North of Rolla, there is a part of Highway 63 where the road gets narrow to two lanes and trees are close together on both sides. Not a median. Not a problem. There is only a thin strip of paint separating the traffic going north and south, and the speeds are so fast that there is almost no room for error. After just one drive, you’ll really understand why the numbers look the way they do.
The rate of motor vehicle deaths in Missouri is 16.0 per 100,000 people, which is about 30% higher than the national average. That number doesn’t come from a single area of terrible violence or a year with a lot of violence. That’s how things have been for decades, with roads built for a slower time that were never quite updated for this one and infrastructure that wasn’t getting enough money.
This reputation has been worst for Highway 63. In ten years, 158 accidents and 179 deaths happened on the 337-mile route through Missouri. That’s a little more than one death for every two miles of road. It’s not hard to figure out why. A lot of the roads are still two lanes. A lot of exits. Curves show up out of nowhere at speeds that seem reasonable until they don’t. Two teenage drivers were involved in a crash on the same highway in November 2025 that killed an unborn child. This added another chapter to a history that no one in the state seems to know how to close.
Missouri is, by most standards, a Midwestern state, which makes this really hard to understand. In general, there are fewer fatal car accidents in the Midwest than in the South or the rural West. Missouri is different from the other states in its region. Its shape is more like that of Florida and Tennessee than its neighbors. Some people think that the state’s geography—it’s big, rural, and full of old two-lane highways—makes things harder than they are in states with more cities.
I-70 makes things even more complicated. Based on some analyses of federal crash data, it’s the state’s busiest road and one of its most dangerous as well. Most of the deaths in Missouri happen near Kansas City and St. Louis, where fast speeds, lots of traffic, and the unpredictable behavior that comes with driving in cities all come together. A semitruck hit and killed a cyclist in December 2025. A person on foot was hit outside of their car after an earlier accident on the same road, same month. These aren’t strange things happening on I-70. They help that highway do its job.
When we talk about Highway 21, it changes the tone. The 28-mile stretch between the Meramec River and De Soto has been called “Blood Alley” by locals for so long that the name has stopped sounding dramatic and more like basic geography. Crashes head on. A car and a dump truck crashed and killed one person in April 2025. Three people were hurt and one person died in another head-on crash that October. For years, people have talked about updating the road. The conversation goes on.
Part of the reason is that the roads weren’t built well. So is the number of commercial trucks that have to share narrow passageways with cars. But the problem might go deeper than infrastructure. It could be a lack of money that leaves rural roads in a state of maintenance limbo, where they are fixed just enough to stay open but not often enough to make them truly safe.
A 2024 report from the national transportation research group TRIP said that Missouri had the 12th most rural road deaths in the country. Almost twice as many people die on rural roads as on non-rural ones. The real story is in that ratio, not on the interstates, which get some attention and resources, but on the forgotten routes where the pavement cracks, the guardrails are missing, and the trees get close.
When you’re driving down some of these streets, it’s hard not to think that the danger has been accepted. Not a holiday. Not really ignored. Just quietly taking it in that they live in a state where things are far apart, money is tight, and the roads are what they are, good or bad.
