Dangerous roads

They roll across the high desert of California, the mountains of Montana and the Carolina low country, highways millions of Americans drive every day. From US-1 in the Florida Keys, to Central Pennsylvania's State Road 41, and all the way across the Pacific to Hawaii's State Road 19, we know them when we drive them -- roads that turn your knuckles white, as you wonder whether that 18-wheeler is going to stay on his side of the yellow line.

They are the mostly rural, often two-lane highways that carry only 28 percent of the nation's vehicles but are responsible for more than half the fatal accidents.

Gerald Donaldson works at the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a consumer and insurance industry supported group.

Josh Mankiewicz: “What makes these roads so dangerous?”

Gerald Donaldson: “They have severe curves so that they have poor sight distance. They have narrow lanes, and all you have to do is just to depart that lane a couple of feet and you're into an extremely hostile territory. There is no margin for error on those roads."

To determine where these dangerous roads are, Dateline searched a federal database listing nearly every fatal traffic accident in the country. There are 400,000 miles of two lane highways in the United States, many with a disproportionate share of accidents. On State Road 138 in Southern California, head on collisions, overturned vehicles and cars going off the road are common. But despite that, many drivers don't realize just how dangerous two lane highways like this can be. There are places where an inattentive moment can be your last. Though 138's image has been helped a little by calling it the Pearblossom Highway, to locals it's the deathtrap highway or just blood alley.

State Road 138 spans two California counties, and, with 22 fatal accidents in Los Angeles County and 17 in San Bernardino County in a five year period it easily made our list of dangerous roads. L.A. County firemen Ron McFadden and Jeff Britton have seen firsthand how many ways people can die on this road. The firemen have even had to pull drivers -- dead and alive -- from the California aqueduct that runs near the Pearblossom.

Roads like 138 tell the story of America's cities. They began as rural farm-to-market roads, but when urban sprawl caught up with them, they began to carry more and bigger vehicles than they were designed for.

Donaldson says that more trucks and SUVs equals bigger and worse accidents. Add in factors like speeding and drunk driving, as well as the failure to use seatbelts, and these inherently dangerous roads just take more and more lives.

Search for dangerous roads Dateline combed through more than 100,000 accident reports, trying to identify the deadliest roads in America. There are lots of reasons a road can be dangerous -- drunk drivers, speeders, highways so poorly designed they're treacherous even for careful drivers and pedestrians. Click here to find out about roads in your county.

To really get a feel for the risks these roads carry with them, drive US-2 in Montana from the Idaho border down to Kalispell. It's high speed, mountain driving, with steep grades and dangerous turns, and that's why it made our list. We drove it with Larry Strokland of the Libby, Montana American Legion. He knows this road better than most. For 50 years Legion members like Strokland have been putting up metal crosses marking Montana highway fatalities. Strokland says it's a safety program. They hope it wakes up drivers and makes them think to use caution.

And if you drive 2,700 miles southeast to US-17 in South Carolina you can hear a similar story. US-17 is a high fatality road running nearly the length of the state. The unforgiving nature of this two lane stretch in Beaufort County added it to the dangerous road list. The dangers of US-17 were well known to Dana Gasque. In January 2004, her son, Cooper, was driving back to college on US-17 when his car collided with one driven by Sherry Leeks' 20-year-old daughter, Kassandra. In that instant, two young lives were lost and two families forever changed.  

Four weeks after that accident, three sailors died in a crash just up the road on 17, and more fatalities would follow.

Rather than trying to assign blame for the accident, these two families have dedicated themselves to getting the road fixed so others don't suffer as they have:

What can be done about these roads? They need the kind of improvements that are planned for literally every highway in this report: safety upgrades like center median dividers, additional travel lanes, wider shoulders and rumble strips. But the problem is money. According to experts like Donaldson, too much federal money went for too long to the Interstate system and not enough to upgrade and maintain smaller, more dangerous, routes.

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