The 25 Most Dangerous Roads in the U.S.

Unfortunately, we can’t point to any specific roadway feature on why I-45 through Houston has risen to the top of the list as one of the most dangerous stretches of road in America and, in recent years, been classified as one of the deadliest in the entire world. With 56.5 fatal accidents for every 100 miles of roadway, the scariest part is through Houston, where officials blame people simply not obeying traffic laws—texting while driving, driving drunk, and driving at excessive speeds—as the main culprit for the deaths.

As the longest north-south highway in the country, it can be tough to point to exactly one spot as the reason for the danger on Highway 1. Running 545 miles through 13 counties, Highway 1 claims over 1,000 deaths recorded deaths every decade. While fatalities are scattered throughout the length of the road, they really increase during the summer months, when traffic counts skyrocket.

Don’t be deceived by the beauty of highway 17. The magnificent scenery that stretches across a highway running from Virginia to Florida gets its most pronounced danger zone in South Carolina, an especially picturesque drive that's also full of narrow lanes, blind curves, sharp turns, and even the occasional animal—look out for the deer!—jutting into the roadway. With one death every two miles, nobody is truly safe.

Sure, the danger of U.S. Route 199 doesn’t stop when travelers heading north cross into Oregon, as what is known as the Redwood Highway runs from Crescent City, California, to Grants Pass, Oregon. That’s because the 80-mile highway records a death every two miles. Drivers face a mix of narrow and twisting lanes, along with ample beauty to look at, but whether distraction of the scenery or not being able to navigate the turn, most deaths come when vehicles leave the roadway and strike trees.

U.S. 83 has a long history, well, in distance. The highway stretches from the Canadian border south to the Mexico border, passing through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. But 83 gets most dangerous when it runs through the most southern area of the roadway, in Texas. Averaging one death every other week just in the Lone Star state, the crash and fatality rates are bigger in Texas.

Wolf’s Creek Pass rises through the San Juan Mountains with an especially steep section full of hairpin turns and tight switches. Add in a propensity for nasty weather, and Highway 160 is one of the most dangerous roads in the country. It may be best to heed the advice of the state’s transportation department and “Beware of the Wolf.”

If you're traveling south from Tucson to the Mexico border, you have a 63-mile journey along I-19. But the sheer bulk of the traffic on a desert road leads to fatalities. Officials blame the false sense of safety on the stretch as lulling drivers into accidents while lacking the needed attention on the road.

I-95 has made this list before, but here it is again, with the Little River neighborhood of Miami adding to the Florida fatalities, blamed in large part on a nearly 4-mile express lane section. With a toll lane delineated by in-ground flexible cones, drivers will attempt to weave into the toll lane at inopportune times to skirt the traffic on the mainline, at times causing accidents and leading to a higher rate of injuries and death. As one of the busiest freeways in the state, I-95 has danger throughout, but no one spot is more to blame in the Sunshine State.

Highway 1 narrows, almost entirely one lane each way, in the Big Sur region. Even in the best of California’s weather, the road can be dangerous. That’s because the pretty weather draws you into the even prettier view of the coastline. Mix in bad weather and you get the danger of mud and rockslides. And with such a pristine location, your average crash can turn deadly much quicker because of the terrain.

Can we just blame the moose already? Route 1 is already a poorly signed, tightly curved location with suspect weather, but add in moose wandering aimlessly on the roadway and the danger level rises on the longest route in Maine.

Although Interstate 10 runs the entire width of the U.S., the 150-mile stretch from Phoenix to the California border is particularly dangerous, with this section through lightly populated desert seeing up to 85 deaths in a single year. The entire state death toll in Arizona is only about 700 for all roads in an average year.

Known as The Perimeter, I-285 circles the ATL in a 63-mile loop, helping to serve as a connector for the variety of highways and interstates that run into the city. With the many interchanges, I-285 is full of unique turns, large trucks, and dangerous merging, leading to a high-density roadway categorized as one of the most dangerous in the country.

Traversing roughly 145 miles in Arizona from Flagstaff to Phoenix, I-17 has a mile’s worth of elevation change from the north to the south. Along with the rise and fall of the roadway come opportunities for drivers to pull out and more closely enjoy the views of the mountains and deserts. But with the beauty comes plenty of travelers, meaning accidents start to mount and record roughly one death per mile of roadway.

The entire I-85 runs 666 miles (an ominous count, to be certain) from Virginia to Alabama, but blame North Carolina for the most dangerous section. During a five-year study, researchers found the portion of the freeway moving through Charlotte took more than one life per week. As with many city stretches, the reason for the danger was, sadly, other drivers.

Running for about 111 miles east to west from Dallas to Jacksonville, Texas, the route averages about 0.7 deaths per mile, but almost half of those occur every year in the Dallas section of the roadway. A key connector road for the state and an alternative route to the interstates in the area, along with being an arterial to help students get to Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, the high death count in Dallas may be blamed less on the road and its features than on the population.

Known as Beartooth Highway, a 67-mile stretch of U.S. Route 212 is often lauded as one of the most scenic drives in the country. Soaring to heights over 10,000 feet and passing between Wyoming and Montana, including Yellowstone National Park’s Northeast Entrance, expect it to live up to its picturesque expectations. But at that elevation, prepare for plenty of twisting and turning and downright nasty weather. Opened in 1937 to automobiles, the hairpin turns are tricky and the drops all along the route can produce queasy drivers.

The Charleston Post and Courier identified an unusually short section of I-26 as one of the deadliest roads in South Carolina.n From 2000 to 2010, federal and state records show 325 people died in 286 wrecks on I-26 in South Carolina. But the paper analyzed crash data on a few short sections of I-26 and found it suffered double the death rate of busier sections of the highway near Charleston. Seven of the nine fatalities in 2009, for example, involved cars hitting trees and rolling over in ditches, according to the Post and Courier, which also reported this section of roadway has few guardrails, yet the slopes to side road ditches are steep.

The 25-mile stretch of Highway 550 in southwestern Colorado, which connects the antique tourist towns of Ouray and Silverton, reaches 11,000 feet above sea level as it passes through Red Mountain Pass in the San Juan Mountains. The scariest part of the road is that it lacks guardrails, which are absent to allow for removing snow and avalanche debris. There aren't any shoulders on much of this section, so weaving off the road means a plunge down the side of the mountain. This section of 550 is known unofficially as the "million dollar highway," though conflicting stories of the name's origin include the cost of building or paving the road, as well as the amount of gold and silver that were excavated when the road was built in 1926.

According to the Center for Excellence in Rural Safety at the University of Minnesota, which calls Highway 2 one of the nation's most dangerous roads, Montana has the highest fatality rate in the U.S. That assertion is backed up by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's findings that rural roads are more dangerous than urban ones.

Why? The reasons include long transportation times for ambulances to get crash victims to hospitals—an average of 80 minutes in the vast plains, where in cities the average is 15 minutes, according to Montana's department of transportation data. Plus, the sparse traffic means drivers drive faster, and U.S. Highway 2 crosses the northern and most remote part of the state.

It's about 98 miles from Phenix City to Dothan, Alabama, on U.S. 431, which has been labeled as one of America's most dangerous roads by outlets like Reader's Digest. Overall, there were 20 deaths along this stretch between 1999 to 2010, leaving the road dotted with white crosses placed by victims' families and friends.

Prior to finishing a major four-lane conversion in 2010, officials cited traffic density and limited visibility on the mostly two-lane sections as the reasons U.S. 431 is so deadly. Today, most of the highway is four lanes wide except for the sections that run through small towns.