Incident location, Long Island
What Happened
Newsday officially launched a first-of-its-kind searchable database tracking fatal traffic crashes across Long Island on April 3, 2025, as part of a sweeping yearlong investigative series examining the deadliest roads in Nassau and Suffolk counties. The database was compiled by a team of Newsday journalists — Nyasia Spencer, Caroline Curtin, Judy Weinberg, Laura Mann, and Dorothy Guadagno — and represents one of the most detailed public-facing tools ever created to document the human cost of traffic violence on the Island.
As of April 2, 2025, the database contained entries for 190 fatal crashes in 2023, 155 fatal crashes in 2024, and 29 fatal crashes recorded so far in 2025. Those figures, while striking on their own, are acknowledged by Newsday to be incomplete — the database is not fully comprehensive, as some deaths are not formally classified as traffic-related until official state or county data is finalized, a process that typically takes approximately 10 months after the close of a calendar year. Additionally, media and police reports may not capture deaths that occur days or weeks after a crash, leaving some fatalities undocumented in near-real-time counts.
Unlike those official datasets, which lag far behind current events, Newsday’s database is updated on a daily basis and draws directly from published news articles and police press releases. Each entry in the database records the age and gender of every person who died, and identifies their role in the crash: whether they were a driver, a passenger in a vehicle, a pedestrian, a cyclist, or classified as “other” — a category that specifically includes riders of scooters and skateboards. Every entry also links to a corresponding Newsday article covering that specific fatal crash, allowing readers to access the full reporting behind each data point.
The launch of the database is accompanied by an interactive map that plots the locations of all reported fatal crashes on Long Island from January 1, 2022, through the end of 2024. Readers are also invited to submit their own experiences on Long Island’s roads, contributing to the broader “Dangerous Roads” series. That series and all related coverage is accessible at newsday.com/dangerousroads, with a dedicated newsletter available for readers who want updates as the investigation continues.
The featured image tied to the database’s launch — captured by Newsday photographer Joseph Sperber — shows the scene of a January 16 crash on Nicolls Road in Centereach that killed a driver, offering a stark visual anchor to what might otherwise read as abstract statistics. That crash on Nicolls Road is one entry among hundreds in the new database, a reminder that each row of data represents a life lost on a Long Island road.
Transportation reporter Peter Gill spearheaded the broader “Dangerous Roads” series, which served as the foundation for the database project. Gill’s investigation found that a traffic crash causing death, injury, or significant property damage occurs on Long Island on average every seven minutes. Over the decade spanning 2014 through 2023, crashes killed more than 2,100 people and seriously injured more than 16,000 others across Nassau and Suffolk counties, according to Newsday’s findings.
Location & Road Context
The database covers all fatal crash locations across Long Island, encompassing both Nassau and Suffolk counties. The accompanying interactive map gives a geographical dimension to the data, allowing residents to examine crash clusters in their own neighborhoods and along specific corridors. One of the most prominent crash scenes referenced in the launch is Nicolls Road in Centereach, a heavily traveled Suffolk County arterial road that has long been associated with serious traffic incidents. Roads like Nicolls Road represent exactly the kind of dangerous corridors that the “Dangerous Roads” series was designed to examine and bring to public attention.
Broader Impact
The scale of what Newsday’s decade-long data reveals is difficult to overstate: more than 2,100 deaths and 16,000 serious injuries between 2014 and 2023 means Long Island has averaged roughly 210 traffic fatalities and 1,600 serious injuries per year over that span. With 190 fatal crashes recorded in 2023 alone — and the database still not fully comprehensive — the numbers suggest that the pace of deadly crashes on Long Island remains deeply entrenched, making tools like this searchable public database a critical resource for advocates, policymakers, and residents working to understand and address the accident patterns defining daily life on the Island’s roads.