Bainton Village Traffic Calming Workgroup

A small group of residents is working in collaboration with the Parish Council to:

• Help people drive through Bainton within the speed limit

• Enable safer traffic flow and

• Reduce the risk of accidents. 

We will post the progress we make on this page to keep people informed. The topic has been discussed at recent Parish Council meetings, feel free to participate.

NEWS:       Bainton Traffic Calming Update

The heat maps show peaks of activity on Monday and Tuesday mornings, and around lunchtime on most days. The maps do not reflect the seriousness of each incident, only events >38 mph. 

Fund Raising 

To be able to buy cameras and signs there are a number of fundraising events going on. The pub night just before Christmas raised £147 through a fun raffle and a visit from Santa!. The next event is a bingo evening on Jan 20th 2023

Installation of the Cameras

With the help of the Highways Department, the new Autospeedwatch cameras have been installed. The traffic data will be managed in line with GDPR regulations and will be compared with the MVAS data we already have for the same site.  Simply observing the traffic comming into the village they appear to have had an immediate effect - once we have comparative data we can see what that tells us.

Vital support from the Parish Council

With help from the Parish Council we have  purchased two camera units from Autospeedwatch . You can find out more about this system at  https://store.autospeedwatch.org/index.php?route=common/home

The camera installation will complement the existing Speedwatch activity we now carry out on a regular basis in the village and also assist with the MVAS data we collect from the signs which are currently used at various points. 

The cameras collect the same data recorded at the manual Speedwatch sessions and allow us to highlight registration numbers of speeding vehicles to the Community Speedwatch Group at Cambridgeshire police. We hope that the evidence we continue to collect will help in our campaign to introduce some of the proposed traffic calming measures in the village over the coming months.

To enable anyone who has ideas or concerns about traffic calming to get these to the working group we have created a very simple form (3 questions) to enable feedback on ideas and progress.
Please let us know what you think in this simple form

A range of incidents over the years: 

• An incident with the speedboat - perhaps inspired by an old TV programme?

Increasingly vehicles over the 7.5 weight limit are passing through the village:

Latest Traffic data from the MVAS sensor    (MVAS = Movable, Vehicle Activated Sign)

The road traffic data is bad and getting worse. With increased housing development comes ever more cars. Growth at any cost?

Please find the MVAS results attached that were downloaded from the MVAS.  It was in the 30mph zone, Helpston Road Bainton between 17th October and 2nd November 2022.  A total of 24,273 vehicles were recorded travelling from the Helpston direction.

Exceeding 30mph   12899    53%

Exceeding 35mph     6410    26%

Exceeding 40mph     2203      9%

Exceeding 45mph       534      2%

Exceeding 50mph       105      0.43%

Exceeding 55mph         18      0.07%

Exceeding 60mph           1      0.00%

The orang and red area show that well over half of all traffic passing through Bainton is exceeding the speed limit

For a safe Bainton for both residents and drivers all of these graphs should be green, which is below 30 mph. Currently 56% of vehicles are exceeding 30mph.
Mostly this is through poor road and street design, occasionally it is just about speed.   (for a larger version see here)

In a typical day in each of the past 18 days  there has been   about 800 vehicles speeding through our village from the Helpston direction alone!

The history of how Ashton came to have such good traffic calming

Because of the mismatch in Bainton and Ashton's implementation of traffic calming, people have been trying to understand how come it is so different.
Talking with people who were successful in making the Ashton scheme work so well,  the essence of what happened is here:

1.  Ashton had been suffering increased  'rat run' traffic travelling to and from Peterborough.  Although the volume of traffic was low the speed of people taking the shortcut meant that life in the small village was becoming dangerous. The roads in Ashton are rural, single-track roads with blind bends and no pavements. The rat run gradually increased over the years as traffic cut through from the Bainton end to Peterborough, via Highfield Road, especially at commuter times. The roads through Ashton were  derestricted (i.e. National Speed Limit - 60mph) and many vehicles travelled at excessive speed. At that time, all the villages along the B1443 had 40mph speed limits.

2. The problem was not the volume of traffic through Ashton but its speed and the risk posed to pedestrians and horses using the road.

3. The Parish Council was informed by Peterborough City Council that money was available to all villages for road improvement. The money was ring-fenced for traffic management. The residents of Bainton and Ashton were consulted and their suggestions were put to Peterborough Council. Ashton requested action to slow traffic, ideally a 30mph limit. Apparently, this was not possible unless there was some physical barrier to slow the speeding vehicles. The council suggested speed humps as the only solution and these were reluctantly agreed upon by a slim majority.  Despite the humps being modified to help them blend in with the environment and reduced signage, there was still a lot of anger generated. However, they did reduce the problem and these measures meant that a 30 mph speed restriction could be implemented.  (At the same time, and under the same scheme, Barnack also had speed humps installed in Jack Haws Lane and School Lane.)

4. The Quiet Lane status was introduced in 2006 following a national government initiative. The villages have all now been reduced to 30 mph with 20 moh near schools. Only very recently has a 20mph speed restriction also been introduced in Ashton along with the newly installed entrance ‘gates’.

5. Although not everyone was sure about the measures at the time, the combination of speed humps, 20mph limit and quiet lane status in Ashton have proved to be very successful in reducing the risk of accidents and preventing the rat run. They have created a place where walkers,  cyclists, horses and vehicles can co-exist in safety.

6. However, over the years the traffic volume along the B1443 has increased with the incessant growth in housing developments with no infrastructure investment, and the problem of speeding traffic has become gradually worse and worse for Bainton. The graphs above show that too many vehicles are speeding through the village. In addition, there have been specific problems around speeding traffic at the bus stop, with vehicles whizzing by children waiting there, undercutting cars turning into Ufford road, along with the very dangerous narrows on Tallington Road. Each of these issues has been dismissed by the Highways department because no fatalities have yet been recorded. This may feel is shortsighted negligence.

The time for action is now

The case for 20 mph. This article in Road Safety News  explains:

Professor Dorling was answering Academy members’ questions about 20mph limits and zones, which he has described as “the most effective thing a local authority can do to reduce health inequalities”.