Why are UK country roads so narrow?

I need to know what country your from to understand clearly your comment about our country roads, the roads your describing are hundreds of years old connecting villages and in some cases farms they weren't meant for modern traffic and yet they exist we'd be lost without them.

The traffic volume on most such roads is quite low and most people are not driving very fast so serious accidents are relatively rare.

I don't have any statistics handy but my impression is that accident rates are higher on roads that have higher volumes and more complex junctions. I too would be interested to see some statistics on accident rates for the different kinds of road in the UK.

As @senghenydd says many such roads are hundreds, in some cases thousands, of years old. Widening them to allow for two lanes along their entire length would be hugely expensive because many of them are a metre or two below the level of the surrounding fields or they run through narrow valleys. And of course you would be reducing the size and hence productivity of the fields that you take land from. It's certainly debatable whether the cost would ever be paid back in reduced cost to society through reduced accident rates.

My experience of driving in Devon and Cornwall is that as soon as a road is wide enough for two cars the average speed rises dramatically and I suspect that this would have an unwanted and equally dramatic effect on the fatal and near fatal accident rate. By wide enough I mean wide enough for two ordinary cars to pass with a few centimetres to spare between then and to the edge of the road; remember that because many are sunken below the field level the edge of the road might well be a two metre high solid wall of mud and rocks with overhanging bushes and trees.

I thank all members who responded.
I honestly never thought about horse and carts or walking tracks.
I do believe that a grading on either side of the road will allow for two lanes.
Convince me otherwise.

Fatality rate on the roads is 2.69 per 100,000 people. Well below the European average (which in turn is well below the international average). Speed is the main cause of death.

The narrow roads were built for Roman armies, pony post, walking to school. Not for modern cars. We have motorways for those.

You would have loved my bus trip through narrow lanes the other day.
These roads have been there for centuries….they are not all like
that.

You're talking about roads that pre-date cars. They were perfectly adequate for people on foot or horseback, and the width of the road has become defined by the boundaries of the fields or woods on either side. It's not as dangerous or inconvenient as you might think, there are usually places where two vehicles can pass, and fatalities are very rare.

Most single track roads have passing places and sometimes drivers have to be prepared to reverse if a large vehicle comes towards them. That can be a problem for the less competent driver. Fatalities on these roads? Rare*. Fatalities on motorways and fast A roads? Much higher.

*Excluding wildlife

They have to be, esp. N - S roads.

England is from German; look at a map--England ist sicher ein ganz enges Land!

("a narrow country" = "ein enges Land")

It’s only in rural areas that this is a thing. The land is worked hard as it always has been. Roads come after the net yield of the land around them.

I like your question.

It's crazy , it drove me nuts last time.

Fatal accident rates? Probably a lot less now Top Gear was cancelled. 😏

Don't dare come to Ireland 🤣🤣. There's a lot of them here too

Only country roads generally are on the mainland. Although all roads are small on the Isle of Wight.

The roads were built for horse and cart....not cars.

Because hundreds of years ago they were designed/built for a horse-drawn farm cart, not cars.

It's to make it easier to set up an ambush.