Which UK Road Experiences the Most Disruptions?

11/03/2022 09:08 Share

Which UK Road Experiences the Most Disruptions?

Here at Vertu Motors, we know how frustrating road closures and congestion can be when you’re just trying to go about your daily routines.

Whether you’re fed up of busy morning commutes, or your usual route to the supermarket is always bursting with roadworks, we all have a bone to pick with regular road disruption. But are there any particular days or roads that are particularly disruptive to UK motorists?

To find out, we analysed the amount of motorway closures over a four week period, recording the most common days of the week for those closures as well as the roads that experienced the most disruptions.

Continue reading, below, to take a look at our findings.

What is the best day for motorists to travel?

With a total of 636 road closures over the analysed period, our research found that Tuesday is the worst day to travel for motorists across the country.

That works out as an average of 159 road closures on Tuesdays alone, making it by far the most disruptive day for road travel. Wednesday and Thursday were also very disruptive for UK drivers, seeing total road closures of 624 and 618, respectively, over four weeks.

Unsurprisingly, we found that the weekends were significantly less disruptive for travel, with motorists experiencing 63% less closures on Saturday and Sunday.

Which road experiences the most closures?

The data also revealed that the A1, which runs from London right through to the North East, was the road with the most closures over this period.

As the longest numbered road in the UK, it could be argued that this high amount of closures is expected. The A1 by far experienced the most disruptions from 17^th January to the 13^th February with 336 closures. Yet, if we account for length, the A1 only saw 0.82 closures per mile.

It’s a similar story for the other roads with the most total closures, too. The M1 and the M6 both experienced more than 200 closures in the space of four weeks, but that only works out as 1.27 and 0.92 closures per mile, respectively.

If we were to only look at road closures per mile statistics, then the most disrupted roads list looks very different.

The further analysis found that the A282 in Kent experienced far and away the most disruptions per mile of road, with 28 closures per mile over the four-week period.

In fact, the M6202, which was second highest on the list, only experienced 9 closures per mile. This is a whopping 68% less than the A282.

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