Bilgly is a good word, along with strategery.
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They are not safe! All kinds of roll over accidents happen on them. I recently passed a motor home facing me in the grass median with a blown right front tire. The tire tracks showed that it had come all the way over on to my side and then steered back down in to the middle where it was left. But I do admit that this is far better than what would have happened on a two lane highway.
Try again.
Are Highways Safer Than Regular Roads?
Is the interstate more dangerous than a normal road?
The Irony of Road Fear - Freakonomics
Driving on Roads or Highways: Which is Most Dangerous? - Wawanesa U.S.
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Any road can be safe, depending on how we drive on them.
That’s not the point. But I suspect you already knew that.
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Well, not as safe as sitting on your sofa, but interstates are safer than all other types of roads, fatality rate is a fraction of that for others:
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Kinda silly to even argue this but I think I’ve seen most rollovers happen on ramps. Monotony is one key factor I think on the interstates. Really bad driving at 55 in the old days. How to stay awake. Then into the ditch and into oncoming traffic on the other side. I found driving at 80 in South Dakota keeps you more alert. They have put up a lot of cables to prevent crossing over though. After a long European trip, a friend fell asleep and totaled his car on one though. Still alive anyway. Most of us took the bus home so had a four block drive instead of 30 miles with jet lag. Stuff happens regardless I guess.
I guess this thread has gotten far enough off point and includes sufficient ridiculous tangents that I can address the statement, “not as safe as sitting on your sofa…”
Just over 40,000 deaths occur in motor vehicle accidents each year…
While over 350,000 people die each year in the home from heart attacks, with almost 270,000 occurring during the day…
Sedentary behavior increases heart attack risk: Studies suggest that spending a significant amount of time sitting increases the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems. One study found that people who spent four or more hours watching TV daily were nearly 50% more likely to experience a heart attack compared to those who spent less than two hours.
Given that prolonged sitting, often associated with activities like watching TV or relaxing on a sofa, is a risk factor, it’s reasonable to infer that a considerable number of people experience heart attacks in their living rooms, potentially while on their sofas.
Please do not get the conclusion that I am suggesting that watching TV while driving is a good way to avoid Sedentary behavior… L 
L . . .
An astronomical fatality rate per mile.
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That’s nice, but they can’t seem to put up wire barriers in the medians to separate the Interstate highways here in Illinois in most areas. In some places where they do have them they don’t maintain them well, and you can see where the wire fence has been hit and the posts wiped away every few miles.
The creation of the Interstate highway system was one of the biggest causes for the reduction in vehicle fatalities that happened since the much higher fatalities per mile in the 1960s to the vastly lower fatalities per mile in the 1990s. People like to claim that vehicles are so much safer now, but that is only part of it.
It’s too back the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) isn’t so inclined to make sure it’s guardrails were safe… Everyone believed the manufacturer that the guardrails were not dangerous… They were not safe and then years ago the VDOT decided it was too expensive to replace them…
https://guardrailinjurylawyer.com/tag/maryland/
Yet no one at the state level demanded the manufacturer replace them as their testing was wither flawed, rigged, or faked.
I always thought they looked like the battering ram of an armored assault vehicle…
I remember, in the ‘60s, a Maryland state legislator complaining that road signs were too flimsy, that we paid too much to replace them all the time.
In South Dakota many of the signs were painted on plywood. Cheaper than steel.
Doesn’t it delaminate? The guy in my case was referring to the stanchions that hold the signs up.
I bet the column part at the end of the X-Lite guard rail is not securely attached to the end of the guard rail. If the guard rail buckles near the end it will pop out the side and the end column part separates and goes off to the side and doesn’t do anything. Then it’s just the bent end of a guard rail pushing in to the vehicle.
Versus a straight steel sword. Lives spared!
The guardrail head, manufactured and licensed by Trinity Industries, has been known to impale colliding cars rather than absorb the impact of the accident. Not all accidents led to the vehicle being impaled, but it was specifically “designed” not to impale any vehicle at all.
Wood 4x4s. I Spose they use outdoor plywood but some delaminations over the years. Maybe mostly county signs. I dunno. Stuck in my mind anyway.
For a guardrail design like that to work, I would make it deliberately weak some distance back, such as 4 feet back, so that it buckles back there and the front retains its shape. It could have holes in it starting 4 feet back and increasingly smaller holes going back to 8 feet. But that method would only work to 8 feet back before the guardrail turns back in to a sword to impale the vehicle if it smashes beyond the 8 feet.
Their design must be intended to cause the guardrail to deform starting at the front using that specially designed end piece, and continue to deform like this for a great distance. A great method, but a disaster if it fails to do this.
Maybe two strong pieces of metal on the end piece could remove the corrugations from the guardrail during a crash as it slides down the guardrail, turning it in to a flat strip of metal that would bend away easily.