More people are dying on Charlotte roads, report shows. Is anything being done?
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- Charlotte traffic deaths rose to 81 and serious injuries to 111 in fiscal year 2025.
- Charlotte is trying to eliminate serious collisions through the Vision Zero initiative.
- The city could reevaluate how it prioritizes safety projects.
Traffic deaths and serious injuries increased in Charlotte last year despite an initiative aimed at eliminating them.
A report released by the Charlotte Department of Transportation last week showed total crashes are trending downward while the number of life-altering collisions continues to climb. Eighty-one people died on Charlotte streets during the 2025 fiscal year, and 111 suffered serious injuries.
The news comes as Charlotte enters its seventh year participating in Vision Zero, an international initiative with the goal of reducing the number of traffic deaths and severe injuries to zero.
“I think it’s fair to say we’re failing on Vision Zero,” said Shannon Binns, founder of Sustain Charlotte, a nonprofit organization focused on sustainable growth.
Sustain Charlotte was an early advocate for Vision Zero, and one of the organization’s employees serves as co-chair of the program’s task force.
“It doesn’t mean we aren’t doing anything. It just means we aren’t doing enough, and we aren’t doing things where they’re needed most,” Binns said.
City officials declined to provide a statement or interview, saying they were unavailable, but spokesperson Jack VanderToll said “more information on Vision Zero is coming.”
The initiative had a troubled start in the Queen City. An internal audit from 2024 determined little had improved since the city adopted Vision Zero in 2019 despite spending more than $21 million on the effort. CDOT failed to implement “key components” of the plan, according to the audit, while police fell short on tracking crash-related data and using that data to improve safety strategies.
In the year and a half that followed the audit, CDOT expanded crash investigations beyond fatalities to include serious bicycle and pedestrian-involved collisions to gain further insight into crash patterns. Charlotte also launched an interactive dashboard where the public can track crash data over time and sort it by demographic, vehicle type, contributing factors and other categories.
Inside the report on Charlotte traffic deaths
Some trends emerged in the collision data.
The new report found preventable behaviors such as distracted driving or failing to wear a seat belt are becoming more common, which could explain the uptick in serious crashes.
Speeding and improper vehicle operations accounted for 64% of fatal and serious crashes in the fiscal year that ran from July 2024 through June 2025. Both have topped the list of contributing factors since at least 2021, the earliest year for which data was provided. Distracted driving accounted for 11%.
Pedestrian and bicycle crashes make up fewer than 1.5% of crashes but account for 29% of fatal and serious injuries.
Last year also resulted in the highest number of serious injuries since at least 2021. The total number of crashes has shown improvement over the past several years, but it remains higher than it was in 2021.
The city knows the roads where serious collisions happen most often and the leading risk factors, but Binns said officials can be hesitant to make difficult changes.
“A lot of times we have asked for things that we know will make the streets safer, and there has not been a willingness to do it because they don’t want to slow down cars,” Binns said.
Charlotte leaders respond to Vision Zero findings
Charlotte City Council members called the report’s findings unacceptable during Monday night’s council meeting.
Kimberly Owens, who represents District 6 in south Charlotte, said she wanted to escalate Vision Zero as a priority and called for City Manager Marcus Jones to direct CDOT to treat serious collisions as a “safety emergency.”
Owens highlighted a key finding from the report: The overwhelming majority of fatal and serious crashes happened on streets listed on the city’s high injury network, which is a collection of roads — most of them major thoroughfares — where serious crashes are known to occur more frequently. The high injury network represents only 13% of all Charlotte streets yet 80% of serious and fatal crashes.
About three quarters of pedestrian and bicycle deaths occurred on high injury network roads.
“Those aren’t just numbers. Those are people,” Owens said. “Those are families living with grief that shouldn’t be part of their story.”
At-large councilwoman Dimple Ajmera said the city needs to prioritize immediate funding for streets on the high injury network.
Ajmera raised Harris Houston Road as a concern. She cited the Observer’s report from December that a pedestrian was struck and killed on the high injury network road, which has waited in the city’s sidewalk queue for years with no end in sight.
“We need to do this,” Ajmera said. “Some of these corridors have waited for 20, 30 years to address traffic fatalities. This is a crisis.”
Fatalities do not directly drive solutions, Binns said. That means roads where a person lost their life often look the same a day, month or even year after the incident.
Sustain Charlotte is calling for rapid upgrades to roads on the high injury network, including connector streets. Changes could involve narrowing or reducing lanes, adding buffers or re-striping roadways to allocate space for cyclists.
The city should also explore “less than ideal” short-term safety upgrades where necessary, Binns said.
“That’s a big part of the problem too is we’re not willing to do the interim steps. We’re kind of waiting for that highly engineered solution that in many cases is going to be years, if not decades, away,” Binns said.
The city previously told the Observer it’s only funding new sidewalks on high-volume, high-speed streets considered arterial roads. Local and connector roads, including Harris Houston, are not prioritized regardless of whether they are on the high injury network.
Charlotte could revisit its sidewalk prioritization strategy and whether to include collector streets in light of the 1% sales tax increase passed by voters in November, according to a previous statement from the city. The tax increase is projected to generate more than $19 billion over the next 30 years, 40% of which will go towards road and sidewalk projects.
City leaders plan to talk about their Vision Zero strategy during the City Council retreat next week.
What’s next for Charlotte street safety
In laying out the city’s action plan, the report noted Charlotte is undoing 50 years of car-centric planning and is building miles of new sidewalks and bike lanes each year. But “it will take time to see the results of our efforts,” the report said.
The report touted a few accomplishments from the past year. Charlotte invested in safer crossings at 39 locations, installed 521 new streetlights and laid eight miles of new sidewalks and bike paths.
The city also reduced speed limits in 82 areas, eight of which were on the high injury network. Almost every speed limit reduction happened on local or collector streets.
Looking ahead, Charlotte will use transportation bond money to identify and address the highest-risk intersections and corridors, according to the report. Construction will begin this year on the first phase of projects funded by a $4.4 million federal grant for safe streets awarded in 2023.
The city will also explore options for automated speed enforcement, like speed cameras in school zones, in alignment with a bill passed by the state Legislature last summer.
City leaders will update the Vision Zero action plan this year to more closely align with existing transportation policies and goals, too.
“Protecting human lives takes priority over all other objectives of the road system,” the report said.
This story was originally published January 16, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
