Highway 61 is the quickest way to work. That message has become eerily familiar over the last year, as family and friends have embraced her life as a symbol for safety on state roads. If Missouri's Transportation Department had expanded the road to four lanes, the drivers' fates might have been different, McReynolds said. State-numbered highways, which can have two or four lanes, have the largest death toll in Missouri. Highway 61 is a U.S.-numbered highway, the type of roadway that has the second most fatal accidents.
Interstates have the fourth-most casualties.
The problem is that highways are too congested, according to the superintendent of the Missouri Highway Patrol, which is the state's traffic accident data collector. Too many cars and not enough lanes leave little room for error, he said. When you have more people sharing the roads, there's more trouble. Boone County ranked behind six other Missouri counties in fatal accidents in 1999, with five of those counties in the more populous urban counties of Kansas City and St. Louis. Department officials single out Highway 63 as Boone's major roadway that could most use improvement, besides what the department has declared its biggest statewide concern, Highway 70.