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Britain's Most Dangerous Roads |
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The biggest study ever undertaken on the safety of Europe's roads has identified the most dangerous major road in Britain as the A889 near Dalwhinnie in the Scottish Highlands.
Following 18 months of work, the AA-led EuroRAP (European Road Assessment Programme) has given safety 'star ratings' to more than 800 A or trunk UK roads, and a further 2,000 in three other countries - the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain.
The league tables are intended to allow highways authorities and engineers to compare similar roads and identify the hidden killers among them.
Top 10 Most Dangerous A Roads
- A889 - A86-A9 (near Dalwhinnie)
- A537 - Macclesfield-Buxton
- A12 - Romford-M25
- A4137 - A49-A40 (west of Ross-on-Wye)
- A628 - A616-Penistone
- A1001 - Hatfield
- A534 - Welsh boundary to Nantwich
- A533 - Runcorn-A56
- A682 - M65 Junction 13 - A65 Long Preston
- A13 (now A1306) - Aveley A1306-M25
(Based on number of fatal and serious vehicle accidents per billion vehicle kilometres travelled 1997-99, source AA Foundation for Road Safety Research)
To find out how dangerous, or safe your local road is, use the searchable database.
The A889 has an accident rate almost double that of the next most dangerous road, the A537 from Macclesfield in Cheshire to Buxton in Derbyshire, while the third most dangerous road is a short section of the A12 between Romford in Essex and the M25.
Of the 833 roads assessed in the UK, 23 were so bad they achieved no stars in the ratings. 90 only received one-star, 213 two stars, 415 three stars, with 92 gaining the top four star rating. Roads with no stars have accident rates ten times higher than the best performing roads in the four star category. An average road scores between two and three stars.
The figures incorporate the safety performance of the routes in relation to the amount of traffic they carry, not just the number of accidents that happen on any given stretch, in order to provide a more-rounded picture of the true risk to drivers and other road users.
Hopefully, this information will allow designers to make changes to lessen the risk of the four major killers - head on crashes, accidents at junctions, collisions with vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists, and vehicles hitting objects at the side of the road.
Each year in Germany, 1,600 people die each year from crashing into trees, while 800 die in the same type of accident in France. In the UK, 500 people die hitting trees, lampposts, signs and other roadside hazards. The EU aims to to halve number of people who die on Europe's roads each year by the end of this decade.
John Dawson, AA Policy Director and EuroRAP Chairman: "We have to make roads more forgiving - everyday human error shouldn't carry a death sentence. People should not be dying on major routes because basic protection is absent from entirely predictable collisions, such as with unfenced roadside objects.
"The EuroNCAP car crash test programme has done wonders for car occupant safety in a few short years, but we have some major roads around Europe which fall so far short of known safe design that they give little margin for survival in the event of a simple driver error, whatever car you're in.
"We cannot demand five-star cars from manufacturers and then settle for one-star roads. The cars we drive, the way we drive and the roads we drive them on are all part of a single safety system."
LINKS
- European Road Assessment Programme
- the Automobile Association
- Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions - section on Roads, Vechicles and Road Safety
reports on traffic congestion in Britain
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