A64

The Leeds to Scarborough road remains a trunk route to this day, but since the 1970s it has been sorely neglected. Back then it was endowed with fast dualled sections (the reason this page exists) from Leeds to York, the York bypass, then the Malton bypass. Plans to finish the job by filling in the gaps all the way to Scarborough were last seen vanishing into a Whitehall shredder in mid 1997.

It's not that the route doesn't need the extra capacity - most of the time it's busy, but through the summer it's a guaranteed 40mph crawl from the York bypass to the A1039 roundabout at Staxton where traffic starts dispersing along the coast. Scarborough's local paper has a very militant campaign running to get the route upgraded, but at present the only thing on the drawing board is a bypass for the town of Rillington, east of Malton, to be built as a single carriageway. Studies have been carried out and recommendations made in long-term transport plans but there's no formal plan to do the job yet.

The result of this is that the Malton bypass is a four-mile frenzy of overtaking. In heavy traffic this usually means additional delays as the two busy lanes try to narrow into one again, meaning the last mile of the bypass is usually a traffic jam. Heading westbound, there's a further (lower standard) section of dual carriageway before York - but it's wasted, as almost nobody dares overtake after the fiasco at Malton.