UK’s slowest motorways revealed by Satrak

Posted by Satrak on 10.04.2017

After it was announced in February that the average driver will spend 32 hours a year in traffic jams, Satrak analysed 527,700 vehicles and has discovered the slowest motorways in Britain based on the average speeds of vehicles travelling on them.

Gathered throughout the entire year of 2016, the data covered all 2,173 miles of Britain’s motorways, from the M5 in Cornwall, right up to the M90 in Scotland.

It may be of little surprise to those that use it on a daily basis, but the M25 was found to be the slowest motorway of all, with the average speed totalled at a dismal 25.05mph.

The M25 is so slow that the tenth slowest motorway (M602) has almost double its average speed at 48.33mph.

It would take a vehicle nearly five hours to travel all 117 miles, which is the equivalent flight time of a plane travelling from London to Turkey or Greece.

The ten slowest motorways in Britain are as follows:

Aside from the slowest motorways, the data was also able to show which cities suffered from slowest speeds.

Analysing the average speeds of vehicles within cities over the same period of time, it was found that Cambridge is in fact the slowest city in the UK with average speeds of only 13mph — 7mph lower than most of its strict 20mph city speed limits.

In fact, none of the cities featured within the top ten surpassed 20mph, with speeds in Oxford (10^th) only reaching 16mph:

For those interested, the fastest average speeds in cities were found in Carlisle (44.7 mph), Preston (39.8mph), and Winchester (39 mph).

Dan Walton, MD of Satrak Plant Security, said:

“It’s little surprise to find that the M25 is in fact the slowest motorway. We undertake work throughout the country and usually find the M25 to be the most cumbersome, and our data provides evidence for that.

“I’ve heard of tailbacks stretching 12 miles in my time there so it’s of little surprise to me. It’s nice to see that people are taking care in many of our cities however, as these places are often busy and above all are not environments for speeding.”

Check out the slowest cities in our interactive map, below: