Last November, ex-music teacher Jane Bramhall was driving home from her weekly choir practice. She was using a road she has known for the last thirty years, the B1077 in Suffolk, her car was a well-maintained Ford Fiesta - a model known for its excellent road-holding - and at 60 years old she's no boy racer.
Suddenly, and for no reason that she could think of, she found herself skidding out of control. The car mounted the bank, crashed into a hedge, hit a tree and fell back into the road on its side. The car and the seat-belt did their jobs, and Jane was unhurt although she was unable to free herself from the car.
Luckily another car appeared, and four local men quickly extricated her and then pushed her car onto its wheels again and moved it off the road. The police arrived, and breathalysed her. She phoned her husband who arrived 15 minutes later to be told that as Jane was unhurt and her breathalyser test was clear, the police would be taking no further action and would not even be recording the accident.
All well and good, you might think. True, once the insurance company had declared the Fiesta a write-off and sent her a cheque, it cost Jane another £3,500 of her own money to replace it with a similar car. She paid the money, took delivery of another Fiesta, assumed that there must have been mud or some spilt diesel on the road, and got on with her life.
Imagine her surprise, then, to be driving down the same road again in February and noticing that another driver had crashed into her hedge and her tree. What a coincidence!
Jane stopped, went into the nearby farm and spoke to the owner. He told her an astonishing story.
Since the beginning of the year, he said, no fewer than seven cars had left the road at the exact same spot, damaging his property. One had crashed into the farm office beside the road, narrowly missing the farm manager. Another had ended up in the farm pond and the driver had disappeared so that the farmer himself had to pay for it to be removed. A hundred yards down the road at a sharp bend, another two cars had crashed.
In January this year the Telegraph published this article about a road surface material called Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA) which had been banned in most European countries but is still in use in the UK. The Highways Agency had found that SMA was dangerously slippery, and recommended that it should be banned here too, but the government ignored them, and so did many local authorities - including Suffolk County Council.
The B1077 was resurfaced last year with SMA.
One of the ingredients of this material is an oil-based substance that remains slippery until it is worn off the surface of the road by the passage of traffic. How long this takes depends on the amount and weight of traffic using the road. It can take up to two years - or, in the case of the strip between the wheel tracks of four-wheeled vehicles, where motorcyclists can be expected to ride, never. The Telegraph report makes it clear that motorcyclists in particular have been coming to grief on this surface, and even horses have unaccountably slipped over on it.
And do Suffolk County Council realise how dangerous they have made this road?
Well, if the police routinely do not record accidents unless someone is injured or there is an opportunity for a prosecution, it's hard to see how those responsible for the upkeep of our roads can possibly learn whether their road surfaces are behaving properly. In this case, Suffolk's SMA roads are plainly not fit for purpose. It can only be a matter of time before someone is killed by them - and the County Council don't have a clue about it.
Jane Bramhall is not one to take things lying down, however. She's contacted MPs, local councillors, the Chief Constable and the press, and appeared briefly today on BBC "Look East". Already the telephone has started ringing as viewers call to tell her about their own experience of these potentially lethal roads.
Of course we can guess what Suffolk County Council's reaction will be. First they'll try to tough it out. They'll blind us with science, or just brazenly claim that SMA is safe.
Then they'll impose a speed limit on the offending road. They're good at that in Suffolk, dreaming up new and unnecessary speed limits. At the end of 1995, Suffolk County Council introduced 450 new 30m.p.h. speed limits, many of them on roads where no driver would expect to see them - clear, uncluttered roads with good visibility and few if any houses. The following year, fatalities on Suffolk roads rose by a staggering 69%, a truly shameful figure and the worst for six years. Despite pressure from the public and the condemnation of the County Coroner, did the County Council even consider that they might have been wrong? Well, no. The limits are still in place and widely ignored.
But they won't have learned from this experience. Speed limits are cheap, you see, and resurfacing a road is costly. They'll just duck their responsibility for providing Suffolk residents with safe roads to drive on, and put the blame on individual motorists. So far as Suffolk County Council are concerned, once you get behind the wheel, you're on your own.
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