Phoenix Car Accident & Personal Injury Lawyers

Phoenix is not an easy place to drive, and it is not an easy place to get hurt. The city accounts for a disproportionate share of Arizona’s serious and fatal crashes, and the reasons are structural: freeway traffic funneled through the center of the city, wide high-speed arterials built for cars rather than people, and a police department stretched thin on traffic enforcement.

We have practiced personal injury law in Phoenix since 2005. Over 25 years, our attorneys have recovered more than $81 million for injured clients, and we have helped more than 4,800 people since we opened our doors. We handle car and truck collisions, motorcycle and bicycle crashes, pedestrian injuries, DUI victim claims, and wrongful death cases across Maricopa County.

Call 480-634-7480, or start a live chat. The consultation is free and someone is available 24/7.

Most large American cities route their interstates around the urban core. Phoenix routes them straight through it.

Interstate 10 passes directly beneath downtown in the Deck Park Tunnel, running under Margaret T. Hance Park before emerging on the far side. Interstate 17, the Black Canyon Freeway, carries north–south traffic through the western half of the city and meets I-10 at the Stack. A few miles east, the Mini Stack ties I-10 to State Route 51, the Piestewa Freeway, and Loop 202. The result is that an enormous volume of commuter, commercial, and through traffic converges within a few miles of the city center, at high speed, in constant merge and weave conditions.

That geometry produces predictable injuries. Tunnel and interchange crashes tend to involve multiple vehicles, sudden speed differentials, and rear-end chain reactions — the mechanism behind whiplash, herniated discs, and traumatic brain injuries that often do not fully present for days. SR 51 and I-17 congestion produces the same pattern at rush hour. And out on Loop 303 in the West Valley, where speeds are higher and commercial truck volume is heavier, crashes are more likely to be catastrophic from the first impact.

Surface streets are their own problem. Phoenix’s arterials — Camelback, Indian School, Thomas, Bell, Baseline, 7th Street, 51st Avenue — are wide, fast, and long, with signal spacing that encourages speed between lights. They produce the left-turn collisions, T-bone impacts, and pedestrian strikes that make up a large share of the city’s injury crashes.

After a six-year gap, photo enforcement returned to Phoenix in February 2026. The city installed 17 speed-monitoring cameras under its Vision Zero road safety plan: nine fixed along corridors with a history of speed-involved crashes, and eight that rotate weekly through school zones. Citations began going out in March 2026, and the system triggers when a driver exceeds the posted limit by 11 mph or more.

The nine corridors currently under fixed enforcement are:

Camera locations rotate roughly every six months, so this list reflects the current deployment rather than a permanent one. You can confirm current placements on the City of Phoenix Photo Safety page.

Here is what matters for an injury claim. These are mid-block speed cameras, not red light cameras, so they do not capture who had the green at an intersection. What they do capture is speed — and speed is often the fight in a serious injury case. When an insurer argues that a collision was minor and your injuries are exaggerated, documented evidence of how fast the other driver was traveling changes that conversation. In cases involving extreme speed, it can also support a claim for punitive damages.

That evidence is not held indefinitely, and it is not handed over on request. If your crash happened on one of these corridors, it needs to be identified and preserved early — not after months of treatment, and not after the insurance company has already made an offer.

Severely injured crash victims in central Phoenix are frequently transported to Dignity Health St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center at 350 W. Thomas Road. St. Joseph’s was Arizona’s first Level I trauma center verified by the American College of Surgeons, and it operates a heliport atop the Barrow Neuroscience Tower for patients flown in from across the state.

For our clients, the Barrow Neurological Institute on that campus matters enormously. Barrow is the largest dedicated neurosurgical center in the world, and head and spine injuries are among the most contested claims in personal injury law. A traumatic brain injury does not appear on an X-ray. Insurers dispute them aggressively. Documented treatment at a facility of that caliber, properly presented, is often the difference between a claim that is taken seriously and one that is lowballed.

If you were treated at St. Joseph’s, several things are happening simultaneously. Bills are accruing. Your health insurer or AHCCCS may be asserting a lien against your recovery. Records are building that will either support your claim or be used against it. Two mistakes cost Phoenix crash victims real money: skipping follow-up care, which becomes an argument that you were not badly hurt, and giving a recorded statement to the other driver’s insurer before anyone has reviewed your medical file. You are not required to give that statement.

In most Arizona injury cases you have two years from the date of the crash to file suit under A.R.S. § 12-542. If a government entity may share responsibility — a city vehicle, a dangerous roadway condition, a malfunctioning signal, a transit bus — that drops to a 180-day notice of claim under A.R.S. § 12-821.01 and a one-year filing deadline under A.R.S. § 12-821.

Two years sounds like plenty. It is not. Camera and surveillance footage is overwritten in weeks. Vehicles get repaired or scrapped. Witnesses move. And Arizona follows a pure comparative fault rule under A.R.S. § 12-2505, which gives the other side a direct financial incentive to shift blame onto you — every percentage point of fault they assign reduces what you recover.

Find out where you stand. Call 480-634-7480 or start a chat now — free, confidential, and no fee unless we win.