| Response to Petition for Formal Crossing at Highfield, Letchworth Garden City 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 and across the County there are 594 schools where children are educated. 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 collision records have been checked and these records show that there has been one recorded personal injury collision along the whole length of Highfield in the latest 5 year period (April 2012 – March 2017 inclusive). 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 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 a low personal injury collision record 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. The site was assessed for a School Crossing Patrol in March 2017, but the set criteria were not met. The basis for determining whether it is appropriate to provide a patrol is an assessment of the number of children crossing the road (P) and the traffic flow past this site (V). This is a measure of how busy the site is, and hence a proxy for the level of road safety risk to the children. The national threshold level for providing a School Crossing Patrol site is that P x V2 is at least four million. In Hertfordshire we have more generous criteria of three million if we only count Primary School Children. If we do include Senior Children, which we did at this site, it should be that the P x V2 is at least four million. This particular site has a P x V2 of 2.47 million. We have also recently undertaken a week long covert Speed and Volume survey in the vicinity of the Schools in Highfield. The two nationally used criteria for considering speeds are the mean speeds and the 85%ile speeds (the maximum speed at which 85% of all vehicles travel). The mean and 85%ile speeds found during the recent survey were 20.5 and 25 mph respectively during Monday to Friday, rising slightly to 22.5 and 27.5 mph respectively at the weekend. These figures show good compliance with the 30mph limit – this is not surprising, as Highfield has a series of traffic calming facilities along its length. During the recent on site observations in the morning peak period, crossing of Highfield was observed over a long stretch of the road (from the junctions with Sollershott West and West View), so even if a formal crossing was considered appropriate, it is likely that many pedestrians would still cross Highfield in locations away from any formal crossing point. A meeting has recently taken place at Highfield with the local County Councillor and various stakeholders, including representatives of Highfield and St Thomas More Schools to consider options to improve matters during the schools start and finish times. Following this meeting, officers will liaise with the Schools and County Councillor Terry Hone on possible minor highway improvement works in the vicinity of the Schools funded from the Highway Locality Budget (HLB). County Councillors have a £90,000 Highways Locality Budget 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. In the meantime, Our Active & Safer Travel Team will continue to work with both schools to deliver a suite of road safety education and active travel initiatives, in association with their School Travel Plans. |