This State Has the Most Dangerous Roads in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 6, 10:47AM EDT

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This State Has the Most Dangerous Roads in America — © U.S. 61, Wilkinson County, Mis... (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Ken Lund

Fatal traffic accidents, which at one point fell most years, have started to rise again. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported recently that 38,680 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2020. That was the largest number since 2007 and up 7.2% from 2019. Among the reasons were impaired driving, speeding and failure to wear seat belts.

The federal government had no ready answer as to why the increase occurred. However, Dr. Steven Cliff, NHTSA’s Acting Administrator, said “Safety is the top priority for the U.S. Department of Transportation. Loss of life is unacceptable on our nation’s roadways and everyone has a role to play in ensuring that they are safe. We intend to use all available tools to reverse these trends and reduce traffic fatalities and injuries.” Hardly comforting.

For the recently released The USA’s Most Dangerous Roads report from legal services provider 1-800-INJURED, a “dangerous road index” was created. Data used to calculate the index included the fatality rate per 100,000 people, the fatality rate per 100 million miles traveled and the fatality rate per 100,000 licensed drivers. Most data came from the Federal Highway Administration and the Census Bureau.

The state with the highest dangerous road index score was Mississippi at 9.93. Its fatality rate per 100,000 people was unusually high at 25.39. Arkansas, South Carolina and Montana followed, with scores above 9 as well.

These 20 states have the most dangerous roads:

State	Overall Score	Deaths per 100K People
Mississippi	9.93	25.39
Arkansas	9.59	21.19
South Carolina	9.59	20.79
Montana	9.12	19.65
New Mexico	8.98	18.80
Kentucky	8.71	17.31
Louisiana	8.64	17.78
Wyoming	8.44	22.02
Tennessee	8.23	17.61
Oklahoma	8.03	16.47
West Virginia	7.82	14.89
Alabama	7.48	18.59
Florida	7.28	15.47
Missouri	7.15	16.04
South Dakota	7.14	15.90
Georgia	7.08	15.53
Arizona	6.94	14.74
Kansas	6.80	14.50
Texas	6.80	13.29
North Carolina	6.53	14.73

Click here to see which state has the best roads in America.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.