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Road Safety GB has a School Crossing Patrol Guide which was co-authored by one of my team who is on their national advisory board. There are various problems, but the main one was the delegation of powers. I think you can delegate, but you can’t offload the responsibility to supervise and remain responsible for issues and the quality/safety of delivery which is half the job so I doesn’t really save money. The other problem is that it costs around £15k to set up a site (traffic management signs, lining, dropped kerbs, recruitment et al) and maybe £5k a year to staff/equip/operate/supervise it. Schools funding is generally ringfenced to the school and its grounds, not the highway, so they normally don’t have any funds to take on the service and wouldn’t want to responsibility either. Community Groups I suspect would be in the same boat. There’s a lot more to training, equipping and running the SCP service than people think. Safeguarding and DBS checks are a biggie.
The link to the RSGB advice is here: https://roadsafetygb.org.uk/members-area/school-crossing-patrol/ , but particularly check out the ‘Survival Guide’ link near the bottom of the page that discusses all the issues.
Incidentally, I’ve just read in it that ‘appropriate authorities’ are defined asAppropriate authorities are defined as:
• Outside Greater London – county councils, unitary authority, metropolitan district
• For the City of London this is the Common Council of the City
• London Borough Councils
• In Scotland a council under section 2 of the Local Government etc (Scotland) Act
1994I don’t know which Act this is from, but have a read. I’m not sure if you need to be an RSGB Member to access it.
Also, we tailor our SCP site times to the flow from/to each school and some sites are not adjacent the school so it takes longer to reach. We used the allowance to alter times to the full in lockdown when we had staggered departure/arrival times all over the place!
That case involved vegetation that the authority had themselves planted in the central reservation adjacent to a sheep pen style crossing point, so the creation of danger was very much on them as they owned the vegetation, positioned it in the first place and could maintain it themselves as they liked. I take your point on duty of care though. With private vegetation which is what commonly obstructs the highway in most cases, I presume the authority would only need to show they have a reasonable risk-based system of inspection, maintenance and enforcement, similar to pothole claims. Ideally, the public would be more aware of their responsibilities on this front anyway and public information films went a long way to helping that back in the day.
The Shiny Side Up Partnership and their facilitator Heidi Duffy MBE would be good contacts for advice on this and all other things powered two wheeler – https://shinysideup.co.uk/. She also facilitates the National Young Rider Forum.
Heidi Duffy MBE | Heidi.Duffy@viaem.co.uk | (+44) 07738 164885
It’s only partly about if its a road safety issue, it’s mostly about the difficulty enforcing the Highways Act 1980. Every summer every highways department is deluged by vegetation complaints, but the vegetation isn’t highway vegetation, it belongs to adjacent residents and landowners. So, a long-winded process of writing to them/serving notice and trying to get them and cut it themselves ensues. If Highway Departments could just cut it when its discovered and be guaranteed to get paid for the work, and if the public could be made to accept that any of their vegetation overhanging the highway could be cut back at any time without notice, highway authorities could resource and schedule it for every summer.
It lost my message that goes with that link, but its the background on the Rufford Splash in Nottinghamshire that hopefully is self-explanatory.
Do you mean public consultation processes to install new crossings? Or do you mean the collision rates around them generally? I think a while ago zebra crossings used to average one minor collision a year which is why we tried not to do them if there wasn’t a history of collisions or a PV2 value which showed significant conflict between traffic and pedestrians being present. If you put a zebra where there’s no collisions you can ironically end up increasing the collision rate purely by attracting increased crossing movements to that location. The DfT line is that if there isn’t sufficient pedestrian demand then traffic got used to rarely ever stopping for the crossing and effectively stopped seeing it which led to violations. However, if there are pedestrians but not enough traffic demand, pedestrians tended to ignore the crossing and cross either side of it which also raised safety issues. Zebras actually had the same collision rate as light controlled crossings, but light controlled crossings are better for busier, higher speed roads as well as being more helpful for the visually impaired. Zebras are very useful where pedestrian crossing demand is suppressed as they simply can’t attempt crossing or where collisions have occurred though. Does this help?
We have two of these but we still use them regularly. Are they really called the Dimms Family? I assume this is a name from long ago. How old even are these ramp sets? I didn’t realise other people had them.
Well, obviously I need to give a mention to the Shiny Side Up Partnership here in case people aren’t aware of their range of motorbike/driver road safety posters for highway use – https://shinysideup.co.uk/. However, as you already know about them, permanent signs intending to warn inform or direct traffic are generally going to come under the TSRGD. I have a lot of experience in getting signs Special Authorisation from the DfT and they generally won’t consider new signs when there are existing signs in the TSRGD which would cover the same ground, particular poster design style signs. However, I spoke to them years ago about the status of permanent ‘Thank you for driving carefully’ signs which don’t warn, inform or direct traffic and weren’t in the TSRGD and they said they weren’t traffic signs, but actually needed planning permission. I then went through planning authorities in my area and got them to agree that they were ‘Adverts Benefitting From Deemed Consent’, i.e. adverts the highway authority are allowed to erect for highway purposes providing they aren’t illuminated and are below a certain size. I think I then went down the path with the same planning authorities of having non-permanent posters (e.g. things like the SSUP posters) also deemed as this. Permanent signs on roundabouts inviting sponsors to fund highway maintenance of said roundabouts probably also fall in this category too. Hope this helps.
