Skip to content

  • Home
  • Our services
    • Libraries and archives
      • Libraries and archives home
      • Renew a book
      • Books and online reference
      • Library opening hours and locations
      • Events and things to do
      • Volunteer at your library
      • Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies
      • Library membership
      • Other library services
    • Highways, roads and pavements
      • Highways, roads and pavements home
      • Report a faulty street light or pothole
      • Roadworks
      • Severe weather (including gritting)
      • Dropped kerb (vehicle crossover)
      • Public transport
      • Speed awareness and driver training
      • Transport and accident data
      • Business and developer information
    • Schools and education
      • Schools and education home
      • School admissions
      • At school
      • Find a school
      • Childcare and family centres
      • Travel to school
      • Young people and work
      • Adult and family learning
      • Special educational needs
      • Services for Young People
    • Adult social services
      • Adult social services home
      • Care and carers
      • Day services and activities
      • Disability
      • Transport for older people and disabled people
      • Money advice, benefits and support to get a job
      • Report a concern about an adult
      • Mental health, dementia and autism
      • Adult social care leaflets and factsheets
      • HertsHelp
    • Children's social care
      • Children's social care home
      • Child protection
      • Adoption
      • Fostering
      • Families First portal
      • Care leavers' local offer
      • Young people in care
      • Hertfordshire Safeguarding Children Board
    • Recycling, waste and environment
      • Recycling, waste and environment home
      • Recycling and waste
      • Planning
      • Sustainability and climate change
      • Countryside management service
      • Flooding
    • Births, deaths and marriages
      • Births, deaths and marriages home
      • How to register a birth
      • Ceremonies
      • Register Offices
    • Business and Trading Standards
      • Business and Trading Standards home
      • Book a room at Hertfordshire Development Centre
      • Services for businesses, charities and other public bodies
      • What do Trading Standards do?
      • Business advice
      • Consumer advice
      • Doing business with us
      • Licences
    • Health in Herts
      • Health in Herts home
      • Drugs and alcohol
      • Happiness, wellbeing and mental health
      • Healthy places
      • Healthy weight
      • Keep active
      • Sexual health
      • Smoking
      • What is public health?
    • Fire and rescue
      • Fire and rescue home
      • Fire safety checks
      • Jobs in fire and rescue
      • Fire station locations
    • Hertfordshire Directory
      • Hertfordshire Directory home
  • About the council
    • COVID updates
    • Jobs and careers
    • Contact us
    • Consultations
    • Make a complaint, compliment or comment
    • Councillors and council meetings
    • Watch council meetings
    • How the council works
    • Volunteering
    • Elections
    • Petitions
    • News
    • Council tax
    • Freedom of information and council data
Hertfordshire
search button
    
Hertfordshire County Council
Go to home page
< Go back a page
  • Freedom of information an…
  • Freedom of information
  • Access the information we hold about you
  • Open Data
  • Open Data
  • Hertfordshire Pension Fund
  • Document list
  • How we make decisions
  • Who we are and what we do
  • Lists and registers
  • Our policies and procedures
  • The services we offer
  • What our priorities are and how we're doing
  • What we spend and how we spend it
  • How we make decisions
  • Past Petitions
  • View petition
  • Watch meetings
  • Decisions
  • View petition
  • Print and Sharing Options
    • Print this page
    • Share Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp SMS

View petition

  • Details
  • Response to petition
Title: Zebra crossing on Highfield, Letchworth Garden City
Petition Overview: Please consider installing a zebra crossing on Highfield in Letchworth Garden City near the site of the two schools. This morning, Friday 14th July 2017, yet another school student was hit by a car on Highfield. This is the second child to have been injured by a car at this location in less than a year and there have also been a number of frightening near misses. There are two schools at this location so school run times are very busy with parents dropping off and picking up young children at St Thomas More Catholic Primary School, many of whom also have very young children with them and/or babies and toddlers in buggies. Highfield is a very large secondary school with pupils aged 11-18 so large groups of students are attempting to cross Highfield at the same time as many parents are dropping off/collecting in cars and other children are on bikes. Highfield has recently extended their buildings so will soon be increasing their intake of pupils, which can surely only make this problem worse. The issue is that without a designated safe place to cross the road the whole of Highfield is full of people zig-zagging across the road at random intervals, add to this a large number of cars (some parked illegally and some driving too fast), a lot of children on bikes and it becomes such a perilous place to try to cross the road as well as to drive down. We have grave concerns for our children's safety on this road and ask you how many more children need to be injured before you will take action?
Relevant Area(s): Not Specified
Opening Date: 15/07/2017
closing Date: 20/10/2017
Signatures: 141
Petitioner Name: Rachel Bloomfield
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.

 

Rate this page

green smiley (good) orange smiley (average) red smiley (poor)

Hertfordshire County Council – The County of Opportunity

  • Services

    • Libraries and archives
    • Highways, roads and pavements
    • Schools and education
    • Adult social services
    • Children's social care
    • Recycling, waste and environment
    • Births, deaths and marriages
    • Business and Trading Standards
    • Health in Herts
    • Fire and rescue
    • Hertfordshire Directory
  • About the Council

    • Accessibility statement
    • Contact us
    • Jobs and careers
    • Councillors and council meetings
    • Consultations
    • Freedom of information requests
    • Cookies and privacy
update-me

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Translate this site

  • Standard
  • High contrast
  • Low contrast

Cookies

Like many other websites, we place small information files called 'cookies' on your computer.

Why do we use cookies?

To remember your settings, for example your language and location. This means you don’t have to keep entering these details when you visit a new page.

To find out how you use the site to help us update and improve it.

How do I change my cookie settings?

You can change the settings of your web browser so that it won’t accept cookies. For more information visit AboutCookies.org.

But, doing this may stop you from using some of the online features and services on this website. 

Cookies we use

Cookies do a lot of different jobs, and we use 2 types of cookies:

Required functionality cookies – these cookies are essential for the website to work.

Performance and feature cookies – these cookies help to improve the performance and feel of this website, for example providing you with personalised services.


Take a look at a list of cookies we use on our website:

NameTypeHow we use itHow long we use the information for

ASP.Net_Sessions

 

Required functionality

An automatic cookie set by our software. 

Just for the time you are on our website.

ServerID

 

Required functionality

An automatic cookie set by our software. 

Just for the time you are on our website.

_ga

Required functionality

To track the effectiveness of our website using Google Analytics. 

2 years

saved-pages

Performance and feature

To save the pages that you visit by clicking the heart at the top of the page. 

1 month

geoPostcode

Performance and feature

This stores your postcode (or partial postcode) when we ask you for your location.

Just for the time you are on our website or 30 days (you choose this).

geoCoordinates

Performance and feature

This stores your location as a pair of latitude / longitude coordinates.

Just for the time you are on our website or 30 days (you choose this).

reckonerName-history

Performance and feature

This keeps a history of all answers submitted to the ready reckoner.

This is set in the control for each ready reckoner. If you haven't interacted with the ready reckoner for the set amount of days, the cookies are deleted.

reckonerName-content

Performance and feature

This keeps a history of what content cards are clicked on when using the ready reckoner.

This is set in the control for each ready reckoner. If you haven't interacted with the ready reckoner for the set amount of days, the cookies are deleted.

SQ_SYSTEM_SESSION

Required functionality

This used to track user sessions on forms hosted on eservices.hertfordshire.gov.uk

Just for the time you are on our website.


Third party cookies

There are links and content from other sites and services on our website. These sites and services set their own cookies.

Below are a list of cookies that the other sites and services use:

Service namePurposeMore information

Google analytics (_utma/b/c/z)

These are used to compile reports for us on how people use this site.

Cookies of the same names are also used for the same purpose by other websites such as Building Futures, Countryside Management Service and Hertfordshire LIS.

Visit the Google Analytics website for more information about the cookies they use.

You can prevent data from being collected and used by Google Analytics by installing Google's Opt-out Browser Add-on.

Google Translation - googtrans

This cookie is used to remember which language to translate each page into if you have chosen to do so.

It expires at the end of your browser session.

Bing

We use a Bing cookie to track the success of our marketing campaigns and make them more efficient.

Visit Bing to find out more about their cookies.

Google

We use a Google cookie to track the success of our marketing campaigns and make them more efficient.

Visit Google to find out more about their cookies.

Facebook

We have a number of presences on Facebook, which we may link to. Facebook may set some of its own cookies if you follow these links.

Visit Facebook to find out more about their cookies.

Twitter

We have a number of presences and feeds on Twitter, which you may wish to follow or read from this website. Twitter may set some of its own cookies.

Visit Twitter to find out more about their cookies.

YouTube

We have a YouTube channel, which we may link to. YouTube may set some of its own cookies if you follow those links.

Visit YouTube to find out more about their cookies.

Netloan

This ASP.NET_Sessionid cookie is essential for the Netloan secure online payments website to work, and is set when you arrive to the site. This cookie is deleted when you close your browser.

 

HotJar

This session cookie is set to let Hotjar know whether that visitor is included in the sample which is used to generate funnels.

Visit HotJar to find out more about their cookies.

Siteimprove

These cookies are set to help us report on how people are using the site so we can improve it.

Visit Siteimprove to learn more about their cookies.