Question

I wish to acknowledge the professionalism of our Borough’s Civil Parking Enforcement team. They are a key part in the strategy to help manage parking and crucially, in many locations, such as outside schools, to help make our streets safer. Some initiatives have helped to address parking related safety issues. But all around the Borough serious problems continue. Regrettably, the often-heard phrase ‘an accident waiting to happen’ remains all too true in many locations. Could the Executive Member for Highways please outline the Borough’s strategies and tactics for tackling this issue – including timings for actions?

Question:

I wish to acknowledge the professionalism of our Borough’s Civil Parking Enforcement team.  They are a key part in the strategy to help manage parking and crucially, in many locations, such as outside schools, to help make our streets safer.  Some initiatives have helped to address parking related safety issues.  But all around the Borough serious problems continue. Regrettably, the often-heard phrase ‘an accident waiting to happen’ remains all too true in many locations. Could the Executive Member for Highways please outline the Borough’s strategies and tactics for tackling this issue – including timings for actions?

Answer

It is a bit difficult to be specific as I am not entirely clear of the locations being referred to here, but certainly I and the Traffic Management Team and the Road Safety Team would be interested in hearing of any specific locations and problems.  A lot of the problems are specific to individual schools and individual roads, so if you can give us some actual examples, we will be delighted to dig into them, and see what we can do to reduce the risk. 

We are aware of some issues with parking and as you say we have been proactively trying to manage these and keep our children safe.  I can also remind you that we can target our Parking Enforcement guys to particular areas.  I recently targeted them at Hawkedon School and Loddon School for example, where we were having problems with parking that was causing a danger to children.  If you can report these to us or the Parking Enforcement guys, we will be happy to adjust the schedule so that they can visit particular schools and particular risk areas.

As you can appreciate, we have to depend on the expertise and experience of our officers, and as you have said they are very good.  That needs to be used to prioritise schemes and we need to address those locations where there is a collision history first before looking at those where others feel there may be one in future.  There is plenty of things we can do.  We can put in parking restrictions.  We have already done that around Loddon School recently and we have put in some speed limiting chicanes around Hillside School. We have also put barriers in to stop children running in the road, but this is a very specific answer to a very specific problem.

Supplementary Question:

I will certainly get back to you with specific locations in Earley, and I appreciate why your answer does refer to the specificity of a lot of the questions.  I am very interested in whether any of the following potential measures have been evaluated and decided upon, for instance converting many of the single and double yellow lines outside schools to ‘No loading’ zones, taking effective action to considerably reduce the length of time it still takes to get Traffic Regulation Orders.  This took about two years outside Loddon School.  Any plans for the use of fixed or mobile CCTV cameras, such as those used in Reading, to identify offenders, whether the pre Covid trial to try to change behaviour in parking is going to be followed up.  Have any of these been evaluated and decided upon?

Supplementary Answer:

Quite a few of those have been addressed.  We were about to try fixed and mobile CCTV enforcement when Covid hit, and we will certainly be picking it up as the pandemic passes.  We had to stop it as we had to prioritise work in other areas.  The TRO timescales have had a lot of work on them, and we have set a TRO timetable where the TRO’s will be done on a regular cadence and restrictions will be put in the next TRO that is ready to go, rather than what was happening before, where we were continually putting new things into a TRO and driving the timescale back.  It is a much better process now.  I have not looked in detail at ‘No Loading’ and I will look at that and take that away.