| Reduce the speed limit on the St Albans Road. This petition has been reviewed and the following response has been offered: The concerns raised within this petition have been considered by officers and assessed against the County Council’s Speed Management Strategy and as part of the Annual Hazardous Sites Review.Assessment against the Speed Management Strategy: The Speed Management Strategy (SMS), which sets out the current criteria for setting speed limits, is based on Government guidance published in January 2013, ‘Setting Local Speed Limits’. Speed limits should be evidence-led, self-explanatory and seek to reinforce peoples’ assessment of what is a safe speed to travel. They should encourage self-compliance and not be seen by drivers as being a target speed at which to drive in all circumstances. The key criteria for setting a speed limit are set out in section 2 of the SMS and are as follows: An assessment of the environment must be made to confirm that a speed limit is appropriate for the road. The Hertfordshire Speed Limit Framework will be used to meet this criterion.For 30mph to 70mph limits, the maximum mean speed should not exceed the proposed limit once implemented. Mean and 85th percentile speeds will be collected before and after a limit is implemented, although mean speeds will be used as the basis for setting speed limits. This section of St Albans Road, Sandridge, has been assessed using the above criteria. 1. The Environment: The Hertfordshire Speed Limit Framework provides a guide to assist in speed limit selection, particularly in assessing whether the environment or nature of a particular road is suitable for a specified limit. Guidance on what the environment should be for any given limit can be found in sections 2.6 to 2.11. St Albans Road, Sandridge, would have been assessed against sections 2.7 and section 2.8 for 30mph and 40 mph limits.St Albans Road is a classified B road (Secondary Distributor), where a 40mph limit applies in the section of road between Ronsons Way and Reynolds Crescent. There are no properties fronting the carriageway as motorists enter and leave the 40mph limit. The properties that face the road within the 40mph limit (by the Sandringham Crescent junction) are set back from the carriageway, where there is good visibility for motorists who are entering or leaving the road. The layout of the carriageway puts this into the category of a 40mph urban road rather than a 30mph urban road, despite some new developments. 2 and 3. Maximum Mean Speed: The 40mph limit was introduced in May 1999 and there is no current speed survey information available for this section of carriageway. The local County Councillor for the division has agreed to fund speed & volume surveys from their 2018/19 Highways Locality Budget, to enable further assessment and to determine if the section of road meets the criteria for a 40mph limit. Annual Hazardous Sites Review: Hertfordshire County Council reviews the available injury collision data annually and produces a list of hazardous sites on the roads within the County. This investigation forms part of Hertfordshire County Council’s ongoing commitment to reduce the number and severity of injury collisions that occur on our roads.Our records show that over the past three years for which data is available, there were five injury collisions recorded along this section of St Albans Road, Sandridge. The collision severity was categorised as serious in three of the collisions and slight for the other two, however none of the collisions had ‘speeding’ or ‘too fast for the conditions’, noted by the police as a contributory factor. Once the speed & volume data has been assessed we will update you accordingly with our findings. |