Europe’s most dangerous road? The A682
And what road do I drive to work on? Oh yes… the A682. Feck and biscuits. Thanks to the BBC for pointing that.
The 15-mile stretch of the A682 has had almost 100 deaths or serious injuries in the last decade.
It’s not like I have much choice either, as you can see from this map:
Home is the green marker, whilst work is the red one. I can go to work by either two routes (both take the same time even though one is 5 miles longer), one is via the A56 (the right hand one) and the other is via the A682 (left hand one). Thing is, I had a little incident on the A56 one day and so I’m reluctant to go that way.
But I have to agree the A682 is an awful road to drive on. Just the other week a van driver from the Home Delivery Network tried to take out myself, an oncoming car and a quarry truck by overtaking on a blind bend.
I was following said quarry truck at a distance when I noticed a white van on a bit of an overtaking spree behind me. He dispatched the row of cars with apparent ease and quickly caught me up. He then began to drive in the central of the road, looking for a spot to overtake. Unfortunately he picked a spot where there was traffic coming in the opposite direction, but he didn’t see that because he was too busy trying to give me a rectal examination with his van.
Choas was narrowly adverted, as I broke and tried to pull off road (kinda hard on a country road with stone walls either side) and the car coming in the opposite direction slammed full on, went off onto the grass verge, whilst Mr. Home Delivery Network carried on his merry way. He probably mowed down a few children in Gisburn for good measure.
I did complain to Home Delivery Network but was sent a cut and paste reply (I know because I searched for how to complain and found this, which I used as the email addresses to complain to, and I got the same reply as listed there (well, with the depot bit changed to Blackburn)).
Anyway, what they should do is what they do in parts of North Yorkshire (the wife is from Whitby so I know the roads up that way fairly well). The roads there are a of bit of bikers haven and as such have suffered from lots of accidents, and what they do is put up great big signs that say what the accident rate was a couple of years ago and what it was last year and if there has been any improvement. In most cases, they show a reduction just due to the sign being there.
I mentioned this at work and apparently it was planned for the A682, but they decided not too since they thought it would attract more idiots to it. Sigh…
