Committees – Traffic Calming

Traffic Calming

Over recent years, traffic passing through the parish has reached levels of both inconvenience and danger for the residents of the village, in particular the number of heavy good vehicles and speeding vehicles passing through Tebworth. The traffic calming committee has been set-up with the aim of reducing the danger posed by traffic.

Our primary weapon against people speeding through the villages is our Community Speed Watch campaign. This is a scheme designed to help people reduce traffic speeding through their neighbourhood, and is fully supported by Central Bedfordshire Council, Bedfordshire Police and Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service in our area. More details are available at the Bedfordshire Police website

The main message is that Community Speed Watch is about education and NOT enforcement – we are not there to catch speeding vehicles, but to educate them that we care about our parish and villages and wish to ensure the safety of our residents. If our speedwatch campaign shows that we have a major problem then the police are committed to providing the enforcement that speedwatch cannot.

At the moment we have four members of our Speed Watch – all parish councillors. I have had conversations with some parishioners who wish to volunteer to help and participate – and this is critical to the success of the group. We need more volunteers who are willing to undergo the required training, which has been much simplified and made more accessible by Beds Police, and who are willing to form part of a team of three to conduct a speedwatch ‘activity’ on a regular basis. If we can gather together twelve people then we can do this once per week, every week but each person only needs to turn out once a month – by the way we intend to cover both morning and afternoon rush-hours so it’s not all early mornings! If we can achieve this level of consistency then the passing motorists will inevitably come to associate our parish with speedwatch and hopefully the average speed of the passing motorists will decrease accordingly.

So if you would like to volunteer please fill in the form below.

Michael Wells


 

2 comments

  1. We’ve been busy over the past couple of months and have grown the team to 8 now. 4 of them are still requiring official training by Beds police, however, and this is being organised hopefully to occur in the next few weeks.

    We try to vary the pattern and locations so that drivers don’t know exactly when we’ll be around – and as a result of our efforts the police have been out recently on Toddington Road which supports us greatly.

    Our last couple of sessions have been well supported by the community with bacon rolls and coffee kindly supplied by Chris at The Plough and teas, coffees and biscuits by the residents on Toddington Road. We thank you for your kindness and hope that we have a positive affect on the traffic near their homes.

    A few stats out of interest – at our last session which was today (21st May) between 16:25 and 17:35 we saw 676 vehicles (in both directions) and letters are being sent to 8 individuals who decided that we hadn’t provided them with sufficient clues about the speed limit in that area! And we still have one or two counters amongst the drivers – these are those people who can count up to two using digits – I’ll leave the rest to your imagination! And for those who are in doubt – we all do actually have lives!

  2. It’s the first time I have seen this site, I don’t know what influence you have over the council, but one of the biggest problems is cars speeding through Wingfield after they come out of the 60 MPH stretch from Tebworth, as there is no 30 mile limit sign from that direction, and a lot of new cars that have a smart dash will show its still 60 MPH, as mine does.
    The other issue is the top of lords Hill, trying to pull out from Tebworth road, it’s like playing Russian roulette thats alo 60MPH on a dangerous blind bend, its crazy.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *