World’s most dangerous roads revealed

Sydney’s M4 motorway is Australia’s deadliest road, but its death toll is a fraction of other notorious roads around the world, a report has found.

Sydney’s M4 motorway is the deadliest road in Australia but its tragic toll is a fraction of the devastation on the most notorious road in the world, according to a new report.

Australian insurance company Budget Direct has used government data, news reports and information from transport associations to determine the deadliest roads in the world by region.

Budget Direct explained differing definitions on what made a road dangerous – annual death tolls for some, frequency of crashes for others – made it difficult to create a singular global ranking.

But its report saw Bolivia’s Death Road in South America hold its notoriety as one of the world’s worst. Officially named Yungas Road, the 64km stretch through mountainous terrain links the Bolivian capital La Paz to Coroico and claims the lives of around 300 people each year.

Bolivia’s Death Road is one of the most notorious stretches of road in the world.

The Bolivian government has built a safer, alternative route to the infamous Death Road, which remains mostly used just by tourists and thrillseekers. A New Zealand biker died on Death Road after falling 100m down a cliff in 2019.

Globally, about 1.35 million people die in road crashes each year, with pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists comprising more than half of those killed, Budget Direct said.

The M4 Motorway through Sydney’s west was found to be Australia’s most deadly road, with six deaths over a five-year period. However, the Hume Motorway/Freeway has the greatest overall number of crashes involving death or injury, Budget Direct said.

The report found Sydney M4 to be the most deadly road in Australia. Picture: Toby Zerna

In the US, the grim title went to Interstate 45 that runs through Houston, Texas and sees five fatal accidents for every 100 miles (161 km).

The UK’s deadliest road is the A1010 though Tottenham to Waltham Cross, which has a rate of 12.7 accidents per one million vehicle-miles driven – nearly nine times the UK national average.

Europe’s deadliest roads are mostly in Eastern Europe, where Lithuania’s Vilnius-Kaunas stretch saw 180 accidents in the first six months of 2017.

A notably deadly road in Asia is the Dhaka-Sylhet highway (N2) in Bangladesh, where last year there were 250 deaths.

The Interstate 45 runs through the Texas city of Houston.

Police blame overtaking, speeding and “overconfidence” for the fatalities but local groups say the problem is with infrastructure.

“There aren’t separate lanes on the Sylhet-Dhaka Highway to facilitate two-way traffic,” the Sylhet Road Transport Owners’ Workers’ Union said, according to Budget Direct.

“The road doesn’t have a divider but has traffic from both directions, which is absurd. On top of that, the highway is very narrow.”

One of the deadliest roads in Africa is Cameroon’s Douala-Yaoundé road (National 3), which accounts for about a third of the country’s annual road death toll.

The Dead Sea Highway made it on the list.

In the Middle East, the Dead Sea Highway, which is part of Israel’s Highway 90, is particularly dangerous: 17 people died on the road in a single two-week period in 2018.

“Highway 90 continues to claim lives as a result of poor infrastructure, which is unforgiving to human error,” Erez Kita, the head of local safe-driving group Or Yarok, said.

“It’s a 50-year-old road, and its infrastructure should have been upgraded. It’s always easiest to blame the drivers, but not every mistake should end in death, and the infrastructure is meant to protect drivers even if they make a mistake.”