Advice please - How to persuade a council that there is a speeding problem

[Pale Rider]

Tempting to say no one will listen to you, but my experience suggests otherwise.

When I was living in Camberwell Grove in London there was a problem with drivers speeding on the road, which is long and straight.

Someone opposite me started a campaign group, and I found myself in the unique for London position of getting to know about 20 or 30 of the neighbours.

The houses are all listed and occupied mostly by wealthy professionals, so they weren't hopeful of getting much change out of the leftie London borough.

However, we did the usual campaigning type things, and after a few months the council installed some semi-permanent chicanes, made of big blocks of wood painted red and white.

One of the wealthy residents said he/we could pay for proper speed humps, after all, how much can a concrete hump cost?

The answer is rather a lot because the drainage on either side of the road has to be redone.

We got proper humps in the end, but they come with a noise penalty as drivers slow, accelerate, and the vehicles 'crash' over them.

I would suggest some precautions if direct action is being taken.

We did some traffic surveys, and handed out leaflets to drivers as they turned into the road.

One or two were openly hostile which meant we introduced a policy of having at least two of us on the street at any one time.

 

[Drago]

Be careful what you wish for.

When I was involved in community speed enforcement it was quite normal for the majority of offenders to be local. On one occasion I even caught the head of the residents association speeding campaign going well over the limit in his own village.

Indeed, it got quite daft at one point. A load of folk had been into HQ for community speedwatch training, and we caught every single one of them speeding down the 40mph dual carriageway on their way out. Suffice to say they never received any more support.

If you're 100% diligent in your observance of the limit (or you don't drive! ) then you have nothing to fear, but despite the haughty talk most motorists are happy to speed past other peoples houses, even as they complain about people doing so past their own.

Physical traffic calming brings its downsides too. In milton keynes they removed all the bottlenecks because they had turned a speeding problem into a head-on collision problem, and the casualty rate shot up.

And humps, bumps and cushions increase noise, the particulate pollution from tyres and brakes and exhaust pollution as folk accelerate away. Some testing has shown a doubling in air pollution. Nice.

Id simply have chosen not to live there in the first place myself, as none ofnthe potential solutions are liable to be terribly effective, and all have potential adverse consequences.