I’ve been meaning to make a post about the speeding on Swaffham Road for some time, but two events recently have made this more apt.
Firstly, the Parish Council has indicated on their recent minutes that they intend to discuss a possible 20mph speed limit for the village.
The other event is one I have been dreading ever since we moved in here 10 years ago. On the evening of Sunday 19th April, there was a road traffic collision just around the bend. One of the cars ended up through the fence of Darwin House, the other ended up on its side by the village hall entrance. I won’t say much as the police investigation is still ongoing, but I will say that speed was definitely a major factor.
Since we’ve lived here on Swaffham Road, I’ve been quite aware of just how many vehicles drive fast down this stretch of road, and also just how fast they actually are. However, I wanted to try and understand the problem by seeing if I could record just what speeds are being reached coming into Oxborough.
I have always been interested in tech, so I built a box which contains a small low power radar. It is similar to the one used by the SAM sign and detects the speeds of vehicles. I take the data from there and store it on a system that allows me to read and analyse the data to see just how fast vehicles are speeding. It does not take any data of what the vehicles are, nor any personal data like registration plates etc. It just stores speed, direction and time and date. It does not detect below 10mph so it doesn’t capture bicycles or pedestrians.
The device has a range of 100m from my property, which relates to the point near the entrance to the fishing lake. This is around 30m inside the 30mph sign so people should have plenty of time to have reduced their speed by this point.
I also set up the system to record and notify every time a vehicle is travelling over 50mph, and it is usually around 5 vehicles per day, though some days it can be around 10.
The graph below shows the week commencing 23rd March, and it is typical representation of what happens every week.
The data below shows an analysis of the data over a 2 year period. You can see the spread of different vehicle speeds, and you can see there are as many vehicles speeding out of the village as into it, sometimes more. It shows that 41% of vehicles are travelling over 35mph. The highest speed recorded was 69.4mph. Big thanks to Darren Wray for helping me compile this analysis.
Some may say that on this section of road there are only a few houses so it shouldn’t matter too much, but there are many people who walk along this section of this road, some with dogs. Also, there are many children in these houses. I have noticed some people walk on the inside of the corner, which is a blind spot to approaching motorists, and at the speeds some are going, they would have no chance stopping in time. I have had problems myself crossing the road at the village hall from people driving around the corner too fast.
The question is what can be done to reduce these speeds.
A number of villages in Norfolk have traffic calming measures like speed bumps, road narrowing or something called horizontal deflection which means you have to go around obstacles in the road to force you to slow down. In Oxborough we have the SAM sign which shows your speed and tells you to slow down, and traffic gates at the 30mph point to make more clear that this is a 30mph area.
The issue of traffic calming measures in Oxborough is that we have to be mindful that there are a lot of large agricultural vehicles that need to travel around, and they cannot always navigate them.
And when the SAM sign is at this end of the village, I see no change in the speeds of vehicles captured by my system.
One of the traffic gates at this end of the village was destroyed a couple of years ago and was replaced by a standard lolipop sign so I assume the county council didn’t deem it necessary here.
There was recently a temporary sign next to the 30 sign which encouraged people to slow down. Again, I saw no difference in the speeds of vehicles.
One option I thought of was to reduce the speed first to 40, some way before the village, before it then becomes 30, but I don’t know how effective that would be.
I have written to my county councillor with my findings a long time ago and they stated the county council will only use their own equipment to monitor speeds and use that to effect policy on traffic decisions. When I asked how I could request the council install some monitoring equiment here I received no reply.
I have written to our MP, both the present one and the previous one and have received no reply.
I have spoken to the parish council to get support for the issue, and they stated that they felt the SAM sign they had was the effective way to manage this. But I disagree as my data shows it makes no difference.
Now that the parish council have stated they are going to discuss this issue again, I will present this data to them and I hope it goes some way to finding a good solution so we don’t have another incident like the one on Sunday.
I would welcome other villagers input to this. There is the option below to leave a reply.