Not California, Not Florida: This State Has The Deadliest 10-Mile Stretch In The US

The United States is chock full of dangerous highways and scary roads with macabre names like Dead Man's Curve, Tail of the Dragon, Shades of Death Road, and Blood Alley. Any one of these roads might be a good candidate for the deadliest 10-mile stretch in the United States. Yet, none of them are. In fact, that distinction belongs to a much longer stretch of highway with a reputation for being a so-called death trap.

It's not that these roads aren't deadly, mind you: Dead Man's Curve is two miles of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California, where at least 60 people died between 2010 and 2024. Tail of the Dragon is an 11-mile section of U.S. 129 with 318 curves that runs along the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. Labeled as the scariest drive in America, it killed five people and injured another 47 in 2024. A one-mile stretch of I-95 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (dubbed "Cocaine Lane") has a fatal crash rate 50 times that of the average highway mile. Twenty-four people died there between 2000 and 2019, earning it the title of the single deadliest mile in the entire country.

However, according to the personal injury lawyers at Elk & Elk, the deadliest 10-mile stretch in the U.S. is on I-45 between exits 49B and 60A, which cuts straight through the heart of Houston, Texas. In 2023, Elk & Elk teamed up with data visualization agency 1Point21 Interactive to analyze 20 years' worth of data from across the country. They found this particular segment of I-45 had 7.7 fatal crashes per year up to that point, with the worst being 15 fatalities in 2006.

The Elk and Elk study found that seven of the 10 deadliest 10-mile segments were in Texas (five in Dallas alone), while the other three were in Florida. Over 1,000 deaths occurred across the 20 years that the study analyzed, and the 10-mile stretch of I-45 between exits 49B and 60A in Houston saw 142 crashes and 148 deaths during that period. 

U.S. Interstate 45 starts in Dallas, runs through Houston, and ends in Galveston, covering around 286 miles. A 2023 study by insurance agency Budget Direct found that the highway had 56.5 fatal accidents per 100 miles. As far as the 10-mile stretch goes, there were 73 deaths on it in 2019, according to KHOU, while the Texas Department of Transportation (via KPRC 2) claimed that another 105 people died there in 2023. The stretch of this road running south out of Houston to Galveston also has a far more sinister aspect, with more than 30 women (most between the ages of 10 and 25) mysteriously vanishing in the area since the 1970s. This has given rise to nicknames such as "America's Highway to Hell" and "The Killing Fields."

Knowing full well how bad this all looks, Houston has been trying to fix the 50-plus-year-old highway via the North Houston Highway Improvement Project (NHHIP), an estimated $9 billion project that started in 2002. It will (among other things) expand express-lane capacity, reroute it closer to downtown, and accommodate high-occupancy, electric, and self-driving vehicles, all in an effort to decrease traffic congestion. However, the project is only expected to finish in 2038.