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30/06/2010
A picturesque Peak District route popular with tourists and leisure motorcyclists has been named as the UK's "most persistently dangerous" road by a safety charity.
The A537 between Macclesfield and Buxton, also known as the Cat and Fiddle, saw 34 fatal or serious collisions between 2006 and 2008 - up from 15 in 2003-05. Most of these came at the weekend during summer, in dry conditions and during daylight hours - and the "vast majority" were motorcyclists, according to police figures.
According to the Road Safety Foundation, the single-lane road, 50mph road has "severe bends, steep falls from the carriageway and is edged by dry-stone walls or rock face for almost all of its length".
The finding was part of the charity's Saving Lives For Less report, which also discovered that half of all fatal road crashes occur on one-tenth of the country's roads, with Scotland and northern England having the highest risk ratings.
The foundation called on the government to target road spending in the UK's accident blackspots – a move which, it believed, would bring down costs in other areas.
It claims that annual savings of £18 billion are "readily achievable" by reducing road crashes - Britain's largest cause of premature death. According to the foundation, spending associated with emergency services, hospitals, and long-term car for those injured "can often be avoided through little more than the cost of a pot of paint".
Director Dr Joanne Hill said that inexpensive engineering measures, such as improving road markings and signs, or adding anti-skid treatments, could vastly improve the number of casualties on UK roads.
Speaking to the BBC, Dr Hill said: "Not only can Britain reduce road deaths and serious injuries but, by targeting a relatively small mileage of high-risk roads, we can do so with good economic returns.
"Too often we pay for emergency services, hospitals and care for the disabled rather than taking easy steps to put road design faults right."
The report, which covered 28,000 miles of A-roads and motorways, also named a stretch of the A18 as Britain's highest-risk road when motorcycles were excluded, and found that single carriageways have six times the risk of motorways.
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