The Executive Board of North Yorkshire Police has given the green light to a new package of measures to address road safety across the region.
At a meeting this week, the Board approved proposals to develop a community speed watch scheme, enhance training and education for road users, and improve “back office” arrangements for dealing with road safety offences.
- Developing a new community engagement scheme to give residents an active role in resolving local problems such as speeding and anti-social road use
- More training and education to change attitudes to road use
- A better “back-office” to handle road safety administration more efficiently
- Also approved as part of the package was an expansion in the number of camera safety vans from three to six, after analysis revealed that North Yorkshire Police has been under-resourced in comparison with other police forces covering a similar road area
Three new mobile safety camera vans were also approved, after research showed that North Yorkshire Police had fewer enforcement resources compared with other similar-sized forces. The vans will come into service in spring next year, and will be used to tackle a whole range of anti-social road use, including speeding, dangerous behaviour and use of mobile phones whilst driving.
The location of the vans will be decided based on police data on accident black-spots, and in response to requests from local communities where speeding is a proven problem.
The North Yorkshire Police area has a road network covering some nine thousand kilometers, and according to police records, more than 8,000 people were killed or seriously injured on the region’s roads between 2010 and 2012 alone.
Agreement of the road safety proposal was welcomed by Tim Madgwick, Deputy Chief Constable at North Yorkshire Police, and the Association of Chief Police Officers’ national lead for motorcycling.
DCC Tim Madgwick said: Road safety is a challenging and complex issue, and we need to tackle it in a range of ways.
More enforcement is an effective approach, so it is great news that North Yorkshire Police will soon have more mobile safety camera vans to deploy in safety hot-spots, but this alone won’t solve the problem.
Many road-users don’t think of themselves as “anti-social”, so they continue to take risks until they are involved in a collision, and tragically we have seen a number of serious incidents recently where people have lost their lives.
We will also be doing more training and education, to help all road-users to realise that unless we all share the responsibility for keeping roads safe, we will all continue to share in the risks. Our aim is safer roads for everyone.
