A quiz for you.
In the two weeks working at HMP Askern Grange how many apprentices picked up a speeding ticket on the A64?
How many got two tickets over the two week period?
How many got two tickets in one day?
How many would not have got a ticket at all if they were in a car not a van doing that speed?
How many would not have got a ticket if they were using Google maps and looked for the speed camera notifications?
How many tickets did I get?
BTW there is no prize.
I was returning from a country show last year and on the long downhill dual carriageway section of the A64 when I noticed a parasite van in a layby. Fortunately I was being overtaken by someone who hadn't noticed it. That must have taken the parasites attention which gave me time to brake. If HARMs were legal I'd have one fitted.
That sounds like Whitwell Hill, between Malton and York. We used to live very near there (just on the Malton side of the hill) and we were very cautious about starting at the top of the hill at 70 and finding the car had crept up to 80 by the bottom. It is a well-known (to locals) spot for the police speed camera vans to wait for their prey. The police aren't being completely vindictive. The cross roads at the bottom of the hill, before the road rises slightly to go over the railway bridge, was notorious for accidents because there is *supposedly* not much sighting time for cars waiting to join the A64 to see cars coming from York, and cars coming from Malton may have got up to 80 (and the rest!) after the hill. The junction was redesigned about 2 years ago, moving the junction with the road from Castle Howard closer to Malton and further from the brow of the railway bridge. I'm not sure how that has affected the accident rate, because we moved away just before the revised junction opened.
The biggest problem that I found was that long vehicles (eg long HGV, car/van/tractor towing a trailer) did not pull far enough forward when they were sat in the middle of the road at right angles to the A64, having crossed one carriageway and waiting to cross the other. There were several near-misses when cars nearly hit the overhanging trailer. Sometimes as a variant, long vehicles would pull too far forward and it would be their front end that was at risk of being hit. If they are static in the middle of the road, you see them from a long way off and know that you might need to change to Lane 1 to avoid them; the problem is when they have been stationary and then edge forward a few feet in anticipation of being able to set off after you've passed - jumping the gun.
The junction ideally should be grade-separated with slip roads, but that would cost a lot of money and there probably isn't space for slip roads.
The worse junction is at the *top* of Whitwell Hill, where the road from Kirkham joins the A64. There is a very short slip road for cars to get up to speed, and some people woefully overestimate how quickly their car will get up to the speed of the car that is approaching from behind on the A64. I saw a guy waiting (apparently) patiently, and then suddenly the unthinkable happened: after not pulling out when he had plenty of space to do so before I got close, he set off at the last moment. Luckily I'd checked Lane 2 in my mirror as I approached (just in case) so I *knew* that it was safe to swerve into Lane 2 to avoid him. Otherwise I couldn't have risked it (and it would have taken too long to look away to check and then look back) so I'd have had to rely entirely on braking. There was a nasty accident a few years before we moved away: the first I knew was when our road became gridlocked with traffic that was being diverted off through Welburn and then back on at Barton Hill, so I went for a bike ride, partly for exercise and partly to see what had happened.
Most of the A64 needs upgrading to dual carriageway.
Unless it is a quiet day I can get to Filey faster using the A166 and turning off at Fridaythorpe. Same for the return journey.
Or at least dual it from Whitworth Hill to Hopgrove Roundabout
The single-carriageway A64 between Hopgrove and the Jinnah (the Indian restaurant at the start of the dual carriageway that leads to Whitwell Hill) suffers badly from two things: slow drivers (eg tractors) and cars pulling out from side roads in a very leisurely manner which leads to cars on the A64 having to panic-brake to avoid rear-ending them. It desperately needs dualling to mitigate those hazards, and ideally it needs motorway-style grade-separated junctions to allow traffic to cross the A64 (eg at the Stockton-on-the-Forest crossroads near the fish-and-chip restaurant. Ideally, the single-carriageway section from Welburn Lodge crossroads to Malton needs to be dualled as well.
A lot of traffic seems to turn off at Malton (at one of the three junctions) and I've not noticed *such* heavy traffic between Brambling Fields junction and Scarborough.
People argue that the A64 should be dualled all the way to Scarborough, but as you've pointed out the traffic splits in two at Malton. A satisfactory solution would be to finish dualling between York and Malton, filling the Barton Gap and the Hutton Gap, and improve the Malton-Scarborough section to High Quality Single Carriageway.
It's one of the perennial topics in a Roads Forum I chat in. See
jgh
Indeed.
But the lad caught twice at 70 and 71 MPH cannot do two speed awareness courses he will have to take a fixed penalty for one of them. I wonder if the courses are available on line?
Not sure if I got caught. I was doing below 70MPH and Thursday is the last day allowed for the NIP.
Who owns the land? Crown estates cannot be subject to compulsory purchase orders. Prevented an obvious dual carriageway expansion near us for years until finally a deal has been done - involving house building of course.
A lot of it is already land banked as Highways land, particularly eastwards of Hopgrave and westwards from Barton Hill and near Crambeck Bridge. The biggest land take is going to be whatever option is used at Golden Hill, and I think at that point just building a new alignment over farm land is the best solution.
jgh
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