Well if it comes to UK road travel I doubt that is the case…
With occasion to be covering a fair few UK road miles in the past few days - and over the next week or two I suspect quite a few more - I thought I’d look up some stats to see whether the general theories like ‘the M25 is the biggest car park in the world’ hold any water…
According to the 2006 national travel survey the average trip length is 6.9 miles and takes 22 minutes - not a good start - an average speed of 18.8 mph!
And given that “motorway carparks” are normally created by accidents its no surprise to learn that, according to Transport Statistics for Great Britian 2007 Edition (Transport Accidents and Casualties) there were 189,000 accidents in 2006 - that’s about about an accident every 3 minutes - so there’s no surprise that on a journey of a few hours you might very well be lucky enough to encounter a delay due to an accident on your chosen route…
And given the Transport Statistics for Great Britian 2007 Edition (Vehicles) now reports 33,369,000 (yup, over 33 million) vehicles on UK roads its an unavoidable fact that you will have to share your road trip with *lots* of other people…
For some reason this all reminds me of Jerry Lewis’ “Sunday Driving” (YouTube) 
Oh, buggered if I know…
[Update: 11Dec07] just to prove all myths are prone to de-bunking I today did over a 100 miles on the M3, M25 and M1 at no less than 60mph… go figure…
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