This list is less certain. It ranks by adjusted fatal crashes per 100 million vehicle miles.
Rates on quieter roads rest on fewer crashes, and they depend on the traffic count.
The traffic count for #1 (U.S. 90 in New Orleans) is unverified: about 5,600 vehicles a day on a 4 to 5 lane city road.
A higher count would lower its rate.
Map key
Click a color to hide or show it.
These are the 25 ten-mile windows with the highest adjusted fatal-crash rate. Each has at least 10 fatal crashes and at least 2,000 vehicles a day, and no flag on its traffic count. No two of them overlap.
These are the 300 two-mile hot spots with the most excess fatal crashes. Each has at least 3 fatal crashes. No two of them overlap. Each runs 1.9 to 2.1 miles. Together they had at least 3,142 deaths. A road counts as one road across a gap of up to 1 km in the state road file. #65 (U.S. 41, Florida) has a 0.4-mile gap: it is drawn in pieces, and no crash in the gap is counted.
The map shows one state at a time: the 10-mile window with the most excess fatal crashes in that state, the same road for up to 25 miles on each side (less where the road ends), and every fatal crash on that road from 2019 to 2023. Use the arrows or the list at the top to move between the 48 states, in order of excess. Pick "All 48 states" to see every window at once. Alaska, Hawaii and the District of Columbia are left out: Alaska's Interstates have no route number in the federal road data, and Hawaii and the District of Columbia have no stretch that meets the rules. Tennessee's U.S. routes are not in the data. In states with few fatal crashes the excess is small, so the worst stretch there may not differ much from a typical road.
This view shows counted deaths and death rates for each fixed 10-mile stretch. It does not rank them. The ranking views use the network screening method in the Highway Safety Manual.
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"Mostly urban" means at least half of the stretch's length is in an urban area.
All stretches, by season
Deaths per 100 million vehicle miles, all 14,570 stretches
How to read this map
- A fatal crash is a crash in which at least one person died.
- Counts are at least these numbers. A crash counts only when its location lies within 100 meters of the route.
- The ranking views use the network screening method in the Highway Safety Manual (AASHTO, 2010). A window of 10 miles slides along each continuous road, one mile at a time. For the 2-mile hot spots, a new window starts every half mile.
- Expected fatal crashes: the number a typical road like this one would have. It comes from a model of similar roads. The model uses traffic, lanes, speed limit, access control, truck share and urban share.
- Adjusted fatal crashes: a small count can make a road look better or worse than it is. The adjustment (called Empirical Bayes) moves the counted number toward the expected number. It moves it more when the count is small.
- Excess fatal crashes: the adjusted number minus the expected number. The 25 deadliest stretches, the 2-mile hot spots and the worst window in each state rank by excess. The rate list ranks by adjusted fatal crashes per 100 million vehicle miles.
- Expected, adjusted and excess are modeled. Crashes, deaths and death rates are counted.
- Traffic is the 2024 state traffic count (average vehicles a day), applied to all 5 years.
- Season traffic is an estimate. It comes from FHWA monthly travel trends for each state's rural and urban roads. It was not counted on each stretch.
Sources: NHTSA FARS crash records, FHWA HPMS 2024 roads and traffic, FHWA Traffic Volume Trends, NWS warnings. Analysis: Wherobots.