7 January 2002

It is 5pm on the first Monday of the new year and Antonius Van Dorst, a Dutch truck driver, has just finished talking on his mobile to his boss back in the Netherlands. During the brief call he explained that he was driving towards the M1 from Manchester, via the A616. Now he is approaching the Tankersley roundabout which marks the eastern end of that stretch of the 616 known as the Stocksbridge bypass, after the South Yorkshire town it was built to avoid in 1988.

Sweeping down towards the roundabout, past lush fields and thick, curving verges, the road narrows. A series of heavy, white diagonal markings on the road and large signs bearing the legend '50' instruct drivers to slow down for the junction which is hidden just around the bend.

For whatever reason, Van Dorst does not slow down. Or at least he does not slow down enough. His HGV slams into the back of a car transporter queuing at the junction, the top platform of which crashes through his windscreen and into his head. He is killed instantly.

When an inquest is opened three days later the coroner is told that, because of the extent of his injuries, it has not been possible to identify Antonius Van Dorst, save by a passport and driving licence found in the cab. He is the twenty-second person to die on the Stocksbridge bypass.

It is one of the most dangerous roads in Britain. Everyone will tell you that: locals, safety campaigners, politicians. Everyone, that is, but the South Yorkshire police who patrol it. They will tell you something even more troubling: that, statistically, the Stocksbridge bypass is no more dangerous than any other road of its type in Britain.

Sergeant Steve Farnsworth, based at Hoyland police station near Barnsley, is certain of it. He has been supervising the policing of the A616 since 1990. He has huge, curling maps sprinkled with red dots for each fatality, which he will spread across the floor of his office for you to look at. He has done comparisons with other routes. 'And I can tell you,' he says with the deadpan authority of the career copper, 'that it is no more dangerous than any other.'

There is only one conclusion to be drawn from this: that driving anywhere can be lethal. But then we've always known that, haven't we? Nearly 3,500 people are killed every year on Britain's roads. Another 40,000 are seriously injured and 280,000 slightly hurt. Tomorrow marks the beginning of National Road Safety Week. There will be campaigns, events and reports of new research - and still people will die as a result of car crashes, some of them on the Stocksbridge bypass. It has claimed almost two lives for every year of its own life. There is no reason to suppose it will stop now, as this diary of the past nine months illustrates.

Farnsworth would probably not approve of such a portrayal of the bypass; this attempt to characterise it as some vengeful creature with a mind of its own, intent on killing anybody foolish enough to think they can drive upon it. 'The problem is not the road,' he says to me - often - when we meet. 'It's the way people drive on it'. And you can hear him saying it about any road anywhere.

That's the thing about the Stocksbridge bypass: distilled within the arguments over it, within its history and the plans that have been made for its future, lie many of the key issues surrounding road safety in Britain. In its own troubled, dysfunctional way, the Stocksbridge bypass is Every Road.

14 January 2002

John Tissington, an 18 year-old apprentice carpenter from Barnsley, appears at Sheffield Crown Court to be sentenced on two charges of causing death by dangerous driving. Fourteen months earlier, shortly after passing his driving test, he lost control of his mother's Fiat Seicento close to the access gates to the Corus steelworks on the Stocksbridge bypass. He drifted across the central 'no overtaking' white lines and straight into the path of a motorcycle. Jean Walker, 48, and his pillion passenger Catherine Brady, 47, were killed instantly.

Sentencing Tissington to 200 hours community service, Judge Robert Moore describes the A616 as 'an important trunk road built on the cheap' and 'quite inadequate for the traffic on it'.

In the 1980s there were few people who argued that the town of Stocksbridge did not need a bypass. The main route from Sheffield to Manchester cut straight through the centre and from dawn to dusk the narrow high street was choked with trucks heading to and from Manchester Airport and the docks at Liverpool beyond. The original plans were for a dual carriageway with a central crash barrier. Then, shortly before work was due to begin, it was downgraded to a single carriageway. The only concession was a passing lane on uphill stretches so that drivers of cars could get around the trucks, which would be limited to 40mph on the otherwise 60mph route.

The bypass was opened by the Transport Minister Paul Channon on 13 May 1988. Just after he cut the ribbon the then mayor of Stocksbridge, the late Malcolm Brelsford, handed Channon a letter. It said that, in his opinion, the road as built was fearfully dangerous.

The first person to die was Maurice Reed on 24 August 1988. He was followed by Daniel Considine on 22 March 1989. Next, a year to the day after the first fatality, came Leslie Starkey. And then, three months after that on 1 November, Mohammed Miah. One person died in 1991, one in 1992, two in 1993, four in 1996, three in 1998 and onwards into the twenty-first century, death after death after death.

To understand why these people have died it is worth taking a drive on that part of the A616 regarded as the Stocksbridge bypass, which runs from the Tankersley roundabout where Van Dorst was killed to the junction at Langsett five miles to the west. The landscape here, while as undulating as one might expect this close to the spine of the Pennines, is also curiously open. At various places the view - of fields, woods, lakes reflecting back South Yorkshire's gunmetal skies - goes on for miles. The road seems to tuck into the gentle hillsides, falsely promising a smooth ride at speeds far above the limit of 60mph. 'It's a very unforgiving road,' says Stocksbridge councillor Martin Davis, who has campaigned for change these past 10 years. 'There's little room for driver error. Accidents tend to be minor bumps or it's bang, dead.'

So is it, as Farnsworth says, down to the drivers? 'That's too simplistic,' Davis says. 'It's everything: topography, layout, road markings.' He hesitates. 'Any road is safe if you drive it properly. I always say that you should design roads for idiots. This one is designed for good drivers and there aren't many of those.'

24 March 2002

It is 8.30am and Joanne Moore is on her way to work in the family BMW with its personalised number plate which reads 'JIM', her husband's name. Jim, a tank erector, is away working in Ireland. In the back of the car are Moore's twin four year-old sons, Keiran and Thomas, whom she is going to drop off at her mother's house nearby.

She pulls on to the Stocksbridge bypass at Deepcar, just as the road heads uphill. According to witnesses she appears to lose control of the BMW. The vehicle first 'fishtails', its back wheels fanning from side to side, and then it spins out of control, sending its rear end into the opposite carriageway where it is hit by a 38-tonne truck coming the other way.

Moore is seriously injured by the impact. The twins are flung from their car seats and on to the road, killing them instantly. Keiran and Thomas become the twenty-third and twenty-fourth people to die on the bypass.

The death of the Moore twins has dominated debate about the Stocksbridge bypass ever since, blowing open the argument between those who blame the drivers and those who blame the road. The local newspaper, the Sheffield Star, launched a massive campaign for change on the back of the tragedy and, with the people of Stocksbridge, raised a 46,000-name petition demanding it be turned into a dual carriageway.

Not everybody agrees with the campaign, however, including the twins' father. Jim and Joanne Moore are separated now. He has moved down to Leicestershire to live with his parents for the moment, but he intends to move back to Stocksbridge when he can find somewhere else to live, even though it will mean driving on the road where his children died. He says he finds it an 'extremely difficult thing to do'.

'I knew that road very well. I worked in Barnsley so I drove it night and day.' At first, he says, he didn't mind locals using his sons' death to campaign for change. 'Initially, with all the shock and not knowing the facts, I just told people to get on with it. But after a period of getting the lads thrown at you all the time, that was too much.'

I ask him how people should drive. 'Just use common sense. Read the signs and take notice of them. But people don't do it. I was probably one of the worst drivers for it. It's the nature of driving,' he says. 'It's very hard.'

For the police based at Hoyland the case has proved a challenge, both professionally and personally. Constable Jim Lucas, already a crash investigator, had only finished his training as a family liaison officer a few weeks before. It was one of the first incidents he had to deal with. He was driving the grandparents home when they received a call on their mobile from Jim Moore in Ireland, who couldn't raise his wife on the phone. He remembers listening to them as they broke the news.

A few days later he was standing in the morgue with Jim Moore, who had come to see the bodies of his sons. 'He's there looking to me for answers,' says Lucas, who has two sons of his own, 'and there's nothing I can say.' There isn't much training that can prepare you for a moment like that, he says. 'You have to take it as it comes.'

Lucas takes me out on a patrol of the bypass. We park up on the verge of a slip road leading on to the westbound carriageway. From here we have a good view of the downhill run where the Moore twins died. We sit, quietly, listening to the muffled hum of the traffic, and watching.

Using onboard video equipment he checks the speed of trucks and cars coming downhill. Most are sticking below or just above the speed limit. Under Home Office guidelines he won't pull them over unless they are doing at least 10 per cent above the limit plus two miles an hour extra - 68mph on a 60mph road. Suddenly we see a motorcycle tuck in just behind a truck. It looks as if it's planning to overtake despite the double white lines which the officer says should be regarded as 'a mental brick wall'. Just before the bottom of the slope he finally goes for it, cutting around the truck, and we set off after him.

We do not need the sirens. The biker clocks us within seconds and pulls over into a lay-by. Lucas gets the motorcyclist to sit in the back of his car and watch the video. 'It's only a couple of months ago I had to go and show a father his two young sons in the morgue,' he says. The motorcyclist says nothing as Lucas writes up the fixed penalty notice. I introduce myself and ask if he has any comments on the road. 'They ought to spend more time on criminals than motorists,' he says and stomps back to his bike.

'That's what we have to deal with,' says Lucas.

Farnsworth admits that, since the death of the Moore twins, the Stocksbridge bypass has become a hugely political issue for the police. 'As a result we've had to give it more attention. In the meantime there have been more collisions on other roads.'

Last year there were 13 fatalities in the Barnsley area. This year, by the end of July, there had already been 12. Farnsworth is prepared to describe this as a 'statistical blip' and it may be, but there are also other pressures at work. The Government's much vaunted campaign to stamp out street crime - which resulted in last week's trumpeted 14 per cent drop - has forced constabularies to pull officers off traffic duties. They are on the streets now, feeling collars for mobile phone thefts. It has not been that tough a call for Chief Constables. Constabularies have a set of what are called 'core responsibilities' and road safety isn't one of them.

According to Rob Gifford of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (Pacts) the number of dedicated traffic officers in Britain has halved over the past 10 years. The current crime drive, which will shortly require Jim Lucas to come off traffic, has not helped matters. 'It feels like a waste of my expertise,' Lucas told me.

Pauline Clare, who retired as Chief Constable of Lancashire Constabulary in July, would agree. ' I really don't believe there has ever been sufficient importance placed on road safety by the Home Office,' she says, 'and that's because there's a drive for the police to concentrate on crime reduction and anti-social behaviour.'

Her response was to seek out extra funding for a separate road safety campaign. The local authority coughed up but the Home Office didn't want to know. 'There is no Home Office objective to reduce road casualties,' Clare said, 'and as a result Chief Constables put their resources into things which are considered a political priority. I think it should be a core part of policing but it's not seen that way.'

David Jamieson, the Roads Minister, declined to be interviewed for this piece but in a written answer prepared by his staff said it was for Chief Constables to decide how to spend their budget. While traffic policing was important, he said, 'that cannot be their only concern and nor can everything be a priority.'

5 May 2002

Ken Faulkner, grandfather of the Moore twins, delivers the 46,000-name petition on the Stocksbridge bypass to John Spellar, Transport Minister. He also writes a letter to Tony Blair. 'For 24 lives to have been lost on a bypass that is barely five miles long is unacceptable,' he tells the Prime Minister. 'I am asking you now ... to do something before it [becomes] number 25 and 26.'

28 May 2002

It is 8.45pm and Leigh Tombs, 28, is driving his partner and their four-year-old twin children in the family Skoda east bound along the Stocksbridge bypass. Some 200 metres from where the Moore twins died, he collides head on with an Isuzu Trooper going in the opposite direction. The driver and two passengers in the Isuzu are unhurt. One of the twins, Grace Nicholson, is taken to hospital with severe head injuries where she dies a few days later. She is the twenty-fifth person to be killed on the Stocksbridge bypass.

Mary Williams knows a lot about death on the roads. In 1992 her mother was killed by a lorry with defective breaks. It led her to set up Break!, the organisation which runs National Road Safety Week. The offices are in Huddersfield, fittingly close to Stocksbridge. Two years after she founded the charity her boyfriend was killed in a head-on collision with an overtaking driver. Mary Williams knows too much about death on the roads.

'The problem with road death is that it is considered mundane,' she says. 'They are inconvenient because they happen in ones and twos.' Then she adds, with dark sarcasm: 'If they would only die in jumbo jet loads it would make more of a splash.'

The bitter irony is that Britain's death toll of 3,500, down 35 per cent from more than 5,000 in 1985, makes us one of the best performers in Europe (although we are one of the worst performers on child pedestrian deaths - the focus of the coming road safety week - which were up 14 per cent last year.)

So what is to be done? 'We need to spend money,' Williams says. Each road death is estimated by the Government to cost the economy £1 million, in expense by the emergency services, lost working hours by the bereaved and support for them. (It means the 25 casualties at Stocksbridge have cost more than the £18m spent on building the bypass.) 'We think that 3,500 times £1m would be a good amount to spend on road safety every year,' Williams says, and she has no shortage of ideas about how to spend it.

She intones the three Es: Enforcement, Education, Engineering. She wants more police back on the roads enforcing the law. She wants more speed cameras and better design to slow drivers down. She wants research and constant advertising campaigns. She is probably the only person in Britain likely to utter the words: 'Bring back Jimmy Saville. He made a real impact.'

To be fair to the current Government, it has been lauded by many in the field for having made a serious commitment to a lot of these things. In 2000 it published its National Road Safety Plan which set ambitious targets of a 40 per cent reduction in deaths and serious injuries by 2010 and a 50 per cent reduction in deaths and serious injuries among children by the same date. It has even provided money. The problem, according to Rob Gifford of Pacts, is a shortage of people to spend it. 'In the mid 1990s when local authorities were under a cash squeeze, they de-skilled themselves by getting rid of their highways departments and contracting it out,' he says.

And then there is the grubby business of politics, which can undermine all those good intentions. In the past year, under pressure from the car makers, the Government has refused to back binding legislation at European level which would make the design of cars less hostile to pedestrians. Instead it backs industry self-regulation. It has also refused to back a European move to drop the safe blood alcohol level for drivers from 80mg per 100m to 50mgs. 'People I have spoken to in the road safety field believe the Government has pulled the rug out from beneath their feet,' Rob Gifford says.

Then again, sometimes, politics can work the other way.

22 July 2002

After first announcing that the Stocksbridge bypass is safe, and then rejecting calls for a public inquiry into the road, Transport Minister John Spellar announces an investment of £400,000 in speed cameras for the A616. 'I hope that the cameras will reinforce to motorists the need to keep to the speed limit and drive safely.' The cameras should be in place by November.

8 September 2002

It is 9.55pm and two women aged 39 and 35 are driving towards each other on the Stocksbridge bypass. About 200 metres from the junction with the A61 the westbound driver's car drifts inexplicably into the eastbound lane. The cars collide head on but miraculously neither driver suffers more than whiplash. 'We were very fortunate with that one,' says Farnsworth. 'It could have been much much worse.'

Late in my visit to Hoyland police station Farnsworth gets out his roll of maps which go back to 1996 and unfolds them on the floor. Changes in the layout of the road before that make it difficult to compare statistics, he says, but he still thinks he can make his point. '

Look,' he says, showing me the rash of coloured spots which mark road traffic accidents. 'In 1999 all there was were 16 slight injuries. In 2000 there were two serious injuries, 15 slights and no fatalities. We've had years with no fatalities on the Stocksbridge bypass at all. There's this myth about that road.'

Perhaps, but it has still claimed 25 lives. For comparison I telephone the Ministry of Defence. They tell me that during the (first) Gulf war, 24 members of the British Army were killed, one fewer than has died on the Stocksbridge bypass. In Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone - the other places in which the Army has seen active service since 1988 - 16 soldiers were killed, nine fewer than on the Stocksbridge bypass.

I phone the fire service - 14 firefighters have died on active service in Britain since 1988, 11 fewer than on the Stocksbridge bypass. Suddenly fighting fires or going to war seems safer than driving on the Stocksbridge bypass. And apparently it is just a road, like any other.

A deadly way to travel

50 per cent of road victims are car passengers.

25 per cent of road deaths involve pedestrians.

87 per cent of car casualties are front-seat occupants.

64 per cent of car deaths involve drivers.

40 per cent of pedestrian casualties are children.

47 per cent of pedestrian fatalities are people aged 60 or older.

20 per cent of cyclist deaths involve children.

One in seven casualties occurs on urban roads, but 50 per cent of deaths happen on rural roads. 42 per cent of road deaths occur at night.

80 per cent of road deaths occur in collisions between vehicles.

8 per cent of collisions are the result of vehicle defects.

Drivers between 17 and 20 are six times more likely to be involved in a collision than a driver over 40.

33 per cent of collisions are a result of speeding.

A 1 per cent reduction in mean traffic speed reduces fatalities by 7 per cent.

5 per cent of pedestrians hit at 20mph are killed; the figure climbs to 45 per cent at 30 mph and 85 per cent at 40mph.

5 per cent of road casualties and 15 per cent of deaths are alcohol-related.

10 per cent of collisions are caused by driver fatigue.

The most dangerous road in Europe runs from Faro to Cape St Vincent in the Algarve, Portugal.

Six people died in road accidents in Britain per 100,000 population in 2000-2001; in Portugal the rate was 21.9.

· Additional research by Kim Bunce