YET again, there is blood on the Grane Road - the hell highway on which almost 100 people have been killed or hurt in the past two years.

Today, six more are nursing their injuries after yet another pile-up. And it is now virtually every day that the Grane lives up to its grim record as the most dangerous road in Lancashire.

But when is action going to be taken to cut the carnage?

It has gone on for far too long and it is time that swift steps were taken to stop the already-dreadful toll of grief from becoming even greater.

This was always a bad road - a single-carriageway, B-route snaking high over the moors between Blackburn and Rossendale.

Now, it is an ill-famed artery carrying more traffic than ever - much of it vehicles for which the road is barely fit.

For ever since the M65 extension opened almost two years ago, the Grane has become a rat-run for thousands of drivers using it as a short-cut between it and the Haslingden by-pass and its motorway links.

The road is at least a third busier than before - and, as the casualty rate proves, vastly more dangerous.

It is hard to imagine what the Highways Agency was thinking of when, as the new stretch of the M65 opened, it upgraded the Grane from a B-road to an A-route with virtually no improvements to it.

For was this step not an encouragement for more traffic to take this rat-run and, in effect, for large volumes of motorway traffic to be fed on to a narrow country road?

The upshot has been that it is packed with heavy lorries toiling up its steep gradients with trains of cars crawling behind them and impatient drivers taking deadly chances when they overtake and when the Grane has few overtaking places and none that is really safe. And after the uphill crawl there comes the downhill race - one that is legally limited to 60 mph that is far too fast for the road in any case - as cars and trucks career in descent alongside the slow uphill stream of vehicles from which the rash and impetuous are seeking escape.

But what is maddening is that this situation has been apparent for almost two years and nothing yet has been done to deter it.

Yes, the danger lies most with the drivers themselves, but the road itself is dangerous.

And when a bad road is mixed with bad driving, you get buckets of blood.

What needs to be done now is for double white lines outlawing overtaking to be placed along the entire length of the Grane.

The speed limit must be cut to at least 50 mph and policed by speed cameras.

It should be classified once more as a B-route and the direction signs on the M65 and Haslingden by-pass amended so the link between them is not disclosed.

Indeed, the slip road on the by-pass at Haslingden could even be shut so that traffic between the two has to take the safer dual carriageway route that links them.

And the Grane should have strict weight restrictions so that the crawling HGVs are banned.

All of this can be done and it should be done - now!

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.