COLUMN ONE : A Moscow Road Paved With Peril : Driving the Ring Highway can be a deadly nightmare--no lights or lane markers and daredevils whizzing by in Western cars. Here, the worst of the Soviet and capitalist eras collide.

They call it the Road of Death.

On the Moscow Ring Automobile Highway, “You could lay a wreath on every kilometer,” one police spokesman said.

Circling the Russian capital, the road is a motorist’s nightmare so perilous that it claims an annual average of almost four victims for every mile of its pockmarked concrete.

On its 65 miles, 243 people died last year, most in head-on collisions or pedestrian accidents. (In contrast, on a hectic 65-mile stretch of the 101 Freeway, reaching from Los Angeles into Ventura, 13 people died last year, according to the California Highway Patrol.)

The Ring Highway, the most traveled road in Russia’s biggest city, combines the worst of the old Soviet regime and the new capitalist era.

Imagine the San Diego Freeway without dividers separating the two directions of traffic, without lines to mark lanes, and, worst of all, without lighting at night.

Add to that an aging surface punctuated by potholes, pedestrians flitting fearfully through the traffic, unmarked exits, nearly invisible signs and newly rich drivers who crowd the road with fast Western cars and laugh off the typical $1 fine for speeding.

The Ring Highway encircles nearly all of metropolitan Moscow, serving as a freeway to pull traffic out of the congested city center. When it was built in the 1960s as the outermost of the capital’s concentric roads, it was already overloaded. Now that Moscow has sprawled past its limits, the road remains a highway in form, bordered almost everywhere by woods, but it carries traffic to and from giant clumps of high-rises sprouting outside it as well.

The Ring Highway’s planners, intent on expanding Moscow’s road network cheaply, cut corners however they could, giving the highway no more than three lanes in each direction and leaving out lights and other safety basics.

Even given the old Communist approach of development at any cost, it is hard to imagine what was on officials’ minds. “I don’t believe they were thinking at all,” said Yuri Shabanov, the traffic police engineer who is responsible for the Ring Highway. “Back then, safety was in second place because they had to give Moscow more transport capacity. Everything else was secondary.”

These days, the road, still six lanes across at its widest and only four in places, is a disaster of this magnitude largely because of the lack of money in city coffers--and because of the new money in private pockets that police say has tripled the number of private cars on Russia’s roads in recent years.

The highway’s signs are nearly invisible at night, Shabanov said, because Soviet-made paint loses its reflective qualities after three years. The signs will be repainted, he said. Meanwhile, night motorists are forced to drive right up to a sign and peer at it--if they are lucky enough to find an exit that is marked.

Moscow authorities have launched a $25-million program to modernize the highway and put up barriers separating the two sides of traffic. But only about three miles are done, and police are skeptical that the city will find money for quick progress; this, even though the dividers could save hundreds of drivers from the head-on collisions that are the highway’s most common type of crash.

The highway’s speed limit is set at a paltry 36 m.p.h.--about the same as on Moscow’s city streets. But most drivers zoom at almost 60 m.p.h., especially on the highway, where an average of 4,000 cars an hour race along any given stretch.

Besides crash fatalities, the highway’s other main victims are pedestrians. While they account for 18% of all traffic fatalities in California, on the Moscow roadway they amount to 40% of the toll. The Ring Highway has only 12 underground walkways. After dark, they are too spooky for most people, who prefer risking their lives scampering across the road rather than going through an ill-lit, deserted tunnel.

Police acknowledge that the freeway--part of Moscow’s famed trio of concentric highways, including the garden ring and the boulevard ring--is a mess.

But they also blame its toll on the bad habits of Russian drivers, many of whom are daredevils who casually veer into the lane of oncoming traffic to pass. Only 30% use their seat belts. (In California, surveys show that 76% of drivers wear the safety devices.)

“People brazenly drive in right under your wheels,” Igor Bogdanov, a truck driver from Ukraine, complained as he took a cigarette break in a concrete pocket just off the highway.

Police tell the story of a speeder who, as he zipped past a police post, just threw a 1,000-ruble bill (about $1) at police, as if to say, “I’ll pay the fine in advance.”

In Moscow, motorists with money have little to fear from Russian traffic police. In recent years, corruption has reached the point that drivers do not even ask whether a traffic officer will take a bribe--they simply assume.

Because newly rich drivers can scoff at paltry speeding fines, they develop “a false sense of immunity to punishment,” said Moscow’s traffic police chief, Vasily Yuryev, who muses, “How many Mercedeses and BMWs have broken up on Moscow’s roads?”

For those in far more common Soviet-made cars, their mistakes are magnified by the relatively primitive tin cans they drive. “It’s better to go onto the Ring Highway in a truck,” Shabanov said.

“Better in a tank,” police spokesman Alexander Kochubei put in.

Truck drivers blame many accidents on what they call “teapots”--inexperienced drivers, who often store their cars for the winter and pull them out in spring. “Spring comes and people come out for the first time and start to hit each other,” trucker Yuri Kurganov said.

The continuing shortages of spare auto parts, winter tires and repair garages also contribute to many accidents, police say. It is common across Moscow to see cars conked out in traffic, with drivers looking anxiously under the hood and sometimes setting out a gas can instead of a missing hazard sign.

For accident victims, the highway’s danger is multiplied by a shortage of ambulances and poor coordination between police and medics. Someday, Kochubei said, police hope to have emergency services replete with doctors and “jaws of life” to cut people out of crumpled cars.

But what happens these days became clear at a recent accident on one of the Ring Highway’s feeder roads.

A woman had been struck by a boxy, Soviet-made Lada automobile. She lay bleeding in the street when an ambulance happened by. Medics gave the woman cursory treatment but said they could not take her to a hospital because they already had a patient in the back. Normally, police say, it can take up to 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive at an accident site.

Kurganov, a veteran of five years behind the wheel of an oil truck, said he has twice used his extinguisher to put out fires at crash sites on the Ring Highway. He has seen pedestrians hit four times.

According to the chief of Russia’s traffic police, Vladimir Fyodorov, 15 people die in Russia for every 100 accidents, a much higher proportion than in the West, largely because of poor medical services. (In contrast, in California there are 0.85 fatalities for every 100 accidents, officials say.)

Safety aside, the Ring Highway is testimony to just how little the Soviet regime cared about its citizens. Along its entire length, there is not a single truck stop or restaurant, barring the rare shish-kebab booths that have started to spring up. No restrooms. No hotels. No phones. No information, except occasional billboards showing an overall sketch of the highway and its main intersections.

“They have plenty of signs for speed limits but none to tell you where to turn,” Kurganov griped.

Gas stations are so rare that fuel trucks do a thriving business selling right out of their tanks at 50% more than the official price. Service stations are nonexistent, so drivers carry all the spare parts they think they might need with them. They also tend to carry cans of gasoline in their trunks just in case. But that leads to horrific explosions when they end up in accidents.

“The roads all the way to Kiev are hungry roads,” trucker Bogdanov said. “There’s no service at all.”

As for the Ring Highway, he said: “It’s better to skirt around Moscow altogether. It’s too rough here.”

Times staff writer Nora Zamichow in Los Angeles contributed to this report.