What makes a road dangerous for truck drivers?

While truck accidents can (and do) happen anywhere, some stretches of road are more dangerous than others. Heavy traffic, poor design, bad weather, steep hills, low visibility, high (or varying) speeds, poor signage, distracted drivers and uneven surface can all contribute to making an interstate or state route dangerous.

Unfortunately, many of those factors are out of the control of truckers, who can only use their own training, experience and common sense to avoid accidents. All drivers know the roads they like, the ones they don’t and the ones that make the hair on the back of their neck stand up. Unfortunately, drivers usually don’t have their pick of roads to drive; they go where the load takes them.

Zonar, a trucking telematics firm based in Seattle, recently set out to identify the most perilous roads for truckers in the United States. Using U.S. Department of Transportation heavy truck crash data from 2013-16, Zonar identified the top 10 most dangerous roads for truck drivers as:

1. I-10 in Alabama
2. I-95 in Florida
3. HWY-75 in Idaho
4. I-40 in Arkansas
5. US-1 in Florida
6. M-20 in Michigan
7. I-80 in Nebraska at Colorado border
8. HWY-5 in Colorado
9. I-70 in Maryland
10. SC-35 in South Carolina

If any of these roads are a regular part of your route, you probably already know they’re bad. Now you have confirmation. Drive accordingly.

Among Zonar’s other findings:

• More than half the trucks involved in accidents were found to have at least one vehicle defect.
• Thirty percent of the crashes were caused by equipment failure, including brakes, tires, lights, transmission failure or vehicle overload.

Bad weather caused 14.7% of accidents with rain blamed for 72.6%, followed by fog (12.5%) and snow (10.1%).