Highway Report

What the roads actually did over Labor Day weekend

September 8, 2026

Before the weekend we published what was scheduled. This is the other half: what the road actually did. We saved a copy of every state DOT feed plus British Columbia once a day, Thursday September 3 through Labor Day Monday, and this is what those 10,951 records show.

How to read these numbers

One thing matters more than any figure below, so it goes first.

This is a daily photograph, not a video. We captured each jurisdiction once every afternoon, around 1 PM Pacific. A crash that happened at 8 PM Saturday and was cleared by midnight never appears here. So every count below is a floor — the least that was happening, not the most.

States do not report alike. California posted 1,500 records over five days. Rhode Island posted none at all. That gap is mostly about how much detail each DOT publishes, not how much was happening on the ground, so the state-by-state numbers are not a fair ranking of anything.

Records are counted once, by their incident ID, no matter how many days they appear.

The weekend in one screen

September 3–7, 2026 — 51 jurisdictions, five daily snapshots

10,951 distinct records
7,631 construction · 1,971 closures
360 crashes visible — a floor, not a total (see below)
832 active wildfires burning 5,948,187 acres
1 mountain pass icy — in September (Monarch Pass, CO)

The crash number is the shakiest thing here

Twenty-six of the 50 jurisdictions that posted anything showed no crashes at all. The tempting conclusion is that their feeds do not carry crashes. We went and checked instead, because a crash is a short-lived thing and we only look once a day — a wreck cleared in an hour has roughly a one-in-twenty chance of being on screen when we take the picture.

The checking turned up three different answers.

Some of the gap is ours. North Carolina posted 3,177 records over the weekend, every one of them roadwork or a closure. While fact-checking this article we found why: NCDOT retired the incident endpoint we read on May 27 and moved crashes to a new API, so MileCheck has been receiving only North Carolina’s work-zone feed since then. Idaho is similar, and for a similar reason on our side. NCDOT and ITD both publish crashes. We were not reading them. That is being fixed, and until it is, crash counts for those states in this report are zero because of us, not because of them.

Two of them were our fault. Oregon does report crashes — it files them under a vehicle-incident type with text reading “A crash has occurred.” Minnesota reports them too, tagged as generic events. Our counting script only recognised crashes carrying the standard code, so it read both states as crash-free. Our own app catches them correctly; the reporting script had drifted from it. We found that while fact-checking this article and fixed it.

And the sampling limit is real everywhere else. Even California, which reports crashes diligently, had just sixteen on its feed at the moment we last looked — against nine thousand other records. Whatever the true crash count for the weekend was, it is far above 360, and we cannot tell you by how much.

So take the numbers below as the smallest possible version of the weekend, from the states whose feeds carried a crash while we were looking:

Crashes visible in five daily snapshots, Sept 3–7

CA — 81
NY — 43
AL — 37
WI — 27
GA — 24
FL — 19

That is a publishing ranking, not a safety ranking. It says which states write crashes down and how often we happened to be looking — nothing about which roads were dangerous.

The West was on fire

While most of the country was driving to a barbecue, 832 wildfires were burning 5,948,187 acres — an area larger than New Jersey. It was not close to evenly spread:

Active fires over the holiday weekend

OR — 111 fires, 2,911,280 acres
BC — 88 fires, 1,026,836 acres
WA — 61 fires, 665,217 acres
ID — 33 fires, 209,267 acres
UT — 16 fires, 198,213 acres
NV — 12 fires, 164,040 acres

Oregon alone accounted for 49% of the burning acreage across every state and province we track. Our own alert feeds carried 47 records mentioning fire over the same five days — the roadside sliver of something much bigger.

Snow. In September.

The first version of this article said 219 records mentioned snow or ice. We rechecked, and that number was mostly one state’s feed listing a snow field on every report, plus a road in Alabama named Frost Road. Here is what was real.

Monarch Pass, Colorado. US-50 at milepost 199, eastbound: “Icy, surface 16°F,” while most of the country was at a barbecue. That was the one true September ice report on a highway people drive. Alaska’s Dalton Highway at the Sag River reported frozen slush and snow on the roadway, which is the Dalton in any month. Caltrans had seven chain-control records on the feed, all boilerplate that stays up year-round.

So the honest line is smaller than the first one. A mountain pass in Colorado was icy on Labor Day weekend, and Alaska was Alaska. The season turns on the passes before it turns anywhere else, and this is the weekend it starts.

The corridors that took the most

Counting every record that named a route, these carried the most:

Most-affected corridors nationally

I-80 — 208 records
I-10 — 156 records
I-94 — 138 records
US-101 — 137 records
I-41 — 130 records
I-95 — 120 records
I-70 — 115 records
US-1 — 112 records

I-80 tops it, which is what you would expect from a road that crosses eleven states. See any of them live on our I-80 map, or browse every corridor.

The closures that will outlast this article

Buried in a holiday weekend's data are projects measured in years, not hours:

Longest-running closures still standing

WI I-535 — 2,616 days, through 2029-06-06
TX US-87 — 2,070 days, through 2031-10-31
WA SR-165 — 1,902 days, through 2030-07-01
NC US-17 — 1,859 days, through 2027-12-31
NY I-91 — 1,733 days, through 2028-12-01

Washington's SR-165 has been shut at the Carbon River bridge to everyone — cars, bikes, walkers — since April 2025. It is not scheduled to reopen until 2030. A child who started kindergarten when it closed will be in fifth grade.

Added September 14: the parts people asked about

After this ran, readers asked the practical questions. How long were the border lines. Which highways had the crashes. Did the road crews actually take the weekend off. We went back to the same archive, plus two others we keep, and pulled the answers. Counts here use a different tally rule than the section above, so they are not additive with it.

The border: the way home was the wait

We save the CBP wait-time feed every hour. Over the five days, the departure was easy and the return was not. The longest passenger-lane waits all landed Sunday night and Monday, when everyone came back at once.

Longest passenger-lane waits, Sept 3–7

Tecate (CA–Mexico) — 240 min, Sunday 5 PM
San Ysidro (CA–Mexico) — 200 min, Monday 2 AM
Del Rio (TX–Mexico) — 180 min, Monday 4 PM
Otay Mesa (CA–Mexico) — 180 min, Sunday 5 PM
Highgate Springs (VT–Quebec) — 170 min, Monday 1 PM
Eagle Pass Bridge II (TX–Mexico) — 150 min, Monday 3 PM
Blaine, Peace Arch (WA–BC) — 50 min, Sunday 9 PM

Peace Arch averaged nine minutes across the whole weekend and never passed an hour. If you crossed at Blaine on Labor Day, the worst hour was 1 PM and the best was 5 PM. Nogales Mariposa reported one 455-minute reading Thursday morning; it was a single sample and we are not counting it as a peak. Live waits for all 85 crossings: milecheckapp.com/borders.

Seattle’s drawbridges went up 213 times

We log every raise and lower on the five Seattle bridges we track. Labor Day weekend is boat weekend, and it shows.

Bridge raises, Thursday through Monday

Fremont — 86 raises, typically 4 minutes, longest 10
Ballard — 73 raises, typically 4 minutes, longest 8
Montlake — 41 raises, typically 6 minutes, longest 10
1st Ave S — 8 raises, typically 10 minutes, longest 20
South Park — 5 raises, about 6 minutes each

That is 17 raises a day on Fremont alone. Live status for all five: the drawbridge map.

Where the crashes were, in the states that report them

Same caveat as above: this is crashes that were on a feed when we looked, from states whose feeds carry crashes at all. It says where crashes get reported, not where roads are dangerous.

Corridors with the most crash records

I-95 — 25
I-10 — 21
I-5 — 21
I-15 — 14
I-80, I-75, I-4, CA-60 — 12 each
SR-91, I-210 (Los Angeles) — 11 each

By state: California 198, New York 48, Florida 44, Alabama 39, Wisconsin 29, Oregon 25, Georgia 24. California reports crashes diligently and has the traffic to match, so it dominates any national list. Five of the top ten corridors run through it.

Did construction pause for the holiday?

Not really. Work-zone records dipped about five percent on Saturday and were back to Thursday’s level by Monday. Most of what looked like a holiday closure was a parade: Keokuk, Iowa shut US-136 and US-218 for its Labor Day parade; Malden, Indiana closed IN-49; Hoisington, Kansas closed US-281 for its festival. Thirty-one records mentioned the holiday by name. The other 23,000 work-zone records did not.

Where the work was, by state

Counting distinct records with a numbered route, California led with more than every other state combined, most of it lane closures on US-101, I-5, and I-405. North Carolina was second and every one of its records was roadwork or a closure, which as we noted above is our ingestion gap, not theirs. After that: Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Idaho, New Jersey.

What we could not see

Worth saying plainly, because it shapes everything above.

We only looked once a day. Rhode Island's feed returned nothing usable for all five days, so it contributes zero records and that is a gap in our data, not an empty road. New Mexico's feed was down when we checked before the weekend. And none of this covers live traffic — the jam that built at 4 PM and cleared by 6 is invisible to a daily snapshot.

What it is good for is the shape of a holiday weekend: where the work was, where the fires were, which roads carried the load. That is a picture no state publishes on its own, because no state sees past its own border.

The live version lives in the app.

MileCheck shows DOT alerts for accidents, closures, and delays across all 50 states and British Columbia as they happen — not once a day, and not three days later.

App Store Google Play

Built from MileCheck's own archive of state DOT feeds, captured daily. The monthly Highway Report — the same treatment across a full month — starts with September.