| E-Petition – Install a pedestrian crossing on Briars Lane outside Hatfield Community Free School. Officers have inspected the site and analysed the latest traffic information to fully consider the petitioners’ concerns. In Hertfordshire, we have over 3,000 miles of roads, which include some of the busiest roads in the country. Across the county there are 594 schools where children are educated. Road safety is one of the main concerns of many parents when considering their child's journey to school. In response to national guidance, the Authority has produced, as part of its Local Transport Plan (LTP), the Road Safety Strategy which aims to improve safety for all by minimising the number of collisions and injuries occurring as a result of the transport network. This can be achieved through road safety education and training, safety audits, engineering measures and enforcement. Our Road Safety Unit monitors collisions and prioritises hazardous sites based on collision history. The five year collision records have been checked and there is no record of any personal injury collisions at this location. The site was assessed for a School Crossing Patrol in July 2015, but the set criteria was not met. We use the results of our analysis to identify and prioritise the sites we will investigate and, where appropriate, carry out engineering work, so that whatever work we do maximises the reduction of personal injury collisions on the County’s road network. We would of course like to address all road safety issues on our roads, however, because we have limited funding, we have to direct our resources to those areas where our work has the greatest potential to reduce the number and severity of collisions that occur. Taking into consideration that there is no record of any personal injury collisions at this location, it is unlikely this site would attract core funding from the County Council’s annual road safety budget for the foreseeable future. County Councillors have a £90,000 Highways Locality Budget (HLB) each financial year to spend on highway related matters in their division. This can be allocated to highway maintenance work (e.g. to supplement Hertfordshire County Council’s annual works programme) and miscellaneous traffic/highway related works, such as small traffic calming and road safety related schemes. These funds are limited and there are many demands for such schemes in each division. Briars Lane will be added to a list of requests in the Hatfield East division for funding consideration during the 2018/19 budget year, for possible investigations including the collection of traffic speed and flow data. In the event that such investigations highlight a significant problem with speeding in this road, council officers will highlight the information to the police and discuss the matter with the County Councillor to see whether any lower cost traffic calming measures like road signs and ‘slow’ road markings could be funded from the HLB during 2018/19. |