Lots of the most dangerous roads in America have something in common: They’re state-managed roads in municipalities. When municipalities are responsible for roads, they can be proactive and responsive to the desires of the community, so dangerous intersections get addressed and speed limits get toggled until a better ideal is found. When states operate roads, on the other hand, they’re dealing with lots of different stakeholders and inherently don’t want to handle any one road fundamentally differently than the entire portfolio. Jam one of these unsupervised highways into a densely populated area and you’ve got a recipe for disaster; while only 14 percent of urban road miles nationwide are under state control, 66 percent of traffic deaths in the 101 largest metro areas happen there.
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