Nashville memorial highlights 28 road deaths in 2025 and prompts renewed focus on safety improvements

A year-end accounting of loss on Davidson County streets

Nashville’s road-safety advocates and families affected by crashes gathered around a stark number: 28 people killed on Davidson County roads in 2025 while walking, biking, or using micromobility. The memorial focus reflected a continuing effort in Nashville to document traffic deaths as individual lives rather than as statistics, while also pressing for measurable changes on high-risk corridors.

Two cases that shaped the 2025 conversation

Among the deaths remembered was Dorothy “Dot” Dobbins, 77, who was struck and killed in June 2025 while using a marked crosswalk at the 3rd Avenue North crossing of the Magdeburg Greenway. In the months that followed, Metro officials approved and began planning upgraded safety measures at that crossing. Temporary stop controls with flashing lights were installed as a short-term intervention while a pedestrian hybrid beacon advanced through design and approval.

Another death repeatedly cited by families and advocates was that of Blaise Schaeffer, 31, a bicyclist struck on the night of December 10, 2025, on Nolensville Pike near Burkitt Road. Metro Nashville Police investigators treated the crash as a hit-and-run and later identified a suspect, announcing warrants that included vehicular homicide by recklessness and leaving the scene of a crash involving death. The investigation detailed an erratic-driving sequence preceding the collision and a driver who fled after the vehicle became disabled.

What the 2025 data signals—and what it does not

Officials have also pointed to a decline in fatal pedestrian crashes within Nashville in 2025 compared with 2024, a shift framed as progress but not a resolution. The broader 2025 toll being memorialized underscores that risk remains across modes of travel, including biking and micromobility, and that fatal outcomes continue to occur both at crossings and along major arterials.

• Memorial totals emphasized people killed outside vehicles, including pedestrians, cyclists, and at least one electric-scooter rider.

• Several of the corridors most often associated with severe crashes are high-speed, high-volume “pike” routes that function as state or major city thoroughfares.

Policy framework: Vision Zero and “Choose How You Move”

Nashville’s Vision Zero initiative sets a long-term goal of eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries, built around changes to street design, speed management, and data-driven targeting of risk. Separately, the voter-approved “Choose How You Move” program established a funding and project pipeline that includes redesigned intersections, upgraded bus stops, and complete-street projects concentrated on the city’s high-injury network, where a majority of fatal and serious injuries occur on a small share of roads.

The memorials have increasingly paired remembrance with project tracking—connecting individual deaths to specific locations where infrastructure changes are planned, underway, or still pending.

For families, the memorial serves as a public record of who was lost. For city agencies, it adds urgency—and scrutiny—to whether safety projects arrive quickly enough at the locations where lives have already been taken.