To wonder why so many people crash on a straight stretch of motorway?

[ColonelBrandonsPiano]

After another motorway crash, involving road closures and delays etc, I’m once again wondering how so many people seem to crash on a straight stretch of motorway.

junctions - yes, built up traffic in a city - yes, roundabouts- again yes.

but why motorways? Is it due to lack of familiarity? Tiredness from a long drive? Lack of motorway experience. Absolutely baffles me.

Driving too close to the car in front
Speeding

Statistics strongly disagree - per mile, motorways are the safest type of road.

Speed and monotony of long straight roads which are boring and so your mind wanders / risk of falling asleep or drifting.

Definitely not leaving enough of a gap. Drives me mad when someone pulls into the gap between me & the car in front.
The gap which I've left so if they hit the brakes I can avoiding hitting them.
Then some moron pulls in & I have to slow down to leave a gap again then idiot behind sits right up my arse, rinse and repeat.

Oh god this all day, drives me insane. So you drop back to make more gap and then another moron gets frustrated and takes that gap too. I see tiny cars right up the arse of lorries and just shake my head in disbelief

Reliance on satnavs
I've noticed that many leave telling you to move for exit lanes far too late. I was using Google maps at the weekend and noticed it told me that in a 1/4 mile keep left.... just as the road markings changed to show the lane had already become the filter/exit lane. If you left it until the satnav said move, traffic was already solid and there was no real room to move over.

People going too slow in the middle lanes causing people having to undertake - again the slow person causes traffic to build up behind them so people in the inside lane can't push their way over to over take.

People moving back into lefthand lane after overtaking cutting in too soon. My car warns if you are too close to the car in front and virtually every time I'm overtaken it flashes a warning. It doesn't matter how big a gap you leave between you and the car in front, some idiot always fills it. I sometimes feel the only way to keep a safe distance is by way of reverse!!

The standard of driving in the uk has fallen imo for various reasons. One of which I think is the large number of people who live here but didn't take their test here, another is the use of sat nav's and phones in cars.

People don't seem to know how to drive on a motorway with many just sitting in the middle lane. We nearly had a very bad accident last night. The speed limit was 20 on the M4 due to a previous incident, the limit then increased to 50. There was a car, quite a way on, still doing 20 in the third lane. It was hard to see this in the dark when there is no queue.

People falling asleep at the wheel due to the monotony.
People changing lanes abruptly without indicated.
People cutting in without enough room to spare causing the person behind to brake suddenly.
People driving too close - that drives me mad.
Impatient and aggressive drivers.

In theory yes if everyone used them correctly. They are very long straight stretches of road, no twists, turns or bumps so ideally they would be the safest type of road. However some of the idiots who use them aren’t safe at all.

Crash statistics aren’t a theory.

I never said they were 🙄

There's a stretch near us that has lots of accidents, usually around similar times in the morning at this time of year. It's a combination of factors:

• down hill stretch with an uphill stretch straight after (people speeding up doing down the hill, then failing to accelerate and keep to the same speed going up the other side leads to a concertina effect at the bottom of the hill)
• higher traffic due to the time of day
• and at this time of year, heading east bound in the rush hour means glaring sunshine straight in your windscreen

Once we get past February the accidents normally reduce again, once the sun glare is out of rush hour.

I have a motorway close to my house and around the edge of the city I live in. So I use it a lot. Something I increasingly notice is how bad people are at joining to motorway. It seems to be two approaches, either bombing along assuming the people on carriageway will more for you, often combined with not looking. Or slowly down to 40 or 30 mph and being really hesitant causing issues on the slip road and the carriageway they're joining.

I've had loads of experience f having to react to both if these approaches and look out for them. But I can easily imagine this causes accidents. Plus on the sections with no slip roads. I think if people join and leave like this how do they change lanes or overtake? Probably in a similar fashion. So I can totally see how they cause accidents.

People not using their mirrors.
Driving too fast /too slow
Not keeping to safe distances
Complete lack of awareness of other road uses
Not driving correctly according to the road conditions ie too fast in fog, not enough breaking distance in the rain, dazzled by a low sun etc
Being distracted
Not keeping eyes on the road, I have a friend who eye balls you (when talking) when she's driving....it's fooking terrifying and I won't get in the car with her again!
Pissing around at the wheel...once saw a women probably early 20s bopping to music waving her hands up in the air whilst over taking...wtaf
Refusing to move out of the middle lane, and being undertaken....one incredibly thoughtless one incredibly dangerous.
Banned drivers
Inexperienced drivers
Drivers without a licence with no knowledge of the Highway Code
A lot of very angry people running late then driving like loons at speed.
Too many vehicles on an overloaded infrastructure, means there simply isn't room for a mistake / lack of judgement etc without consequences.
So many reasons really.

Statistically, motorways are safer, but when things do go wrong, because of the speeds, the consequences are often worse.

When I first got a car in the '90s, which was a few years after I passed my test, I took a motorway lesson. The instructor took me out on the motorway, focussing on joining at the slip road, but took me home via the parallel A-road, because that's where more accidents happen.

It's truly concerning how prevalent dangerous driving behaviors are on motorways.

I think too close to the car in front and being impatient is a big one. I drive on a busy stretch of the M6 to get to/from work. I try to leave a reasonable gap but someone always shoves themselves in it. So many people darting in and out at high speed. It’s not helped by the amount of HGVs that slow up the inside lane then try and pull out round each other, therefore slowing up the middle lane too. It takes them an absolute age to overtake so causes chaos at busy times.

Absolutely, and you leave 100m gap and then someone instantly moves into it.

Reliance on satnavs
I've noticed that many leave telling you to move for exit lanes far too late. I was using Google maps at the weekend and noticed it told me that in a 1/4 mile keep left.... just as the road markings changed to show the lane had already become the filter/exit lane. If you left it until the satnav said move, traffic was already solid and there was no real room to move over.

I don't understand why anybody bothers with a satnav on a motorway. How hard is it to remember (eg) M23/M25 clockwise/M4 until you get to the A34 or whatever?

I think I've used mine twice in the last year, and last time I used it, it was a complete fucking disaster. The road I needed to go down was closed for road works, the diversion was badly signposted and the satnav kept telling me to go down the closed road. I pulled into a Tesco car park and worked out an alternative route using Google maps as an actual map.

I actually asked a few people for directions, but the people of Havant must be unusually law abiding, because none of them had a clue where the court building was.

I've had a few crashes on straight dual carriageways - in fact, the same stretch every single time. None of them were my fault, but they always followed the same pattern - slow/stopped traffic in front, and somebody hitting me from behind.

Most recent one was just before COVID - traffic had stopped about 500m in front of me, so I slowed and came to a stop. Nearest car was about the same distance behind me when I stopped, so I figured I was OK.

Then it didn't slow down. I push the brake pedal hard and yank the steering wheel away from the other lane in the hopes of there not being too much damage.

She saw me (and all the other stopped cars) at the last second, and hit me at around 50mph, driving me into the van in front...in total, four cars written off and a lot of damage to the tools in the van.

The cause of it? Well, when she got out of the car her hair and shoulders were wet with coffee, as was her right arm. There are no cup holders on the right hand side of the driver in the BMW she was driving. She admitted she was drinking coffee and didn't see the cars at the time, but started denying it as soon as we got all the cars off the road. Fortunately, we all made sure to get her coffee-drenched self in at least some of the photos we took of the damage for the insurers.

In total, I'm told the insurance claims came to around £120k not including injury claims, all because one woman couldn't wait for her morning coffee.

The problem is that, on that particular stretch of straight road, people just stop concentrating - because it's a straight road. Happens all the time - there are usually three or four crashes a week on that stretch, even now that there's a 50mph limit due to works (which don't seem to actually be happening). It's madness.

Is it so many though? You have to take into account how many cars are on the road.

Mostly inattention and failure to leave adequate distance.

The scariest I’ve had by far was a crazy man at night on a very quiet stretch of motorway. He cut me up on the single-lane slip road just as we were about to join the motorway, then turned his lights off and swerved across all three lanes repeatedly whilst I was behind him to try and make me crash into him. I hung back as much as I could and he just stopped his car until I was close again, so I pulled onto the hard shoulder as it wasn’t safe to try and get past him with what he was doing, then he pulled up in front of me. Locked myself in and called the police while he was banging on my windows and trying all the doors. Still nobody else around at this point, a good thing in a way as others wouldn’t have known what he was doing until there was a pileup, but also terrifying because I was alone on the hard shoulder with a madman trying to break into my car.

I’ve since invested in a dashcam as I couldn’t actually believe what he was doing and that I’d survived it!

Straight is the worst, your mind wanders, you don't realise someone's braked in front of you, and before you know it there's a pile-up.

Lane changing due to vehicles travelling at 55mph in the middle lane ( no significant traffic in left lane) refusing to pull into left lane .... Tesla drivers in particular!

Oh and the number of people on phones is ridiculous, even watching a movie! I ride pillionon a motorcycle and you can see right in, if only I had a go pro on my helmet, I could be a plain clothes traffic cop!