What's bad about these stretches of road in particular or is it nothing and just bad driving again?
All around the Chilterns there are similar stories - roads with high banks and tall hedges so a car can't see around corners, the roads are often winding because they're ancient cart tracks but they've been flattened out, widened and the corners smoothed over the years, so in places they drive like a race track. It ends up with whole stretches of country road that you can race down without dipping below 70mph if you know them well - and you're fine, so long as there isn't a stationary or slow-moving obstruction in the road. One of the guys I went to school with was killed a couple of years ago when he drove his motorbike into the back of a tractor early one morning. He'd travelled that road every day for 15 years - you just get complacent after a while.
The problem isn't the cyclists themselves, it's the car drivers' expectation that there won't be any kind of obstruction in the road just around the next bend, too close to stop in time. But after years of driving the same road the same way, people just don't expect it - that's human nature. As a cyclist though, unless you've lived in the area for a while it can be hard to tell if it's one of that kind of road.
All around the Chilterns there are similar stories - roads with high banks and tall hedges so a car can't see around corners, the roads are often winding because they're ancient cart tracks but they've been flattened out, widened and the corners smoothed over the years, so in places they drive like a race track. It ends up with whole stretches of country road that you can race down without dipping below 70mph if you know them well - and you're fine, so long as there isn't a stationary or slow-moving obstruction in the road. One of the guys I went to school with was killed a couple of years ago when he drove his motorbike into the back of a tractor early one morning. He'd travelled that road every day for 15 years - you just get complacent after a while.
The problem isn't the cyclists themselves, it's the car drivers' expectation that there won't be any kind of obstruction in the road just around the next bend, too close to stop in time. But after years of driving the same road the same way, people just don't expect it - that's human nature. As a cyclist though, unless you've lived in the area for a while it can be hard to tell if it's one of that kind of road.