Analyzing Pedestrian Crashes in Albany

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“The annual number of crashes in the city has trended downward over the past three years. In 2022, there were 3,838 traffic crashes, with 575 involving some level of injury. Last year city police responded to 3,649 crashes, which included everything from minor scrapes and fender benders to head-on collisions, with 562 crashes involving some level of injury.”

• “Albany sees traffic crashes drop with new speed limit”, Time Union, April 6, 2025

“This year we added more than 70 speed humps, implemented a new 25 MPH citywide speed limit, and completed installation of speed cameras across 20 school zones to enforce the existing 20 MPH speed limit where our younger residents learn every day. These changes have already helped reduce traffic accidents by 40% and accidents with injuries by 50%”

• City of Albany Proposed budget, p 6

Traffic safety, both actions to make our streets safer and using data to analyze trends, is receiving significant attention nationwide and in the City of Albany.  Vision Zero is the nationwide road and pedestrian safety organization that communities are rallying around, which includes Capital District Vision Zero.

Nationwide, car-on-pedestrian crashes are more likely to cause serious injuries or fatalities than car-on-car accidents; pedestrian deaths are growing at a faster rate than overall traffic-related deaths. Yet car-on-pedestrian crashes get bundled into overall traffic safety reporting, and the volume, severity and visibility of pedestrian crashes get diluted in the discussion.

What is missing for us is the data, specifically data on pedestrian crashes - not just "traffic accidents" - within the City of Albany.  We want to understand Albany’s pedestrian crash data - where it happens, when it happens, and what the trends are.  Our goal is pretty simple - we want to demonstrate that pedestrian crash data is available and it should visibly inform the City of Albany’s planning, goal setting, analysis and communication about the progress that we are making.

We are also aware that the science and analysis of pedestrian safety is evolving.  Writing this article we looked for research on the benefit of specific pedestrian safety infrastructure and programs.  We communicated with several people involved in pedestrian safety research.  From our point of view the linkage between pedestrian safety and the introduction of pedestrian safety measures can best be described as directional and/or early stage.  For us this validates the need for the City to be using data to inform the actions that we take and to connect those actions to observable, objective benefits; or identify where our safety measures do not appear to be providing benefit.

Before we move to the analysis, a quick prefacing word.  Our analysis may come across as dispassionate - reducing pedestrian crashes, injuries and deaths to numbers.  We are well aware that behind these numbers are people - people who die, people who are injured, and families that are impacted by pedestrian crashes.    

We FOILed statewide pedestrian crash data from New York State DOT and received a file of over 75,000 car-on-pedestrian crashes statewide between January 1, 2020 and October 27, 2025. 

Each crash record (image above) contains the data, time of day, injury and fatality information, reporting agency, and then other information on the conditions, circumstances and road network. 

We extracted the 644 pedestrian crashes reported by the Albany Police Department over the time period to create our analysis dataset.  While other law enforcement agencies (State Police, Campus Police, etc) reported pedestrian crashes within the City limits the numbers were not material or were associated with Interstate highway pedestrian crashes.

We mapped out every crash (below) and computed a few data points that we would use in our analysis:

• The name of the road where the crash happened
• The major road or minor road designation of the road where the crash happened
• The neighborhood where the crash happened
• Whether the crash happened in a school camera speed zone 

Is the rate of pedestrian crashes increasing, decreasing or static?  Prior to answering this question we can explain the time period that we chose to study.  We stopped the trend study at the end of Q2 2025 (June 30th).  While we have pedestrian crash data from NY State through late October 2025 we found that there is a latency in entering pedestrian crash data into the system.  Each crash record lists the crash data and the date of data entry; typically there is a week or more delay, however many crashes take 90+ days to be entered into the system.  We concluded that the Q3 (July-September) data was likely missing crash data due to this delay.

We can review crashes by quarter in a chart from Q1 2020 through Q2 2025.  We also overlaid a trendline that uses a statistical method (polynomial) to show the overall trend.

Are pedestrian crashes going down?  That is a tough question to answer with any certainty.  A few bullet points capture our observations:

• The data from the first half of 2025 suggests improvement in pedestrian safety
• The pandemic likely, but not certainly, had some effect on minimizing traffic incidents in 2020 and 2021
• We do not know how the crash reporting processes may have changed, which may have caused over- or understatements for certain quarters
• Some of the large spikes and troughs may be just statistical chance

GIven those considerations, we would suggest two takeaways:

1. the 2025 trend suggests improvement however 3-5 quarters of additional data are required before anyone can make broad claims of pedestrian safety improvement
2. the pedestrian crash data, regardless of trend, demonstrates that there is a big gap to get to Vision Zero.

A quick point about our analysis before we describe where accidents happen.  To determine the level (minor or major) of any given road we use DOT Arterial Classification Codes (ACC) associated with each road.  A road gets an ACC based on its importance, usage, traffic volume, etc.  In the map below ACC=3 (yellow), ACC=4 (purple), ACC=5 (red).   

In our analysis below we consider major roads to include ACC 3 & 4, and minor roads to be ACC 5.  We linked each pedestrian crash to a road and determined if each crash was associated with a major road or a minor road. For a handful of crashes (13) we could not reliably determine the associated road.  

• 486 pedestrian crashes (77%) occurred on Major Roads
• 145 pedestrian crashes (23%) occurred on Minor Roads 

We can then analyze where pedestrian crashes happen, by street and by neighborhood.

We reviewed the number of accidents that are within 200 yards of a school zone speed camera.  (Map above).  Between 2020 and October 2025 there were:

• 5 serious injuries in a school zone between the hours of 7am and 6pm, not including July and August. 2 serious injuries occurred in 2020 and 3 serious injuries occurred in 2023.
• 19 other injuries in a school zone between the hours of 7am and 6pm, not including July and August

We can use this historical data to understand the current and future pedestrian safety benefit of the school zone speed camera program.

Lastly, the pedestrian crash data identifies, for each crash, whether the accident occurred at an intersection or not at an intersection.  The map below - the south end of Lark St near Madison Ave - shows pedestrian crashes at intersections using green circles, and pedestrian crashes that happened in-between intersections are identified with black squares. 

Roughly 60% of pedestrian crashes occur at intersections, 40% in-between intersections.  We doubt the value of ranking the “top 10 most dangerous intersections in Albany”, however we can note that intersections with the highest number of pedestrian crashes during the study period include Lark St & Washington Ave, New Scotland & Madison Ave, and Central Ave & Henry Johnson Blvd.

What insight could we find from understanding when - day vs. night, day of week - pedestrian crashes happen?  The pedestrian crash data codes “Light conditions” in 5 categories - DAYLIGHT, DAWN, DUSK, DARK-ROAD LIGHTED, and DARK-ROAD UNLIGHTED.  We created two categories for Day vs. Night, where Day consists of DAYLIGHT and DAWN, and Night consists of the other three categories.  63% of the City’s pedestrian crashes happen during the day, 37% at night.

We then plotted pedestrian crashes by day of week and day vs. night.  We had some thoughts about when pedestrian crashes are most prevalent and none proved to be correct.  We were extremely surprised by the day-to-day variability in overall pedestrian accidents, and the day-to-day consistency in night pedestrian crashes.

Similarly, we can examine when pedestrian deaths happen.  Deaths generally track the day of week rate, with a much higher percentage of deaths happening at Night (72%).  

As we analyze when pedestrian deaths happen we can look at broader analysis.  The National Safety Council’s analysis of pedestrian crashes, states:

“The largest number of pedestrian deaths occurs on Fridays (1,155), closely followed by Saturdays (1,150).  Except for a decline on Sundays, the number of pedestrian deaths during daylight hours is relatively consistent throughout the week. However, pedestrian fatalities at night (during dark with or without artificial lighting) vary substantially. Nighttime pedestrian deaths are at their lowest point on Tuesday and peak on Saturday and Sunday.”

These statements do and don’t align with the City of Albany’s pedestrian deaths, however this could be due to the low volume of pedestrian deaths on the City’s roads.

We ran the same trend analysis for Troy and Schenectady - a quarterly analysis of pedestrian crashes for each city between 2020 and Q2 2025.  While Troy and Schenectady have fewer pedestrian crashes we wanted to identify how each city’s trend compares.  In the graph below the quarter-to-quarter pedestrian crash data and trends are in solid lines.  The statistical trend for each city is shown with a dashed line. 

Troy has seen a slight downturn in pedestrian crashes while Schenectady has shown a slight uptick.  Both communities are a part of Capital Region Vision Zero, similar to the City of Albany.  We have not examined if either Schenectady or Troy has been making the same investment in traffic calming measures as the City of Albany.  

Our takeaway from the inter-city comparison is that this is an interesting data point for us to track.  Within these three peers cities we can examine broad trends in pedestrian safety and the linkage between safety investment and awareness and reduction in pedestrian crashes.

We picked a few of the many ways to examine the City of Albany’s pedestrian crashes since 2025.  We wrote this article to highlight some of the data points that we are seeing from examining the pedestrian crash data.

We also want to ask our readers - what questions do you have that we can attempt to answer?  If you have a question concerning pedestrian safety and crashes that you think we may be able to answer, drop us an email at AlbanyDataStories@gmail.com.

The City makes significant investments year-over-year in our streets and related safety.  The City’s budget items that directly or indirectly support transportation safety in the 2026 proposed budget include:

• $1 million for traffic speed reduction measures
• $15 million for traffic signal improvements
• $14.5 million for street reconstruction
• $0.65 million for streetlight improvements
• $0.65 million for sidewalk reconstruction
• $0.4 million for roadway striping
• $0.3 million for traffic safety equipment

Net, the City invests over $30 million in road maintenance and improvements.  Optimizing or directing this spending for traffic safety should be an important consideration.  For example, the data could guide whether we should or shouldn't be installing speed humps on minor streets with no history of pedestrian crashes. 

We can suggest a few outcomes from our analysis:

1. New York must make pedestrian safety data and all other traffic crash data available to the public proactively, not requiring a FOIL
2. The City of Albany should make all pedestrian and traffic safety analysis available on the City’s open data website.  Quoting statistics and studies must be accompanied by visibility of the analysis.  For example, let’s see the data and analysis behind our opening quote from the 2026 budget “These changes have already helped reduce traffic accidents by 40% and accidents with injuries by 50%”
3. Data should be used to analyze our new and improved infrastructure.  If we have installed speed humps, pedestrian walkway improvements of various types, speed zone cameras and more, can we identify which improvements are or are not making a difference?
4. Data should inform our goals.  Our City should set targets or goals for the total number of pedestrian crashes, or related fatalities and serious injuries.  As an illustrative example, in 2027 can we strive to have fewer than 70 pedestrian crashes and no fatalities?
5. If we have data on our improvements to date (#3) and our goals (#4), can we use those data points to prioritize how and where we make improvements and additions to our infrastructure?  Data should inform our $30 million of 2026 infrastructure spending. 
6. Let’s use the word “crash” rather than “accident” when we are talking about public safety.  “Crash” conveys the tragic consequences of what are, in most cases, avoidable scenarios.

For further reading regarding the City’s pedestrian safety programs we suggest looking at:

• City of Albany Complete Streets Design Guidelines
• City of Albany Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan

We have also posted the datasets that we received via FOIL in this Google Drive for anyone to download.  This folder contains statewide datasets of pedestrian and bicycle accidents and a documentation pdf (which has a lot of inaccuracies but it’s a starting point for understanding the data).