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  • Petition
  • ePetition details

    Install a pedestrian crossing at the school bus stop on Tonbridge Road opposite the White Hart Public House, Sevenoaks

    We the undersigned petition the council to install a pedestrian crossing at the bus stop on Tonbridge Road, opposite the White Hart pub, Sevenoaks. We believe that school children should have safe access to their school bus stop and ask the council to provide a pedestrian crossing to enable this. Currently the school bus stop that takes children to school on Tonbridge Road opposite the White Hart Public House has no traffic calming measures. Children are expected to cross the road to the bus stop on a road with a steady stream of traffic travelling at least 40miles per hour in each direction.

    There are no traffic calming measures in place near this bus stop. Currently many parents are having to drop their children at the bus bay as this is the only way to access the bus stop without risking crossing the road. This is not a suitable solution. At 40 miles per hour if a pedestrian is hit there is a 90% chance they will be killed (source Roadwise.co.uk). Pedestrians should not have to take this risk crossing a road to get to school.

    This ePetition ran from 22/11/2021 to 22/02/2022 and has now finished.

    148 people signed this ePetition.

    Council response

    Thank you for your petition received on 8 April 2022, regarding your petition requesting that a pedestrian crossing be provided on Tonbridge Road, Sevenoaks opposite the White Hart Public House.

    In accordance with our ‘Petition Service’ as your letter contains less than 1,000 signatures I have investigated and reviewed your concerns in my role as the Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport.

    I appreciate the time you have taken to raise this issue with me, we take every suggestion about road safety very seriously.

    As explained in my previous email to you of 2 November 2021, we receive many requests for improvements to the highway including pedestrian crossings. We often have to make difficult decisions regarding where we allocate our finite budget in terms of road safety investment and use an evidence-based approach to do so. Our first priority is to check if there is any pattern of personal injury crash records for the past three years that could be addressed by engineering methods.

    Our officers have reviewed the latest personal injury collision data for the last available three-year period which now currently extends up to 31 December 2021, and I am able to advise that in this location there is no pattern of incidents. It is therefore very difficult to prioritise this site for Crash Remedial Measures against other locations across the County where a pattern of incidents is occurring and our engineering intervention may help to reduce the number and severity of such incidents.

    With regards to traffic calming measures, our officers have reviewed average speed data available to them and I can advise that this data does not show a speeding problem at this location. There are many different forms of traffic calming which can include gateway treatments (white wooden gates, coloured surfacing, speed limit signage etc.), speed humps, chicanes and road narrowing’s. Traffic calming is not always appropriate in all locations and can have associated negative impacts including noise and vibration. Physical traffic calming measures are not normally provided on A or B class roads due to their strategic nature. Tonbridge Road is an A road being the A225 and has a predominate through traffic function and therefore would not be suitable for traffic calming.
    Implementing highway improvements at known crash hotspots remains our priority, and as such we do not currently have any plans to install a pedestrian crossing or traffic calming at this location. However, we continue to monitor sites such as this all over the county as part of our annual crash cluster review.

    I appreciate that this will not be the response you were hoping for, however we do recognise that whilst prioritising our efforts based on known crash data is an established and sensible approach, not all problems will be highlighted using this method. Our officers continue to work closely with local Parish and Town Councils and County Members to ensure that a community voice helps to prioritise our efforts, and in many cases, help support funding for improvements that do not achieve sufficient priority through our countywide assessments. You may therefore wish to contact Sevenoaks Town Council or your County Member, Richard Streatfield to see if they may be willing to promote changes here on your behalf.

    We have also recently developed and published a new approach to casualty reduction in Kent and this is called ‘Vision Zero’ Road Safety Strategy (please see link below, the details of which were explained in my email of 2nd November):

    https://www.kent.gov.uk/roads-and-travel/road-safety/road-casualty-reduction-strategy

    I would like to reiterate that if you believe that drivers are driving at excess speed and without due care, then this is a matter for the Police using their existing powers. Such concerns can be reported to them on their non-emergency number 101.

    There are also schemes such as Speed Watch that allows the local community to record