The ladies of BRAKE speaking nonsense again.

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When it comes to road safety and driving, I wish the ladies of BRAKE, the charity, stuck to what they know, victim support, as they have no cv in road safety or driving expertise.

With all these costly so called road safety charities, you wouldn't believe that after about 300 billion driver miles a year, there's less death, from all causes, on the road than from accidents in the home, less than from strangulation and hanging and even less than from self harm.

There is nothing dangerous about a well planned and executed overtake on a country road but to suggest that there should be no overtaking on them at all is totally ill conceived. 

What we need to do is reduce the need to overtake, thus reducing the attempts to do so. When a slower driver ignores a long queue of faster drivers - a queue only forms because all other drivers had been driving faster until obstructed- it is driving without due care for other road users and imposing a speed on all others. Police should be pulling these Aggressive Slows over and finding out why they are ignoring a tail back. We could also convert many lay-bys & spare land to passing places where drivers may pull over regularly to allow others to pass them safely.

We should also revise speed limiting. Restricting dual carriageways to 50 MPH prevents the safe and legal overtaking of slower vehicles and HGVs on roads that were built for overtaking. This inevitably pushes overtaking out onto the single carriageway roads where we need it least. Authorities never connect the accidents they have caused somewhere else by a badly placed speed limit. 

Poor speed limit layout will also induce hurried overtaking when a short length of de-restricted limit is sandwiched between long stretches of 40 MPH for example.

But let's beware. If BRAKE have their way, overtaking will soon be banned totally on single carriageways. It would be safer to ban BRAKE  I think.