When we talk about traffic deaths in the United States, we usually rely on official numbers from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Those figures are essential, but they do not always tell the whole story. NHTSA’s headline fatality data focuses on crashes that occur on public trafficways, meaning many crashes in parking lots, driveways, and other private-property areas may be counted separately or receive far less public attention.
That distinction creates a major blind spot. NHTSA has acknowledged the need for separate tracking of non-traffic crashes, which include incidents that occur away from public roads, such as in driveways and parking lots. These incidents are part of the real-world safety problem, but they are often not included in the same headline traffic-fatality figures used in public policy debates, media coverage, and transportation planning.
These are not rare or irrelevant spaces. Parking lots are where families walk into grocery stores, workers cross between buildings, children move around vehicles, and drivers frequently back up with limited visibility. Driveways are also especially dangerous for young children and older adults because drivers may not see someone directly behind or in front of a vehicle.
The data gap matters because private-property crashes can involve serious injuries and deaths, especially for pedestrians. Prior estimates have suggested that a meaningful share of pedestrian crashes occur in parking lots and driveways, and AAA has previously reported that roughly 20% of all vehicle crashes happen in parking lots. NHTSA has also estimated that deaths from “non-traffic crashes” on private property represent a notable share of pedestrian deaths when compared with official pedestrian fatality totals.
In 2025, NHTSA estimated that 36,640 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes, a decrease of about 6.7% from 2024. Meanwhile, the Governors Highway Safety Association reported that drivers struck and killed an estimated 3,024 pedestrians in the first half of 2025, or about 16 pedestrians per day. Those numbers are alarming on their own — but they may still understate the full scale of vehicle-related harm if private-property crashes remain harder to track and less consistently reported.
The takeaway is simple: if we want to make communities safer, we need to count all the places where cars injure and kill people — not just public streets. Parking lots and driveways may not look like roads, but they are part of the transportation system. Our safety data should treat them that way.
Because non-traffic crashes are tracked separately from standard trafficway crashes, available figures may vary depending on the dataset, reporting method, and whether the incident occurred on public or private property.
Sources
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NHTSA — Early Estimate of Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities in 2025
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813800 -
NHTSA — Traffic Crash Deaths, Early Estimates January–June 2025
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-reports-sharp-drop-traffic-fatalities-first-half-2025 -
Governors Highway Safety Association — U.S. Pedestrian Deaths Fall 11% in First Half of 2025
https://www.ghsa.org/news/pedestrian-deaths-fall-first-half-2025 -
GHSA — Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2025 Preliminary Data
https://www.ghsa.org/resource-hub/pedestrian-fatalities-2025-preliminary -
National Safety Council — Preliminary Semiannual Motor Vehicle Death Estimates 2025
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/preliminary-estimates/
