Mr. Teplygin runs an online community of a few dozen enthusiasts who cruise around Russian cities, looking for luxury cars with special license plates that are violating traffic rules as though to demonstrate their untouchable status. People in his group take pictures of the cars and upload them online. His online forum has a dedicated thread about the special highway.

“You cannot understand how cool you are before you drive in the middle of this road,” Mr. Teplygin said, sitting in a burger restaurant. “Spotting this is like sports for us.”

The highway was built in the 1950s to link the Kremlin with government residencies west of Moscow. Along the road are grand Stalinist buildings, constructed for members of the Soviet elite. The median lane was reserved for government cars in the beginning, too, but the traffic was much lighter at the time and so there were not as many accidents.

Today, the road reflects the hierarchy that organizes life in Russia into a top-down structure.

Traffic gets fully blocked for cars carrying Mr. Putin and Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev. Only certain cars with special license plates are permitted to use the middle lane, and violators are swiftly moved aside by the police, say advocates for traffic safety. Government ministers drive with the general traffic, some of them surrounded by a few police cars, depending on their rank.

A special traffic police regiment patrols the road, which is also peppered with CCTV cameras. In 2013, Gadzhi N. Makhachev, deputy prime minister of Dagestan, a Russian republic in the North Caucasus, collided with another car in the special lane. He and two people in the other vehicle all died.

Sergei A. Medvedev, now a popular commentator and TV host (and no relation to Prime Minister Medvedev), grew up in one of the imposing buildings near the highway and has seen many of the crashes on it. Leonid I. Brezhnev, the former Soviet leader, lived nearby.