TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Among the United States’ deadliest roads and highways, Florida is home to three of the worst. Find By Plate, a “free resource for license plate lookup and reporting bad drivers,” analyzed traffic data across the country and picked out 20 most fatal roads to drive on.
Three of those roads were in Florida, including one in Tampa Bay.
The Florida roads with the deadliest traffic were U.S. Route 1, Interstate 4, and Interstate 95. The three highways stretch across multiple states and counties, but have big impacts on road safety in the Sunshine State.
According to the Find By Plate study, I-95 is the 17th deadliest road in America, stretching from Miami to Houlton, Maine across more than 1,900 miles. The company said “accidents on this highway are frequently serious, involving multiple vehicles and high-speed crashes.”
The most dangerous portions, according to Find By Plate, are in South and Central Florida, which “have high volumes of daily traffic” in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.
Moving across Florida, I-4 is another deadly road. I-4 has a reported 1.4 deaths per mile and stretches 132 miles from Daytona Beach to Tampa. It’s ranked as the third most deadly road in the country, with Find By Plate saying “there are many rental car drivers on this stretch of road that are prone to distracted driving,” somewhat due to its run through Orlando, a “tourist hotspot.”
The final Florida roadway on the list is U.S. Route 1, the deadliest road in all of the United States.
Find By Plate said its one of the deadliest due to a lack of full bans on using cell phones while driving. Ranked at No. 1, U.S. Route 1 is described as “a straight shot down the Sunshine State’s east coast, which encourages aggressive drivers to overspeed” and that the portion which connects Miami to the Florida Keys, the Overseas Highway” is difficult to navigate safely due to being made of a “number of ocean bridges.”
The bad driver lookup firm also said Florida was among the top 5 worst states in the country for driving experience, ranked 50th out of 51 total, counting Washington. Only California was ranked lower.
Part of the low ranking among all 50 states and the nation’s capital is from the cost of auto insurance, cost of car repairs, and average commute times, among other factors, according to Find By Plate.