Someone walking or biking along 7th Street or 7th Avenue during rush hour is moving through one of Phoenix's most dangerous corridors for anyone outside a car — and the study that was supposed to catch that risk in 2021 never surfaced it.
7th Street and 7th Avenue run reversible peak-hour lanes through Midtown Phoenix, moving traffic toward downtown in the morning and away from it in the evening. The program has operated for decades with minimal independent safety review. Independent analysis found crash rates on these corridors are double those on 16th Street and 19th Avenue — comparable streets with nearly identical traffic patterns, located in the same study area — even after adjusting for volume. Non-motorists account for just 1 percent of crashes during reverse-lane hours but 82 percent of the fatalities. Over the last twenty years, crashes on the 7s have cost Phoenix taxpayers more than $316 million, a cost the City's own study never calculated.
The City's 2021 traffic study, published that December, was supposed to evaluate the program. It caught none of this. It used a traffic count of up to 65,000 vehicles per day that an independent review of 49 traffic studies could not substantiate; the figure traces to a data-entry error in a single source study, where counts were simply doubled. It never compared the corridors to 16th Street or 19th Avenue, the natural control group for isolating what the reverse-lane design itself contributes to the crash rate. And it mentioned pedestrian and bicycle crashes without ever weighing them against their share of the fatalities. A public-records request GOOD|GOAT filed on May 31, 2021 for the study's procurement records has never been answered.
The City is evaluating the reverse lanes again now, through a Midtown Core Transportation Study whose stated goal includes determining the "long-term role" of the 7th Avenue and 7th Street reversible lanes, with a public comment window open through May 29, 2026. GOOD|GOAT submitted written feedback built on this data on May 8, 2026, asking the City to base whatever it decides about the 7s on a comparison to 16th Street and 19th Avenue, and on the fatality data the 2021 study left out.
The comment window is still open — residents who show up with this data are better equipped to speak than residents who don't.
1 Matter
GOOD|GOAT's data-driven campaign on Phoenix's reverse-lane program. Crash rates on 7th Street and 7th Avenue are double comparable corridors — and non-motorists account for 82% of fatalities despite just 1% of crashes. The City's 2021 study had the data. It didn't surface it.
