THE A909 that runs between Kelty and Burntisland has been named as one of the "10 persistently high risk main roads" in Great Britain.

An annual report out today, 'How safe are you on Britain's main road networks?', said there were 20 fatal and serious crashes on the 14km route in West Fife between 2012 and 2017.

The other nine roads are in England.

And while the Road Safety Foundation said "striking progress" had been made in Scotland in reducing the death toll on our roads, it insisted major investment was needed across the UK to improve road safety.

Kate Fuller, acting executive director for the charity, said: “Our main road networks need to be safe.

"So much of our travel is on these intensely-used networks that any flaw in their in-built safety means tragedy sooner rather than later."

The report said that the A909, which also runs through Cowdenbeath and past the Mossmorran complex, is a black – high risk – road on a map compiled by the European Road Assessment Programme (EuroRAP).

It assesses roads in Europe to show how well they protect life in the event of a crash and the risk is calculated by comparing the frequency of road crashes resulting in death and serious injury on every stretch of road with how much traffic each road is carrying.

The A909 is in the worst category and the report said two-thirds of the crashes on the road between 2015 and 2017 involved pedestrians, cyclists or motorcyclists.

Just over a fifth were head-on smashes.

The annual report tracks the safety of the main ‘A’ roads, where most of Britain’s roads deaths are concentrated, and despite the Fife road's record, Scotland was praised for leading the way in making our roads safer.

Travel on major routes in this country now has a death and serious injury rate of 13 per billion vehicle kilometres, the safest in Britain and one of the safest in the world.

Ms Fuller said: “Years of work in Scotland, coupled with widely-adopted formal casualty reduction targets is delivering results, and Scotland’s main road network is now safer than England’s and significantly safer than that of Wales."

The report said that by setting formal casualty reduction targets, and establishing multi-agency partnerships to deliver them, Scotland was a successful model to follow.

A total of 1,793 people were killed on Britain’s roads in 2017, a figure which has changed little since 2011 despite ongoing improvements in the safety of vehicles on the road.

The foundation, a UK charity advocating road casualty reduction through action on roads, vehicles and behaviour, has called on the UK Government to invest £117 million to prevent 3,450 fatal and serious injuries on persistently higher-risk roads over the next 20 years.