| Officers have visited The Commons and can confirm the lead petitioner’s comments that there is some congestion caused by the existing resident vehicles, through traffic and parents trying to access or park as close to Commonswood Primary School as possible. The problems are usually confined to the 20-30 minute period around school start and finish times and ease off outside that. All of the County Council’s Highways and Transport related schemes and initiatives are identified through a number of Local Transport Plans, developed with consideration to Hertfordshire County Council’s Corporate Plan. Therefore all concerns and requested schemes must be able to demonstrate a clear link to the objectives set out in the Local Transport Plans. These objectives include improving road safety and school travel planning. The Police provide us with collision data and our road safety engineering specialists consider all reported personal injury collisions in the County on an annual basis and identify locations at which there are concentrations of reported injury collisions. Taking into account the collision history for the entire County, the Council initiates road safety engineering enhancements, on a prioritised basis, where the collision history demonstrates that there are aspects of the road environment that could be modified and/or improved to reduce the potential for future collisions. The most up to date collision data for The Commons thankfully shows it does not have a high rate of collisions and consequently does not feature on the County Council’s Safety Engineering Programme. In 2012 the local County Councillor at the time supported funding from the Highways Locality Budget (HLB) for a consultation of The Commons and the 4 cul-de-sacs off it. The consultation suggested a number of possible options which included; a. providing a one-way system either east to west or west to east b. providing new parking restrictions around all the carriageway junctions c. providing some additional parking by either widening the carriageway or hardening some verges. 170 consultation letters were sent to which 14 responses were received. Analysis of those responses, coupled with the low responses rate, gave no clear consensus and therefore no further work took place. The County Council encourages schools to identify their road safety concerns through the formation of a School Travel Plan. The purpose of a School Travel Plan is to set out a package of measures and actions to reduce the number of car journeys on the school run and to increase the number of active and sustainable journeys, such as walking and cycling. Commonswood Primary School does not currently have a School Travel Plan in place and as such, our School Travel Plan co-ordinator will try to make contact with them to offer support in moving this forward, but this is not likely to provide immediate solutions to the problems raised in the petition. In the meantime the County will continue to liaise with the current local County Councillor to see if any future minor highway works can be funded through the Highways Locality Budget scheme. |