The man was flat on his back in the road, a distraught passenger next to him, two cars flashing hazard lights nearby. I passed the crash at a tiny but busy roundabout in Lincolnshire on my way home from the school run a fortnight ago. The day before, less than a mile away, a teenage motorcyclist was airlifted to hospital after another collision.
“There but for the grace of God…” I thought. Most weeks I’m taken aback by something I see on my local rural roads, whether it’s yet another flattened signpost at a junction or an unavoidable crater of a pothole.
Driving is more dangerous in the countryside than cities. According to the Department of Transport, 956 people were killed on country roads last year, 72 per cent more than the 555 on urban roads.
But what exactly increases the risk? Research released this week found it is not just what but who, with Londoners like me disproportionately to blame. A survey by insurer NFU Mutual found 38 per cent of motorists from the capital had been in a crash on a country road, compared with 23 per cent of the rest of the population.
Why? Overconfidence, it seems. Seventy-five per cent of Londoners said they felt prepared to drive on rural roads as soon as they’d got their driving licence, compared to an average of 69 per cent of drivers from other regions.
Certainly, there’s something about having driven in London that instils self-belief. When I arrived in the countryside from the ironically named Green Lanes – one of London’s busiest roads – the prospect of driving in the sticks didn’t scare me.
After all, I’d had 17 years of being beeped at and sworn at and cut up in the capital. I was on intimate terms with my own car horn because without a bravado to counter the aggression, frankly, I’d never have got anywhere.
Surely, in comparison, country drivers would be the epitome of courtesy? Not necessarily, I quickly realised as I was gesticulated at for trying to park too close to other cars and tailgated when I deemed it unwise to overtake. Many times, I’ve run over potholes because SUVs were storming towards me so quickly I had no option but to swerve.
Drivers here, I realised in shock, were every bit as entitled as I was. And it would be a bit of a stretch to conclude they were all fresh from London like me.
So, while I am as disgruntled as the next rural resident that three times as much is spent on road repair in London as the shire counties, I don’t think Londoners are to blame, so much as our treacherous driving environment.
As Nick Turner, chief executive of NFU Mutual put it: “The unique hazards found on rural roads – from blind corners and junctions to inappropriate speed limits, to navigating vulnerable road users and agricultural vehicles – mean that using countryside roads is fundamentally different to travelling on urban roads or motorways.”
As hostile as drivers are in the capital, the volume of traffic forces you to inch along, making it more difficult to crash. Even on the M25 you’ll struggle to pick up more speed than a bicycle at rush hour (there were around 10 times more fatalities on rural roads than motorways last year) and, with police and speed cameras at every turn, you’re constantly aware of being watched.
While rural towns can also be gridlocked – especially if you’re trying to secure one of the two parking spaces available in each town – they lack the surveillance to stop rule-breaking. This leads to vigilante behaviour – at least, if the woman who jumped her turn at the roundabout yesterday and stuck her finger up at us all as she drove past is anything to go by. Who knows if she was from London, or just late for work and aware there was about as much chance of running into a police car as a branch of Nando’s.
She’s not the only one to break the rules at roundabouts, which are not enforced by traffic lights, meaning either nobody moves, or everyone accelerates at the same time, making them far more daunting than the behemoth Elephant and Castle equivalent in south London.
Lorries are another problem. They aren’t supposed to use the roads here as a through route but seemingly do. The other week I was in the hold-up as a driver got stuck trying to reverse his extra-long HGV into a drive on a blind corner. In 2022, villagers in Ulceby, Lincolnshire, said lives were being put at risk by up to 400 HGV movements a day recorded in daylight hours in a local traffic count.
And as Turner stresses, the national limit of 60mph outside towns and villages is a hazard on our tiny roads. Were anyone to hit that speed on the lane we live on, and face incoming traffic, they’d almost certainly crash – as the cars with smashed windscreens left in laybys attest.
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No local I know would risk it. However, nor would a Londoner with any sense. And in truth, being a motorist in London might have made me a bolshier driver, but it also made me better. I passed my test as a teenager in the area I live now and was, for years, truly terrible on the roads -reversing into bollards, down one-way streets the wrong way, and so on.
Moving to London and navigating the capital’s traffic, terrifying as it was, forced me to be more decisive and assured behind the wheel – which, on our crazy country roads, can be a blessing as much as a curse.
