I was struck again earlier on today driving back to Reading from Oxford by the amount of investment by other authorities in basic road safety. Every village on my route had an electronic 30mph speed sign that flashed a warning if drivers approached at faster speeds. These signs are now common almost everywhere except in Reading. They do remind careless drivers that there is a 30mph limit as they enter a built up area.

In Reading we have a very different approach to road safety, we tie several small yellow plastic signs to lampposts with long messages in print so small that drivers could not read the messages even if they saw the sign amongst all the other street clutter as they speed by at 40-50mph. Oh, and the signs are taken down after two weeks and moved to another road. There were originally supposed to be electronic signs used in these two week actions but the council only has two such signs so most of the campaign is restricted to the ineffective yellow plastic signs on lampposts.

And the reason  –  RBC officers fear that electronic signs would be vandalised and parts nicked if they were left in Reading streets. So why does this not happen to traffic lights or other road signs ? They also have precious little budget for road safety so we have this wonderfully ineffective ‘awareness campaign’ which is, apparently, going to help reduce traffic speeds in Reading. Do not ask them how, they are not measuring traffic speeds before or after the signs are put out. In short the whole campaign is all about pretending to do something about a very serious problem for which they have no resources to tackle properly.