims, 302 traffic deaths against 268 homicides recorded through December 28. Pedestrian deaths in the city were 170 in 2024, down from 185 in 2023, and roughly double the 88 recorded in 2015.

Crashes across Los Angeles County

These are county figures, which cover the whole of Los Angeles County: the city, every other incorporated city, and the unincorporated areas. They come from UC Berkeley SafeTREC's 2025 traffic safety fact sheets, which use FARS 2023 and provisional SWITRS 2023. Los Angeles County had the highest count in California in every category below.

The individual fact sheets are SafeTREC on pedestrian safety, speeding-related crashes, alcohol-impaired driving, motorcycle safety and bicycle safety. Those categories have their own pages here: pedestrian accidents and motorcycle accidents. For the unincorporated parts of the county, Vision Zero Los Angeles County, run by the county's Public Works and Public Health departments, reports an average of 100 people killed and 450 severely injured in traffic crashes each year.

Los Angeles versus other cities

These are 2023 figures for the City of Los Angeles from the California Office of Traffic Safety, with the city's population given as 3,819,600 and the city placed in Group A alongside 14 other California cities. Read the rank column with the convention above: 1 of 15 would be the worst rate in the group, and 15 of 15 the lowest. Los Angeles carries large raw counts and, on several of these measures, a rank at or near the low-rate end of its group.

The OTS page also breaks pedestrian victims down by age: 86 under 15 and 186 aged 65 and over, in 2023. Nighttime collisions between 9 p.m. and 2:59 a.m. totaled 1,498, ranked 14 of 15.

Crashes across California

The pedestrian share stands out: SafeTREC reports that 27% of all California motor vehicle deaths in 2023 were pedestrians, against 18% nationwide. Roughly one in four people killed on California roads was on foot, which is why so many of the claims described on these pages are right-of-way cases rather than car-to-car cases.

National figures for comparison only

These are United States totals published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety from federal fatality data, and they are here only so the California figures above have a scale. None of them is a Los Angeles number.

The IIHS fatality facts pages for pedestrians, motorcycles, large trucks and bicyclists carry the underlying tables.

The numbers and your claim

Statistics do not decide a case, but the categories above map onto specific California rules, and knowing which one your crash falls into tells you what the dispute will be about.

The sources: Civil Code section 3294 on punitive damages, Vehicle Code section 22350, the basic speed law, which forbids a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, traffic and the road, Insurance Code section 11580.2 for uninsured motorist claims, Government Code section 835 and section 911.2 for public entities, and Vehicle Code section 16056 for the minimum limits. Underneath all of it sits Civil Code section 1714, which makes everyone responsible for injury caused by a want, meaning a lack, of ordinary care. That is the at-fault system, and it is why California is not a no-fault state.

Limits of these numbers

A statistic describes a population, not a person. No figure on this page proves fault in any individual crash, and none of them sets a case value. A county leading the state in alcohol-impaired deaths says nothing about whether the driver who hit you had been drinking, and a city rate that improved year over year is no answer to a specific intersection with a blocked sight line.

Two limits apply. Reported crash data undercounts, because collisions that go unreported never enter SWITRS at all, which affects minor injury and property damage counts far more than fatality counts. And these are calendar-year totals for large areas, so they cannot be read down to a corridor, a block, or a time of day without going back to the underlying records.

Reproducing these figures

Every number on this page can be checked in under an hour, and anyone citing a Los Angeles crash figure should do so.

1. For county and city collision counts, open TIMS, the UC Berkeley SafeTREC tool. It is free, no account is required, and it queries and maps SWITRS collision records. Set the geography to a city or county, set the year, and set the severity, then export.
2. For the 2023 fact sheet figures, go to the SafeTREC fact sheet for the category you want and read the California and county panels. Each sheet names FARS and provisional SWITRS as its inputs.
3. For city rankings, use the OTS rankings page for the city and year, and read it with the method note at ots.ca.gov, remembering that a rank of 1 is the worst.
4. For City of Los Angeles fatality totals, Crosstown publishes annual reporting from LAPD Traffic Division data.
5. For the older LAPD record-level data, the Los Angeles Open Data collision dataset still loads, but treat it as historical: the department moved to a new records management system and the dataset no longer receives updates.

One consequence follows, because the claim is repeated on many local pages. We do not publish the figure that a small share of Los Angeles streets accounts for most of its traffic deaths, because we could not load a primary source for it. If you find one that resolves, our editorial guidelines page carries the corrections contact, and this page is reviewed once a year when the SafeTREC fact sheets and the OTS rankings publish.

Los Angeles crash data summary

The county leads California in pedestrian, speeding, alcohol, motorcyclist and bicyclist deaths. The city's OTS ranks sit at the low-rate end of its population group despite very large raw counts, and in two consecutive years more people were killed on the streets of Los Angeles than were murdered in it. Those are the facts a claim sits inside, and none of them decides an individual case.

What decides a case is the record: who was at fault, what the injuries are, and what coverage exists. If you were hurt in one of the crashes behind these numbers, our Los Angeles car accident lawyer page explains how a claim is built, the guide to filing a car accident claim in Los Angeles covers the deadlines, and fatal car accidents covers what a family can do. There is no fee unless we recover.