The three roads that connect the Drayton Road with Wilsham Road in South Abingdon all have traffic calming measures. Caldecott Road has speed bumps. Saxton Road has a 20 MPH Home zone with narrowing and chicanes.
Preston Road has the notorious chicanes at the top end where drivers leave a trail as their wheels cut up the road. Some cars even bump into the chicanes.
Then there is a long stretch down Preston Road where junctions are mixed with parked cars – where vehicles can go fast.
So what would work best?
a) Better enforcement of speed limit
b) More traffic calming, speed bumps, chicanes etc..
c) Reduction of speed limit to 20mph
d) Safer Road crossing
e) More Off road parking
f) Other.
And where is that most needed?
The chicanes are two short – they invite drivers and riders to treat them like skiers treat a slalom. If the narrowed sections of road were twenty to thirty yards long, traffic would move more slowly through them. That would also help with the road surface.
However the excessive speed usually occurs further along the road and chicanes by the two sweeping bends where there are also road junctions would be very difficult to introduce.
A speed reduction to 20mph might help, but it would still be ignored by some.
The best thing would be improved driver and rider training – but that is unlikely to happen unless Pass Plus is made compulsory and re-testing every 10 years is introduced. Any politician selling those ideas to the general population would see votes melting away very quickly.
By the way, what are the accident statistics on Preston Road? And, to be crude, what are the fatality statistics? Most people will ignore the problem until someone is seriously injured or killed.
I should declare an interest, I am the Training Officer for the Thames Valley Group of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents Advanced Drivers and Riders.
Don’t shoot 😉
I’m in your trench, ppjs. Keep doing what you do. I was fortunate as a teenager to attend a series of safer driving lectures at the MG car club back in the ’60s; it changed my whole thinking process on the road.
“Most people will ignore the problem until someone is seriously injured or killed”
And then most will continue to ignore it, in the conviction that it is always someone else’s fault and that their own road behaviour is faultless. The cultivation of arrogance, impatience and selfishness starts long before someone gets a driving licence.
Where to start ?
PS While BS highlights this part of A-o-T, the Preston Road area is not unique. These problems can be seen in many domestic zones.
There is no point just reducing a limit and leaving the road as it is, if you reduce to 20mps then you have to engineer the road to keep the speed down as demonstrated in Saxton Road. Oxford went for the blanket limit approach and are having a devil of a job with the police to enforce it as the majority of roads haven’t been altered to reduce speed as it costs. It takes time to alter driver behaviour (and is resource intensive), it costs to enforce (is resource intensive) and expensive to re-engineer roads properly and in the current financial climate I can’t see that happening unless sadly people get killed or seriously injured and become a statistic to influence where money is spent
They could do speed traps… and publicise how many people were caught – then repeat it – might help with driver behaviour in the short term.
Annabel, It would have to be a permanent speed trap,
In Oxford St Giles, they (Police) put up a camera, (usually park a number of police vehicles as well.)
Acts as a speed trap, but also other violations (No VED/Insurance/Licences etc). As soon as they leave, enforcement of 20mph very difficult. As OxonChris wrote above.
I think it’s a combination of the solutions you have mentioned.
The chicanes don’t work, and many times I have seen road rage caused by them as people treat them like slalom, and put their foot down instead of giving way! They are far more likely to get someone hurt, than save lives.
I can’t see how having a flat straight road with good visibility can be made safer by making people swerve!!! Even at low speeds, in the winter when it is frozen they are a nightmare. Also the road has been carved up through them, and people keep hitting them, so they are costing to be repaired.
I think bumps would be a better solution as they allow traffic to flow, as well as slowing the drivers down.
I think off road parking would help, especially near junctions. People park on the corner, of the junction to lambrick way, which makes visibility coming around the corner pretty difficult.
Crossings would be helpful, especially as there is a school on the road, yet anyone living on the other side of Preston Road doesn’t have a safe crossing for the kids to get to the school.
I live in Preston Road near to where the cyclist died this week,that piece of road is dangerous by that junction especially.There are nearly always parked cars on one side of the main road reducing the road to one lane usable and the turning to kensington close has cars regularly parked as near to the junction as about 20 feet continuing up that side for a least 6 or 7 cars,if you are trying to turn into that road from drayton road end you have very little chance of seeing anything smaller than a van behind them and again meaning only one lane of road for all traffic.
The chicanes are very dangerous for cyclists, as even if you have right of way, you end up with cars charging at you, almost playing a game of chicken, and the design of them actually makes drivers increase their speed. The sections segregated for cyclists as too narrow, and full of debris. Another factor on Preston road is the state of the road itself, very potholed at the sides, which means in some sections cyclists need to be further out in the road than they might feel comfortable (much wider than an arms distance from the roadside needed for safe riding). Its so sad that someone has been killed on this section of road, but there are other roads in Abingdon with similar problems, for example the useless cycle lane on Ock Street which is dangerously narrow, or Stratton Way turning into Stert Street. Better road surfaces would be very helpful, and an enforced 20mph limit on some roads is very overdue
Chicanes and speed humps do nothing but distract drivers and create hazards for cyclists. Perhaps applying the “average speed” camera technology, as you get on motorway road works, then genuine 20mph roads could actually be enforced. Deployed at the end and middle of these roads this would prevent the usual mini-cab style “brake like a maniac” for the speed camera then “drive like banshee” between them.
This is should the system outside schools where at arrival or leaving time even if its a normally a 30mph zone it becomes 100% enforced 20mph zone. No ifs, no buts.
I travel up and down Preston Road every day. I have had several head on collisions. Cars are parked on the corner. There are some laybys on let hand side of Preston Road. Because of vandalism people want to park their cars outside their houses resulting in cars having to drive on the wrong side of the road. To make the road safer the highways authority should convert the grass verge into laybys especially around the bend so that cars do not have to drive on the wrong side of the road with their vision obscured. The chicanes should be changed to speed bumps as cars race to go through them. I had a near head on collision in a chicane (see the fixmystreet web site). We have been constantly told however, that there is no money available to make the changes.
I do find it slightly odd/amusing that any post re roads, driving or cycling always garners the most comment/feedback. Just saying.
After posting my earlier comment, I drove down Saxton Road (from Drayton Road to Wilsham Road).
The Drayton Road end is very well controlled; there are long chicanes which slow the traffic down effectively – the area is also a designated Home Zone. At the Wilsham Road end, the road widens and traffic speed increases.
I then drove up Preston Road and saw the fatal collision notices – not by the chicanes but where there are several road junctions which are frequently (as others report) the sites of near misses and, sadly, collisions. The most recent has resulted in someone’s death.
When the roads were built, we didn’t all have cars. Now that most people do, there is insufficient room to park safely. We therefore need to be far more vigilant. The risk to safety is greatly increased. Nearly all collisions and near misses are the result of poor observation and planning. We don’t look as carefully as we should.
Unfortunately, people emerging from the junctions often only give a quick glance before pulling out. And those travelling along Preston Road do not always consider the possibility that the other road user is not entirely safe.
The rule for people pulling out from the side road is: Never put your vehicle where your eyes have been first.
The rule for people travelling along Preston Road is: Never drive so fast that you cannot stop safely in the distance you can see to be clear on your own side of the road.
Nobody is perfect, so accidents happen. But 95% could have been avoided.
The biggest contribution to road safety is improved driving and riding.
I recently had a day with a very experienced police driving instructor who worked for 22 years on the high speed driving courses. He had covered over a million miles and had never been involved in a traffic incident. That is safe driver – and he knows about very high speed driving. His first concern is to get us working our eyes properly. When we do, the roads become much safer….
It’s not the chicanes, nor the pot holes (and did you see occ filing in the pot holes the day after the fatality?) its the numb nuts that live and drive around there, like the idiot in the silver people carrier who drives half on the path the full length of Wisham rd, every morning ! there’s cctv there, so why doesn’t bill find him and stop it? then there’s all the parked cars on the blind bend just before the marina turning? then there’s the umpteen cars (mostly taxis) that cross the iron bridge every day, the wrong way ! we can all moan and groan all we want, demand occ install s this and that, but the bottom line is until we have proper policing the idiots will just keep on keeping on. BTW, I drove along Bath St today,there were cars parked on the pavement going into the bookies the entire length of the road from outside the Blue Boar to the black swan, where’s bill?
We don’t know that speed was an issue in the fatal accident the other day; there haven’t been reports of an arrest but even so perhaps it is unwise to speculate unless and until facts emerge.
Simply reducing the speed limit say to 20 mph won’t help in the absense of other measures to make it largely self enforcing.
The safety issue around the Kensington Place and Lambrick Road junctions results from the parked cars close to and around the bend in the road. Evidently there needs to be some restriction there, but evidently also people need to have somewhere secure and reasonably convenient to park their cars.
The chicanes are positively unsafe, and encourage drivers to move over to the ‘wrong’ side of the road up to 100 yards ahead of them to force their way through. There needs to be something to force vehicles to keep to their own lanes on the approaches to them.
I suspect it would be difficult to follow the example of Saxton Road, because the route is used by large vehicles (heading to the Thames Water site?) and potentially by buses and coaches.
Those chicanes look fun, would motivate me to go faster. How about (used around Seattle) –
Raised crosswalks/pedestrian crossings (a wide speed bump).
Narrowing at intersections. Also keeps cars from parking to close to the intersection if you do it right.
Stop signs. I prefer timed traffic signals (timed to just under the speed limit), but they cost.
No one has mentioned Gainsborough Green. I always drive up and down there very slowly in fear of someone stepping out between parked cars. To think the speed limit is officially 30mph is frightening. And what makes it worse are inconsiderate people who park their cars opposite sides of the road almost adjacent to each other forcing you to weave in and out….
Nothing is going to change. The concerns about parked cars forcing cars to drive on the wrong side of the road down Preston Road especially on the corner and the danger of the chicanes has been raised at the highest level. The extra housing to be built in South Abingdon will make Preston Road even more of a rat run. There is no willingness by the powers that be to have the road properly assessed and when the issues have been raised we have been told that there is no money available by Oxfordshire Highways Department to make the changes.
Sounds like most of have complained to the council about the chicaines and been told there is no money in the pot to replace them.
I was told that in hindsight they should have put in bumps as that keeps traffic moving, but it’s too late now, the chicaines are there and there is no cash to replace them.
Oddly, they were out about a month ago putting new bollards on them and repairing the damage to them where they have been hit by cars numerous times. The cost of keep repairing them and the road in between that gets churned up, is going to be more than replacing them in the first place!
I agree that there is little point in speculating about the recent fatality.
However, whenever someone dies in a collision there are two factors present (beyond the human error that is present in 95% of all road traffic incidents). Those factors are speed and mass.
Either the speed of colliding objects was too great or their combined mass was too great – or both. It is possible that the speeds could be very low – in which case the mass has to be very large. I imagine a steamroller would do it for a cyclist or pedestrian at less than one mile an hour.
Normally, however, someone is going far too fast if there is a fatality. A car doing 35-40mph will be pretty serious (possibly fatal) for a cyclist who is hit head on. A glancing blow will still be unpleasant (broken bones) but probably survivable.
Police accident investigators have a series of equations into which they feed the measurements they take at the scene. They are extremely accurate – physics is at this level a very exact science.
I reckon that 20-25mph is about the maximum safe speed for Preston Road as it is presently laid out. I wonder what the police advice to the Highway Authority is – and whether it is followed.
Sorry a bit off topic but I couldn’t resist.
I cycle 10 mile each way to work a few times a week (and also drive a car), I would say I have a close miss about once a week on the bike.
Most common are cars overtaking/passing without giving enough room (so if the cyclist swerves to miss a pothole etc you will be on their bonnet) and cars pulling out of side-roads right into your path.
Some are half asleep or just don’t look before manoeuvring which I can possibly understand and forgive but some people who I’ve had the pleasure of talking to after such an incident just don’t care and are happy to put a cyclist at risk of injury or death. I caught up with a chap who had just passed me about 6″ from my handlebars as he got caught in traffic – he said “so what, I didn’t hit you” and drove off.
Also I recall a lady reversing her 4×4 out of her driveway onto the road after looking me in the eyes … I had to break hard not to end up as the back seat passenger 🙂
I’m not sure what the answer is?
Out of Town: I couldn’t agree more; your experiences are very similar to mine as a regular cycling commuter. The answer you seek is simple but apparently unachievable. It is a good measure of care and attention on the road by all and a little consideration and respect to fellow road users be they on foot, bike, car whatever.
A place I have regular problems is coming down East St Helens St into St Helen’s Wharf at the narrow by the church. Have nearly been taken out there several times by inattentive or aggressive oncoming drivers.
Hi Graham, Yes I’ve had the same on that St Helen’s Wharf section when cycling to my previous job.
I think, in this country, not that many adults actually cycle and have forgot how it feels to be overtaken too close etc and what the consequences could be.
If a police officer witnessed a risky manoeuvre I wonder if they would be pulled for dangerous driving etc?
Also have wondered many times, would that car of pulled out / into etc me (after obviously seeing me) if I was in my car / riding my motorbike – I’m sure not,
I’ve had my fair share of near misses at St. Helens Wharf too when cycling. Cars travelling into town from Caldecott Road overtake the parked cars along by The Anchor, pulling out onto the opposite side of the road forgetting the cyclists ……. how many times have I been forced into the gutter when coming the other way.
Also cycling through the Preston Road chicane on those cycle lanes is hairy too. Again as drivers swerve round the chicane, they drive right up to the kerbs on the opposite side of the road …… where the cycle lane and cyclists happen to be. Again I’ve been forced to stop.
A permanent speed camera, speed humps and how about one of those flashing smiley faces when you’ve driven at the correct speed ……. all of those I think would make it a safer place.