The program starts off with story of a road in North Cotes, Lincolnshire with a bad accident record.

My inital thoughts were that the road had no "features" (flat land, with dykes alongside) thus hard to judge bends; plus crap, bumpy surface (re-inforced by the inclusion of euro-enforced slippy-road signs) thus minimus tyre grippus - so i was waiting for the "speed kills" theme to begin.

How refreshing to find that they laid new grippy tarmac (especially for use in wet conditions) plus solar-powered cats-eyes to see the bends in the dark (night-time had one third of accidents, and most probably a fraction of the traffic vlumes). No accidents so far this year!

Good to see TRL and Co. making some sensible decisions - even the "intelligent" slow-down sign that reacted to road conditions (rain, temperature etc.) was a nice idea.

It appears that grippy tarmac costs GBP5 per square metre - a lot less that GBP30,000 for a single Gatso. Maybe a change in government attitude would _really_ improve road safety!

mb

 

Good point, well made.

S

 

Being from round those parts, I'll add a bit more info here...

There's 2 big reasons that I'm sure there's more crashes here.

(1) The road sits above the rest of the land - you've got sod all reference points on any of the bends so you can't see which way they go. There's nothing to define the edge of the road and even when there is, because it's completely open, you just get a "sea of marker posts" that could relate to any bit of road.

(2) Just near to where that bit of road is (at least I think), you can bascially "do a circuit" past Tetney lock. No cars, twisty sweeping roads... I'll let you be the judge of how many have come a cropper because they've just "done a lap"

cheers
Andy

 

Penny Mallory did a test of the new tarmac at TRL in a BMW and in the wet.

Firstly on smooth tarmac - 60-0mph in 8 seconds
Secondly on normal tarmac - 60-0mph in 3.07 seconds
Finally on the rain absorbing tarmac - 60-0mph in 2.13 seconds

Knocking a THIRD off the wet stopping distance is pretty impressive!!!!

Now where is that Morris Minor??

mb

 

I agree - surely this is a more sensible thing to do? It's got to be better to try and prevent accidents rather than just 'punishing' people with speeding fines.

I was down at the TRL a few months ago and saw the new tarmac on test. We weren't allowed to take the cars on it, but you could see when it rained, that there appeared to be less water laying on the new tarmac.

Chris

 

I don't know anything about the area at all but, had they put drainage pipes in the ditches and levelled off the top with gravel; it would not have cut down the number of incidents, but if someone did leave the road then the likelyhood of serious injury would surely have been reduced? Especially as everyone seemed to be crashing at 60mph.

 

Don't people always have crashes at 60mph (or whatever the speed limit is) rather than the speed they were actually going at...

 

Boomer.......nice one, didnt see the program myself, but that grippy tarmac stuff sounds great.

i`m going to elect you as our next Transport Minister, then you can rip down all the gatsos and give us some off the grippy stuff instead.

Paul

 

Surely I can't be the only one likely to drive faster on a grippier surface?

Better to make the bend more readable, rather than just push the absolute limit up further.

 

DavidRB,

maing the road (bend) more "readable" is precisely what the solar powered cats eyes did - you didn't rely on the "straight ahead" headlamp beam to get a reflection, and this helped with the large proportion of night-time accidents. Andymac also made a good point (that i wouldn't have been able to articulate, er, describe) about the marker posts being useless as a reference point.

Robertio also has a very valid point that filling in the drainage ditches would lessen the consequences of an "off" (but wouldn't generate any revenue though ).

Twas interesting that one of the road casualties was a Police car performing driver instruction - heck if these guys **** up then the road _must_ be bad!

I'm all for the sticky Tarmac (and thus possibly driving faster) rather than more slippy tarmac.

As for Walker's nomination - well the M4 bus lane would be my first change (then charging double-jag owners with union funded London flats FIFTY times their current tax!!!).

mb

 

Great point. The Lincolnshire roads can be real killers at night in the wet e.g. the infamous B660. Standing water, potholes, adverse camber, no cats eyes, long straights plus Lincolnshire nutters bezzing along at 90 in their Ford Escorts. If there was only one improvement that I could make to UK roads, I'd say put those self-charging cats-eyes in! Being able to see the road is the most critical part of being able to drive, after all