Vehicle Activated Speeding Sign
In May, we managed to persuade the Council to put up one of these signs next to Camden Crescent as it narrows before City View and the rest of Camden Road. For the first week, it was on and reminding anyone speeding to slow down. In the second week it was left off, but simply monitoring the speed of traffic going past.
The different colours represent different speed bands, as follow:
- Purple is 40+ mph
- Red is 30-40 mph
- Orange is 21-30 mph
- Green is 20- mph.
Two main conclusions:
- With the VAS in place and fully operational, 60% of drivers complied with the speed limit.
- With the VAS not working the compliance virtually halved to 32% and the reduction in extreme speeding was even more dramatic.
Lethality (the risk of serious injury or death) increases exponentially as speeds increases, so it is really important to stop this extreme speeding, as evidenced by our ‘Massive Bang‘ a month ago.
Our trial has produced dramatic changes for the better, not a few percent here and there, which we must pursue in our attempt to make Camden and the abutting localities into a Low Traffic Neighbourhood.
I assume we will seek to have a VAS at each end of Camden Road? But I do wonder if we need a third one for westward traffic at the top of Bennett Lane. In my experience (living here for 36 years) it seems to be the section between Bennett Lane and Gays Hill that is most accident prone. Westward traffic speeds up as there is a section around the top of Bennett’s lane without any parked cars to make drivers slow down. The speed bumps at that point seem particularly feeble too.
I agree entirely about reminding drivers in both directions about their speed and how effective we have proved it will be. I also agree about the particularly dangerous section which was the site of ‘massive bang’ last month. And the end goal is some form of low traffic neighbourhood.
The really frightening thing about this is that, on the stretch of road where they put the sign, it’s actually pretty hard to speed. Imagine how fast people go when they see a nice straight stretch of road ahead them!