Making our roads safer

This is one of the big issues which keeps cropping up. The roads are not safe for pedestrians or cyclists for a number of reasons. They are too narrow; cars travel too fast; the few pavements we have are insufficient and there is too much traffic just passing through our villages using our roads as a “rat run”. I have been given a number of suggestions on how to improve the situation, (not all repeatable on this Blog!) but here are some I intend to push:

Access for pedestrians and cyclists:

Improve the condition of the pavements we have and add more.
Put in pedestrian crossings near Flitton & Greenfield Village Hall (for access to the hall and recreation ground) and near the Cornerway Garage (for parents walking their children to school).
Ideally have pavements and cycleways linking the villages e.g. Warhedges to Silsoe, Greenfield to Pulloxhill, Flitton to Pulloxhill and Greenfield to Flitwick.

Car speeds

Silsoe Road and Sand Lane should have 30 mph speed limits.
Pulloxhill Road past Greenfield School should be 20 mph as should the approach along Flitton Road between Holmewood Road and Joes Close.
Outside the existing 30 mph zones there should be a maximum speed limit of 40 mph for our narrow country lanes in the area bounded by the A507 to the North, the A6 to the East and South and Flitwick and Westoning in the West. The CPRE have a Quiet Lanes campaign which suggests even lower speed limits are required.

Traffic Calming

Within the villages themselves we need to slow cars right down in the danger zones where people have to cross the road and where there are blind corners such as opposite the church in Flitton or in Barton Road as it enters Pulloxhill.

Some of these measures such as the Traffic Calming and new pavements are costly and so will take time to implement. But changing speed signs would hardly cost anything and would hopefully change the mind set of people using our country roads as a trunk route to the motorway. We need a vision for how we want to improve the roads in our villages so that when opportunities (funding) arise we can grasp them.