South Carolina

Interstate 26 runs approximately 220 miles from I-40 in Asheville, North Carolina southeast through Spartanburg, Columbia, and the South Carolina Lowcountry to Charleston on the coast. It is a major freight corridor connecting the Southeast’s interior to the Port of Charleston — one of the busiest container ports on the East Coast — and carries substantial commercial vehicle traffic year-round.

Between 2000 and 2010, I-26 in South Carolina recorded 286 accidents that claimed 325 lives — a fatality rate that placed it among the most dangerous interstates in the Southeast. The causes were specific, structural, and in many cases preventable.

US Highway 17 is not a highway that appears on most national dangerous-road lists. It lacks the dramatic mountain passes of I-70 or the oilfield chaos of US-285. It is, in most sections, a moderately traveled two-lane or four-lane road through the coastal South — passing through resort towns, fishing villages, agricultural land, and coastal wetlands from Virginia to Florida. That ordinariness is part of what makes it dangerous.

The highway’s accident rate reflects a confluence of hazards that individually seem manageable but in combination produce consistent, serious crashes: poor infrastructure, varied and unpredictable traffic, inadequate lighting, and terrain that limits sight distances in ways that drivers unfamiliar with the route don’t anticipate.