Speed Guns & Road Safety

Much of our curent Road Safety work in Reading is all about getting drivers to realise that they are speeding. It is far too easy these days to get in a car and zoom off at 35 or 40mph down ordinary suburban streets. There is nothing to stop you. The few cameras that are in place rarely work and police speed traps are not very common.

Unlike other councils, Reading seems to have taken a stand against flashing speed signs that light up when you approach at speeds over the limit. Such signs are now common in neighbouring authorities. RBC officers tell me that they worry about vandals wrecking the signs or nicking the solar panels that often power them. Interestingly they must have had a change of heart recently as I see they are now proposing the use of solar powered bollards in some parts of the Borough.

During the recent budget debate in council I managed to insert a small sum of money to buy speed guns for use by local NAGs (Neighbourhood Action Groups  – go to http://www.thamesvalley.police.uk/yournh/yournh-nag.htm if you have not come across NAGs before) when they had identified speeding as an issue. Local police teams are ready and willing to get their hands on the cameras and to start enforcement actions on local roads. Only by providing some deterrent can we really begin to hammer home the message that speeding on our roads is not acceptable. Drivers understand well enough that the faster they go the more danger they create but with no visible enforcement, they do not seem to worry about doing 40mph on a 30mph road.

We have a long way to go to change drivers behaviour but that was said 20 years ago about drinking and driving and we have succeeded over the years not in totally eradicating it but in making it unacceptable where before it was commonly accepted as a normal thing to do.  Partly this required eductaion and publicity but it also relied on the police taking stronger action against drink drivers and increasing enforcement.

Well now in Reading we can provide the tools for local police to take action against speeding drivers and I hope we can start very soon.

Road Safety

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.