In a Washington Post analysis released in late 2025, Tennessee was among the states listed as having a sharp increase in areas with clusters of pedestrian deaths.
From 2021 to 2023, the number of locations with at least three recent pedestrian deaths clustered within a mile of one another tripled from more than 275 in 2010 to more than 825 in 2023. East Nashville showed five separate clusters of pedestrian deaths in that period of time, and Nashville overall had more than 10 clusters.
Just this year alone in Nashville, more than a dozen pedestrians have died. Most recently a vendor of The Contributor passed away after being struck by a semi truck at a known dangerous portion of road at East Trinity Lane at Gallatin Pike in East Nashville. Billy Ray Swaner fell into the road as a semi truck was turning right onto Gallatin Pike. Just before that in April, 52-year-old Larry W. Smith was struck and killed by a truck while riding his bike at the intersection of 2nd Avenue North and Junior Gilliam Way.
The portion of road where Swaner died is part of an upcoming project that starts this summer to increase safety features to Main Street and Gallatin Pike. The first phase is slated to repave the road from I-24 all the way to Briley Parkway in that area. It was also slated to add new crosswalks, improve intersections and school zone signs. Though this area is shown to be a cluster area for deaths, a four-mile stretch of Murfreesboro Road is in the top roads in the country for pedestrian deaths from 2021-2023. In cities all over the country, pedestrian deaths went up, but Southern states held the deadliest stretches of roads.
Even before these sharp increases in deaths and data releases on deaths came out last year, Nashvillians and in particular folks living on the streets have known how dangerous it is to have to walk anywhere in or around the city. Even the city’s most walkable areas are a nightmare for pedestrians when you consider current road and building construction downtown. Nashville’s pedestrian high injury network, which can be viewed online, consists of roads with the highest number of traffic crashes where somebody has died or been injured while walking. Even if they’ve never had to traverse the city on foot, most Nashvillians will recognize these routes as the more difficult roads to navigate in a car as well. Driving down Murfreesboro Road during rush hour alone will show you just how much foot traffic is right there with the cars. The pedestrian high injury network identifies areas where investment can be impactful in reducing serious pedestrian crashes. The tool is a fairly defined roadmap for improvement, for lack of a better term.
Metro and Mayor Freddie O’Connell have been promoting a Vision Zero goal to eliminate fatalities and injuries on the roads in Nashville. Advocates have called for the city to move faster, and O’Connell has responded by saying the city was doing all it could to stay committed to Vision Zero.
However, the mayor’s pitched 2027 budget is slated to take approximately $8 million from the Vision Zero program to use on other road projects. Though the Mayor’s Office and Metro have said all projects are on track for Vision Zero despite a funding reallocation, advocates for safer streets argue the funds shouldn’t be diverted if the city is seeing an increase in deaths.
At a May 12 meeting of the Nashville Vision Zero Advisory Committee, folks gave public comments asking for more urgency around the increase in deaths.
Katherine McDonell, chair of the Metro Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, called the increase in deaths a public health emergency and asked the committee to consider it as such.
“Since Jan. 1 of this year, 16 people outside of cars have been killed, including five in just the last five weeks,” McDonell said. “That’s more than three times as many as there were at this point last year. These numbers are even more striking when you consider that statewide traffic fatalities are down. In Knoxville, Chattanooga and Memphis, overall traffic fatalities are actually reducing while Nashville’s continue to rise. But instead of treating this like the emergency that we should, $8 million dollars have just been cut or reallocated from zero funding and another $4 million is going to repave Gallatin without really any meaningful safety [improvements]. These deaths on our streets are horrific. They’re heartbreaking, but they’re not surprising.”
McDonell said that since Nashville Next, a general growth plan for the city, was adopted in 2015, Nashvillians have repeatedly seen good plans be delayed, watered down or thrown away. She lists several unfinished or slowed projects as well as projects like bike lanes that were installed on Cleveland Street and identified priority bikeways with broad community support only to be quickly removed at the request of the district council member. Another project in 2019 adding bike line infrastructure at 3rd and Commerce with major community support now dead ends into oncoming traffic. Another East Nashville road project near McDonell’s house that started in 2020 finally got designed in 2024, but still is not in progress.
“To date, we still have nothing to show for this, no timeline for completion, no interim safety measures and massively wide roads that I have to take my daughter on on a daily basis,” she says.
After going through a series of other projects, she ends by saying that in 2024, following a series of public meetings, designs were developed to transform Main Street and Gallatin Pike, which is considered one of Nashville’s most dangerous corridors. Outside of deaths, nearly 800 crashes have happened in this area in just the past three years. Construction was due to be completed in 2026 from 5th to Eastland, but instead more public meetings were held two weeks ago to reveal these plans wouldn’t begin until 2030. Instead, that area of the street would instead be repaved this summer with “some very marginal safety improvements.”
A few days after this was revealed, Swaner was killed on Gallatin and Trinity.
“This is why we’re frustrated,” McDonell said. “This is why we’re angry and this is why people are still dying on our streets. Most of the mentioned are on our high injury network. These are places we know people are dying, but even on the streets we fully own and even on the streets that we are designing and building from scratch, we are repeatedly failing to do anything to keep people safe … Please just build some good infrastructure and build it fast. We don’t need any more plans. We don’t need any more community engagement. We need action and we need it now.”
During the meeting, the committee introduced and unanimously adopted a detailed resolution condemning the removal of $8 million in surplus Vision Zero funds and the redirection of remaining Vision Zero dollars to repaving Main Street and Gallatin Pike.
“If we can’t get it right here where we have the plans, we have the funding, where we own the streets, how can we ever get it right on our pikes where people are literally taking their lives into their hands just to try to cross the street? This lack of action is not due to lack of funding,” McDonell said. “We’re not even spending the money that we have. This is due to lack of political will.”
Most everyone agrees these areas are high injury areas, that resources should be allocated to fix them, but as with most things in Nashville, it seems it can’t happen fast enough. Though some might argue one can’t evoke the impending Super Bowl in every article on city growth and planning, it feels relevant to note that a city that can’t build well enough or maintain safe roads enough to stop pedestrian deaths on our major roads is planning to invite a bunch of people who don’t live here regularly to walk the streets in a few short years. Maybe when it’s their lives on the line, someone will feel it’s appropriate to use some extra money.