Flashing lights on Hoppers Road

By Root Streetwise

I’d met friends at The Salisbury Arms at the northern end of Hoppers Road for an afternoon gossip, and afterwards stood outside in the evening half-light waiting for one of them to join me for the walk home. 

It was a cool, still moment, spoilt by occasional cars, foot down, accelerating hard from the traffic calming and roundabout at the junction with Compton Road.  Minutes ticked by, and after a while I became aware of a flashing light to the left of the road and perhaps 150 metres ahead. 

Puzzled I watched the irregular flashes through the darkening gloom, but eventually the penny dropped: “Those cars again!” 

Every one, quite literally every one – was already exceeding the speed limit by the time it reached a Vehicle Activated Sign (VAS) on the hump over the railway bridge.  

This picture was taken a few days after the event.
Call me old-fashioned, but I’d say that this is not on. 

Cars travelling at 30mph, let alone above it, kill or seriously injure most people they hit. 

And real live people, people entitled to a quiet and pleasant life, people with kids, live on Hoppers Road.  What a nightmare! Living on a long straight road with its unnecessary acceleration noise, unnecessarily damaging emissions, and worse, the fact that residents dare not make a mistake, dare not let younger kids out of their sight, worry constantly about kids of all ages.

And Hoppers Road is not even a through road.  It’s a residential road with a school, a few shops, a couple of pubs; a social space, a place for living, not a place which should be dominated by traffic.  In fact, for many reasons no-one should drive along a street of that character at above 20mph let alone above 30 – just to take one example: at 20 a child will usually survive without much injury; drivers have time to stop.

For people everywhere their street is part of the fabric of their lives.  Not as key as their front room perhaps, but key to their sense of home nevertheless; a social space where neighbour ought to be able to meet neighbour in pleasant surroundings, and children are safe.  In fact there should be seats on these pavements to encourage neighbourliness.

In any urban street parents and kids, cyclists and pedestrians, the elderly and young on foot, people with disabilities, have as much right to reach their journey safely and on time as drivers. 

Natural justice, simple democracy, should decide priority when pedestrian meets driver, not the threat of a ton or two of steel at speed. 

On any urban street or road other than arterial roads like the A10, priority should be as much a matter of negotiation as it is in a crowd of people, not a hierarchy dominated by drivers enforcing a preferential position by  speeding.

Alone during the second part of my journey home my thoughts returned to the race track on Hoppers Road. 

Why have residents put up with it? 

Perhaps they haven’t and I’ve missed their frustration, but likely enough they just accept it as the way things are; a mindset which has grown up since the second world war, often fostered by well-intentioned road rules and street design which permit excessive speed.  It’s time we followed some other cities in the UK and thought it out again.  

Meanwhile those fair-ground lights should go; they’re doing no good, they are an anathema to residential living and, because they are self-evidently not reducing speed, are probably reinforcing the idea of drivers in charge.