Wake Forest car accident statistics

NCDOT's newest city ranking counts 3,901 reported crashes in Wake Forest from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2025, with 7 fatal crashes and 777 non-fatal injury crashes. For location, the Wake Forest Police Department's May 2025 list of high-risk intersections puts Capital Boulevard in five of its seven entries.

Both tables below are copied from those sources. The NCDOT figures are three-year totals for the whole town.

What does NCDOT count for Wake Forest?

NCDOT publishes a yearly ranking of cities with populations of 10,000 or more. The ranking draws on reported crashes, crash severity and crash rates based on population, and each edition covers three years of crashes. These are the Wake Forest rows from the two newest editions.

The two windows share 2023 and 2024. Subtracting one row from the other does not give a one-year count, so the rows stand as two separate totals.

NCDMV publishes a separate statewide book, North Carolina Traffic Crash Facts, and the 2024 edition is online. NCDMV's Crash Facts page says a copy of the 2025 Crash Facts report is available by email request to operations-support@ncdot.gov.

NCDOT's ranking criteria list total crashes, fatal and non-fatal injury crashes, annual crashes per 1,000 persons, equivalent property damage, a severity index and average annual crash cost. The criteria page lists the factors without stating how they are weighted.

Which Wake Forest intersections does the police department call high-risk?

On May 12, 2025, the town reported that the police department "announced the top seven high-risk intersections in Wake Forest based on the number of accidents that occurred in those areas." The count runs from January 2021 through March 2025, and the release does not name the data system behind it.

This is the department's ranking in the department's own word, accidents. It is not an NCDOT ranking, and its period does not line up with the NCDOT windows above.

What do these numbers include and leave out?

The counts rest on the reportable crash. G.S. 20-4.01(33b) defines a reportable crash as a crash involving a motor vehicle that results in death or injury of a human being, or total property damage of $1,000 or more. The NCDOT ranking describes itself as based on all reported crashes.

NCDOT's statewide crash data table, the one behind its crash dashboard, is limited to public roads and excludes crashes in parking lots and private vehicular areas. That road limit is NCDOT's counting practice for that data set and does not come from the statute.

The town line is the other caution. Franklin County lists Wake Forest among its municipalities, and the NCDOT ranking shows Wake Forest as a single row with no split between Wake County and Franklin County.

What is planned for the corridors on the police list?

NCDOT's Capital Boulevard North Upgrade covers US 1 from I-540 in Raleigh to Purnell and Harris roads in Wake Forest, and Burlington Mills Road is one of its segment breaks. NCDOT schedules construction on the southern segments to begin in 2031 and on the northern segments in 2033.

The town's South Main Street corridor study runs from Capital Boulevard to the NC 98 Bypass. Both ends of that study appear on the police list, as the first and fifth entries.

Town totals describe traffic, not any one claim. A claim turns on one crash and one person, and I usually pay close attention to how the accident has affected their life in a negative way. The Wake Forest crash injury page covers who writes the report in each part of town, and the Wake Forest crash report page explains how to get a copy of one.