Dartford Crossing is UK's most dangerous road for speeding

The Dartford-Thurrock River Crossing clocked up an alarming 26,920 speeding offences in 2019/20, comfortably the highest in the country, whilst the Met Police was also responsible for three of the top ten highest.

The figures come from a Freedom of Information request from car rental firm Wessex Fleet to all 45 police forces across the UK, revealing that 167,448 speeding crimes were committed on the top 10 most dangerous roads alone last year.

Over a quarter of them were recorded by the Metropolitan Police alone (45,226).

But it’s Kent’s A282, also known as the Dartford Crossing, and Surrey’s stretch of the M25 that have come out as the worst; a total of 50,478 drivers were caught out on these roads in 2020.

Greater London, policed by the Met, is far and aware the worst area for speeding offences – 88,481 instances were recorded, almost 30,000 more than second-placed Avon and Somerset on 60,000 exactly.

Other stand out statistics include northern roads being nearly 20 times safer than those in the south.

More than half of the safest areas are governed by Northern police forces, with a total of 323,222 speeding offences recorded by Southern forces in the most dangerous list, and only 20,716 in the Northern regions.

The full list of most dangerous roads in the UK, as ranked by speeding offences, is below.

Across the Welsh border, Dyfed-Powys Police is the standout performer, with a total of just 298 speeding offences recorded last year – more than 90% better off than the second safest.

Although they didn’t receive a timely response from all forces, the data gathered by Wessex Fleet covers hundreds of UK roads and hundreds of thousands of speeding reports – filtering each force by the 10 roads with the most cases of speeding, we’ve analysed 699,517 instances.