But, transport planners dispense with the deadly stretches in favour of newer and safer bits of tarmac.
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One road north of London is now covered in leaves, as its 2023 replacement carries traffic just metres away.
The A602 connects Hitchin to Ware via Stevenage, a 30-minute drive on the 17-mile-long road.
A new A602 was built in the 1980s to replace an old A602 after traffic in Hertfordshire grew.
But now, the 1980s A602 has now been replaced by an even newer A602 in 2023, as highlighted in a video by a YouTube account Auto Shenanigans.
So why replace only a 40-year-old road?
“It turns out the road wasn’t designed too well in the first place,” host Jon of Auto Shenanigans says.
Jon points out three right-hand turns in quick succession on left-hand bends in a section of the 1980s road just outside Ware.
Jon described the stretch as possibly deadly, or “a bit of a punt”.
None of the three turns had turning bays and traffic would build up waiting for the car to go.
Also, the three turns all sat on or just before corners, making the right hand turns blind.
“And yes, there is a school next door,” Jon glibly jokes.
As traffic built up in the 1980s and 1990s, the turning problems became worse with more traffic competing for the limited space.
The council looked to replace the road in the 2000s, but bungled the paperwork and eventually lost funding from the government.
Then, after getting another chance in 2016, the council brought the paperwork out of storage and got funding to replace the stretch.
The new section of the A602 just opened in August 2023 and its metres away from the old one.
Now drivers take a road with one long bend and turning bays, which provides them with better visibility and an even flow of traffic.
A bridge has also been built over a tributary along the road, but the original structure was found to have defects.
Engineers managed to build another one without any time delays after building its replacement on-site.
But, the old A602 stretch sits only metres away collecting leaves and is one of the country’s most recently abandoned roads.
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