London has 5 'killer roads'

Five of London's busiest commuter routes have been named as "killer roads" in a new survey exposing Britain's most dangerous highways.

They are highlighted in a new investigation assessing the level of danger to motorists, based on the number of fatal and serious accidents. The five worst roads in the London area are the busy A1 to the north, the A12 and A1306 to the east, and the A41 and A1001 to the north of the capital.

The heavily congested A12 - which carries thousands of commuters into the capital from the east - emerges as the third dangerous in the UK.

It has an accident rate more than seven times higher than the national average, according to the European Road Assessment Programme which graded 800 UK roads.

Between 1997 and 1999 there were 61 crashes involving deaths or serious injuries on the four-kilometre stretch of the dual carriageway between Romford and the M25.

The heavily congested A41 to the north of London is also singled out by the survey because it had 27 severe accidents over only 4.6kilometres between the M1 and the M25.

Three other roads in the south of England also scored the worst possible " zero" rating in the survey led by the AA, which compared the number of accidents with the number of vehicles using notorious sections of each highway.

They are the A1001 in Hatfield to the north of London, with 18 accidents and the A1306 (previously the A13) from Aveley to the east of London to the M25, with 21 accidents over a stretch of road three kilometres long.

The A1 to the north of London is also named as a "killer road". The 2.4 kilometre section from the North Circular to the M1 had 26 serious accidents over the threeyear study period.

The only two roads with an even worse record than those in the South are the A889 near Dalwhinnie in the Scottish Highlands and the A537 in Derbyshire.

Eleven other sections of roads in the South scraped only one star in the grading that runs from zero to four.

Today the AA called on the Government to make killer roads more "forgiving".

" Everyday human error shouldn't carry a death sentence," said John Dawson of the AA. " People should not die on major routes because basic protection is absent from entirely predictable collisions, such as unfenced roadside objects.

"The EuroNCAP car crash test programme has done wonders for car occupant safety in a few 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.

"In three years most of the roads we've examined have seen death and serious injury on such a scale that, if they occurred in a rail disaster, would generate national headlines and soul-searching. Yet road deaths are often comparatively cheap to avoid."

The first phase of the EuroRAP programme focused on A roads and motorways. British sections total 14,000 miles, where there were 20,000 fatal and serious injury accidents in the three-year period studied.

Experts compiled the data over the last six months by driving along the networks in Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain, videoing and testing them mile-bymile to try to understand why some have higher rates of death and serious injury than similarlytrafficked stretches elsewhere.

Initial results show that the Netherlands and Sweden have death rates very similar to Britain, but that in Spain the rates on comparable roads are three to five times as high.

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