Road Safety Event 2019
Last night, GRCC helped to facilitate a road safety conference which helped to highlight the work that is going into keeping Gloucestershire’s roads safe.
We heard from a variety of speakers from across the county who were involved in driving the strategy for road safety and aimed to highlight what communities could potentially do themselves.
We heard from people ‘on the frontline’ catching dangerous drivers, those who are in charge of analysing data and informing police of locations with a high number of speeders, those in charge of Gloucestershire’s Road Safety Strategy as well as independent groups who are working with the police to reduce speeding.
We first heard from Charles Pedrick who has helped to organise the meeting and has been a pioneer in improving road safety, first within Rodborough and then as the movement grew and grew, within the whole of Gloucestershire. He introduced the evening and thanked everyone for their attendance, particularly with the flooding in the area.
The first speaker of the night was David Hawker from the Gloucestershire Road Safety Alliance who explained his role and the motivations behind it. He explained the ‘fatal five’ in driving and the need to have strategies for each one.
These were:
- Speeding
- Mobile Phone Usage (Distractions)
- Drink and Drug Driving
- Non-use of Seatbelts
- Careless or Inconsiderate Driving
Next up was Chief Inspector Steve Lindsay MBE and Inspector Sarah Blake who were here to talk about their work within communities such as asking school children to draw slow down messages to drivers as well as involving Police Cadets to create neighbourhood teams and increase coverage because of course, two people can’t be everywhere at the same time.
Chief Inspector Steve Lindsay spoke about the work (and success) of Op Indemnis which was an operation launched last November along the entire A417 in order to reduce the number of fatalities on the road.
Andrew Parker-Mowbray, the Road Safety and Transport Data Team Leader from Gloucestershire County Council, was able to shed some light on the impact of the measures that the police have in place before Iain Dunbar from the Stroud District Road Safety Group explained how they, as an independent group, were working with Police to identify speeding hot spots across the county using VAS cameras.
To round the evening off we had Gloucestershire’s Chief Police and Crime Commissioner, Martin Surl, who gave his thoughts on the work that has taken place as well as the strategy for moving forward. Assistant Chief Constable of the Gloucestershire Police, Julian Moss, rounded off the evening by providing stories of his experiences and echoing messages from the evening.
The key message to take away was that by working with Police we can reduce speeds and make it a safer county.