Dangerous roads

If you drive anywhere in America, you've noticed that the nation's roadways are crowded with drivers who see the speed limit not as a law, but as a suggestion. We've all developed a bad habit, and a dangerous one: speeding. It's killing thousands of people each year, and it's no accident.

Mankiewicz: ”You don't like the word accident.”

Richard Retting: “An accident suggests that there was no way to anticipate the event and prevent it from occurring. Crashes are anticipated, and therefore they're preventable.”

Richard Retting is a senior transportation engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit research group funded by auto insurers. He says that, behind the wheel, we're a nation of law-breakers.

Retting: “On many roads, I suspect drivers don't even know what the speed limit is because they don't pay attention to speed limits.“

Speeding contributes to nearly one-third of the nation's traffic fatalities, and on roads where drivers routinely speed, the risk is high, and deadly.

To find those dangerous roadways, Dateline analyzed five years of the most recent federal data, county by county, to identify roads with high numbers of fatal crashes involving speeding drivers, crashes where police reported both the posted speed limit and how fast the driver was going. We looked at two types of roads, beginning with high-speed highways. All had a posted speed limit of 55 miles per hour or higher.

First on our list is stretch of Interstate 15 in the desert that runs from Southern California to the Nevada line. Each year, millions of visitors speed along this road, seeking their fortune in Las Vegas. Some never make it. Over five years, speeding cost 173 people their lives there, putting Interstate 15 at the top of our list of dangerous high speed roads.

Retting says that when drivers go too fast, it comes down to physics. Increased speed means decreased reaction time.

Other dangerous sections of I-15 run through Nevada and Utah. And in the southeast, Interstate 95 is a heavily traveled freeway with high numbers of fatal crashes in counties stretching from North Carolina to Florida. That's where we met the Schaefer family. Kathy Schaefer admits she was overprotective of Casey, her only child. It was up to Kathy, and her husband John, Casey's stepfather, to keep Casey safe. And she was safe, until one summer night in 2003. The 16-year-old Casey went to the movies with friends.

Kathy Schaefer: “It was a little before 11 and there was a knock on the door. My first thought was Casey forgot her key. And it was not Casey at the door, it was a police officer.”

Casey had been in a car wreck.

Schaefer: “When I got to the hospital, security immediately ushered me in to a private room, where I was met by the attending doctor. The doctor immediately offered me some form of tranquilizer pill to calm me down. I just said I don't need any pills, I just want to see my daughter. And that's when she said we did everything we possibly could but she did not make it.”

Casey and another girl died when the SUV they were riding in rolled five times. The teenage driver was a friend of Casey's. He was driving at least 10 miles over the 65-mile-an-hour speed limit on Interstate 95.

The deadliest stretch of I-95 on our survey is in Palm Beach County. From Boca Raton up to Jupiter, speed killed 48 people, putting this Interstate on our list of dangerous roads.

Trooper Paul Rich: “When planes take off, they take off at about 150 mph. These people are running at 120, 130 miles an hour out here. They're about ready to take off”

Riding with Florida highway patrol trooper Paul Rich, we witnessed some typical I-95 speeds. The speed limit there ranges from 55 to 65. One driver is stopped for driving 86 miles an hour, as is a second driver. Another driver is caught on a radar gun at 96 miles an hour. That doesn't stop him from trying to talk his way out of the ticket.

But Interstates aren't the only roadways with speeding problems. We also looked at roads with posted limits of 45 miles an hour or less. Drivers may not go as fast on these streets as they do on Interstates, but the effects are still deadly.

In Clark County, Nevada, Sahara Avenue is a typical Las Vegas street. It carries traffic from one end of this fast-growing city to the other. Take away a few intersections and it could be a highway -- which is just how people drive it. With 14 deaths from speeding-related crashes, Sahara made our list of dangerous roads.

We found more wide roads in Maricopa County, Arizona, another region with record population growth. In our survey, seven of the 10 roads with the highest number of fatal speeding-related crashes in the nation are there, crisscrossing Phoenix, the county's largest city. In five years, 190 people have been killed on these streets, putting all seven on our list of dangerous roads.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon: “Unfortunately, because of the way the roads are, they're wide, the weather is clear almost the whole year, and there's no curves or turns in it, people speed.”

He says Phoenix is actively working with neighboring cities in Maricopa County to bring down drivers' speeds. But speeding isn't isolated in the West. Some of the other roads on our list include sections of US-92 through Tampa, Fla., US-1 through Raleigh, N.C., and US-40 through Denver.

Since the national speed limit was abolished in 1995, speed limits -- and drivers' speeds -- have been on the rise around the country. Traffic expert Richard Retting says the consequences are tragically predictable.

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