Is I-45 the deadliest highway in America? Tracing a statistic

Interstate 45 is often described as the deadliest highway in the United States. The description appears in news stories, magazine lists and law-firm marketing, usually with one number attached: 56.5 fatal accidents for every 100 miles.

Texas Mobility Outlook followed that number back through each article that repeated it, to the ranking where it first appeared, and recalculated it from the original table. Each source was read in full in October 2026, from the live page or a saved copy. The original ranking no longer exists at its web address, so it is cited from an Internet Archive capture dated Feb. 23, 2017.

Where the claim started: a 2016 ValuePenguin ranking

ValuePenguin, a personal-finance and insurance comparison site, released “The 50 Most Dangerous Roads in America” on Oct. 4, 2016.^1,2 It counted fatal crashes on each U.S. highway in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) for 2011 through 2015, then divided each route’s total by its length.

California State Route 99 ranked first, at 62.3 fatal crashes per 100 miles. I-45 ranked second, with 161 fatal crashes over 285 miles, or 56.5 per 100 miles. ValuePenguin named Houston as the deadliest city along the route, with 51 of those crashes.¹

I-45 also ranked first on a sub-list of fatal crashes involving a drunk driver (17.5 per 100 miles, 50 crashes) and third for fatal crashes in the dark (18.9 per 100 miles, 54 crashes).¹

The Houston Chronicle reported the result on Oct. 14, 2016, under the headline “Interstate 45 ranked as second-deadliest highway in U.S.” The story pointed out that the analysis covered the whole 285-mile route, against 2,460 miles for I-10.²

What “56.5 fatal accidents per 100 miles” measures

The figure is a five-year crash count divided by road length. Texas Mobility Outlook’s arithmetic reproduces it: 161 divided by 285, times 100, is 56.5. Three features of that measure matter whenever it is quoted.

• It is not a yearly rate. Spread over the five years, it works out to about 11.3 fatal crashes per 100 miles a year (computed).
• It counts crashes, not deaths. ValuePenguin’s main table labels the column “Deaths per 100 Miles,” but its text says “Fatal Accidents per 100 Miles,” and the values match crash counts. One crash can kill more than one person.
• It ignores traffic. ValuePenguin said it used road length “as a surrogate” because it was “difficult to find the average ridership” for highways that cross several states.¹ A short road carrying heavy urban traffic will score high on a per-mile count whether or not each trip on it is riskier than average.

I-45 carries heavy traffic through Houston. TxDOT’s busiest 2025 count station on the North Freeway, near Resthaven Cemetery, recorded an average of 271,938 vehicles a day.³ A count per mile of road gives that volume no weight at all.

Sorting ValuePenguin’s 50 routes by their raw count of fatal crashes gives a different order. I-10 had the most, 1,342. I-45’s 161 placed it 44th of 50 (Texas Mobility Outlook’s arithmetic from ValuePenguin’s table). Only one listed route, which ValuePenguin labeled I-84 East, was shorter than I-45, at 232 miles. Its short length, not a large crash count, put I-45 second on the per-mile measure.

How second place became first

Between 2016 and 2021 the figure moved from article to article. Along the way it lost its data years, and I-45’s rank changed from second to first. The number itself, 56.5, never changed.

Sources: each publication listed, read in its saved or archived form.^{1,2,4,5,6,7,8,9}

The earliest No. 1 placement Texas Mobility Outlook found is in a Popular Mechanics list, in the version updated Aug. 10, 2020. Its I-45 entry gives the 56.5 figure with no years and no named source.⁴ The chron.com article that followed two days later cited Popular Mechanics for the top ranking, while also noting that I-45 had been ranked second in 2016.⁵

Budget Direct’s 2021 study, which looked for the deadliest road in each country, cited that chron.com article and repeated the 56.5 figure. Its own summary line gives the rate as “5 fatal accidents for every 100 miles,” an apparent typo.⁶ Houston and Texas outlets then reported the Budget Direct finding in July 2021.^7,8,9

Every later article in this chain repeated the 2011-2015 figure. None recalculated it with newer data.

Newer rankings measure other things

Rankings published since 2021 use other years and other measures. Each is a commercial or law-firm analysis, not an official statistic.

• ValuePenguin, current edition. The site replaced its 2016 study at the same address with one based on FARS data for 2015-2019, last updated June 30, 2026. It ranks each road’s portion within a state by total deaths. Texas I-45 places 23rd, with 229 deaths in 208 fatal crashes. California I-5 is first, with 584 deaths.¹⁰
• Elk & Elk, 2023. A law firm’s marketing study, prepared with 1Point21 Interactive, divided limited-access roads into 10-mile segments and counted fatal crashes from 2000 to 2019. It ranked I-45 between exits 49B and 60A in Houston as the deadliest segment in the country, with 142 fatal crashes and 148 deaths. A second Houston segment of I-45, exits 38 to 47D, ranked eighth.¹¹
• Future Bail Bonds, 2025. A study commissioned by a bail bond company, reported by CultureMap Houston, ranked roads by total fatal crashes from 2019 to 2023. It put I-45 in Houston 16th nationally and first in Texas, with 88 fatal crashes. Texas Mobility Outlook did not review the original study.¹²
• MoneyGeek, 2021. A personal-finance site’s analysis of 2017-2019 data, reported by FOX 26 Houston, ranked 5-mile segments. Two I-45 segments in Houston were among the 10 deadliest in Texas, and I-45 had 38 fatal crashes in Harris County, the most of any road there.¹³

All four draw on NHTSA’s crash records, but they cut roads into different pieces and count different things. As described by their publishers or the news reports, none adjusts for traffic volume. Houston’s most dangerous highways sets every published Houston highway ranking side by side.

What official crash records show about I-45

Texas Mobility Outlook found no ranking of Houston freeways by name from TxDOT, the Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC) or the City of Houston. H-GAC’s regional high-injury network includes freeways, but only as a map.¹⁴

TxDOT’s annual tables sort Harris County traffic deaths by road class. Its “interstate” class covers every Interstate highway in the county, including I-10, I-45, I-610 and, by Texas Mobility Outlook’s reading of TxDOT’s route codes, the I-69 sections of US 59, so it cannot isolate I-45. Deaths in that class rose from 85 in 2015 to a high of 137 in 2024, then 134 in 2025.^15,16 Interstates’ share of all Harris County traffic deaths rose from 21.7% to 26.6% over the same years (calculated by Texas Mobility Outlook).

Those figures show a rising toll on the county’s interstates as a group. They cannot show whether I-45 is more dangerous than I-10 or I-69, or than highways in other states. The I-45 corridor guide covers the road’s traffic, congestion rankings and rebuild, and Harris County crash statistics has the full county series.

A corridor count for I-45 is possible. The published rankings built theirs from FARS records, and TxDOT’s Crash Records Information System can be queried by location. Neither agency publishes I-45 totals in its standard tables.

Limits of this note

• It traces a claim; it does not settle one. No source reviewed measures deaths against traffic on I-45 and on other highways on the same basis, so this note does not say whether I-45 is safer or more dangerous than comparable roads.
• Archived source. The 2016 ranking is read from an archived copy, because ValuePenguin replaced the study at the same address.
• The chain is not exhaustive. Law-firm pages and social media repeat the claim widely. This note covers the news and magazine versions that link the 2016 ranking to the later No. 1 claims. A deaths-per-mile figure for I-45 attributed to the fleet-software company Teletrac Navman appears on a law-firm blog; Texas Mobility Outlook could not find the original and does not use it.
• Commercial analyses. The ValuePenguin, MoneyGeek, Budget Direct, bail bond and Elk & Elk rankings are not official statistics. Apart from the 2016 ValuePenguin arithmetic, Texas Mobility Outlook did not reproduce them.