YOUR front page headlines last week and your editorial made much of the crash at Fosse Bridge and the apparent dangers associated with the A429.

The problem is not with the road; I travel this road quite regularly and have never had a crash or even a near miss between Cirencester and Bourton on the Water, in either direction.

I do travel at the speed limits, which include National, 50 mph and 40 mph, when safe to do so.

However, I am regularly tailgated and overtaken by cars, and sometimes vans, in stupid places obviously exceeding the speed limit by some margin. There are sensible opportunities to overtake slow moving vehicles without exceeding the speed limit but drivers are too impatient to wait for these safe stretches.

Lo and behold, there they are waiting for me at the traffic lights.

The volume of traffic on this road is not sufficient to warrant dualling; there are quite often significant periods with no traffic at all. Unfortunately, the number of road deaths and casualties nationally is rising for the first time in years so perhaps we should be looking at the underlying cause.

The survey has already been done or at least is ongoing. The Gloucestershire Road Safety Partnership, part of GCC councillors please note, continuously gathers information on all road safety issues.

Try looking at http://roadsafety-gloucestershire.org.uk/data/incident-map/ where you can see all incidents for the past five years. The very latest are not yet on it because investigation is not complete.

However, there are some incidents for earlier this year and it will be updated when the information is available. As a bonus, it also shows where all the road safety cameras are situated!.

The statistics show that almost all incidents are down to road user error.

Perhaps driver education is the solution to the problem, not spending £millions on otherwise quite sensible stretches of road. Or let’s remove all the distractions from the vehicles and ensure drivers concentrate on the road ahead and around. Resolve the cause, not the location.

GORDON BURLEY

Cirencester