The Debate: Are Londoners safer drivers?
A new survey has found that Londoners cause more accidents on country roads than their rural counterparts. But are sophisticated urbanites really more reckless drivers?
YES: Rural roads are a deathtrap
Picture this: It’s five o’clock on a December afternoon, completely pitch black, and a giant Rangerover comes hurtling round the corner, right wheel just inching over the white dividing line. You just about manage to pull in to avoid being totalled by two tons of metal, scratching up the side of your car on an overgrown hedgerow in the process.
You’ve survived the Rangerover, but there’s an endless obstacle course to get through before you reach your destination: Bridges too narrow to let two cars pass at the same time, deer in the road, sheep in the road, 17-year-old drivers who’ve just passed their test and 80-year-old drivers who need to take it again.
You’ll face long waits for roadworks you can’t take the back roads to avoid – because here, there are only back roads – a lack of streetlights, walkers on the side of the road, and an ambling tractor which doesn’t turn off for two miles.
Good luck if you go in the wrong direction, or god forbid if you need fuel, because there won’t be anywhere to get gas and there absolutely won’t be enough space on the road to do a three-point turn. You might find yourself driving along a single track, or veering off into a mysterious dual carriageway – it’s difficult to predict, because out here your GPS isn’t working properly and you can’t make out the road signs.
Driving in London might require a bit of patience – and a good eye for bikes – but at least you know you’re safely inside the well-lit ring of the M25.
Amber Murray is a reporter at Morning Wire
NO: They’re just slower
I can understand why Londoners might consider themselves to be great drivers. Afterall,
they daily take to the nation’s most congested roads and dodge preoccupied pedestrians,
swerve conceited cabbies, and weave in and out of cycle superhighways. Insurance
provider Cuvva even went so far as to rank Londoners as the UK’s best drivers in a study in
2023.
But their confidence is an illusion. All that supposedly meticulous driving takes place at much
lower speeds than other drivers in other regions encounter. Everything that the capital’s
drivers most despise – low traffic neighbourhoods, endless roadworks, rampant congestion,
20mph zones, ponderous buses, numerous traffic lights and pedestrian crossings – conspire
to ensure that London has the slowest average road speeds not just in the UK but worldwide.
An analysis by TomTom found that journeys on London’s roads often happen at less than 10
miles per hour. (For context, the average speed for a penny farthing bicycle was around 15-
20mph).
Maybe it’s seeing tractors rather than red buses. Possibly its swapping the metropolis’s dirty,
polluted air for the sweet smell of manure. Or perhaps it is just the novelty of an open road
and a far horizon. But we should not be surprised that London drivers tend to put their feet
down and forget their road sense when driving in the countryside.
James Ford is a former advisor to Mayor of London Boris Johnson
THE VERDICT
“Over-confident” Londoners are more likely to crash on rural roads than their country cousins, according to new research, which blames the fact that 75 per cent say they are ready to drive on any terrain immediately after passing their test compared to a national average of 69 per cent. Ford is surely right that Londoners have convinced themselves they are safer drivers because our nannying Mayor forces them to go everywhere so slowly.
The real danger to motorists – and let’s be honest civilisation – is the countryside itself
And Morning Wire does not quibble with the commercial efforts of the insurer that conducted this survey to scare parochial customers into buying its products – thereby protecting them from us reckless city dwellers. But they are taking aim at the wrong target. The real danger to motorists – and let’s be honest civilisation – is the countryside itself. As Murray says, it’s dark, roads are narrow, there’s tractors and livestock all over the place, a blind pensioner behind every wheel but nowhere to get fuel. And because there’s nothing to do and no public transport, all the drivers are drunk. Like so many of Britain’s problems, the way to improve road safety is to grow the economy by building houses, fast, hi-tech infrastructure and doubling down on London. The alternative is driving the country into a ditch.