Dear all. Apologies it has taken so long to provide a further update. However, it was only yesterday that a formal response to the petition was received from the Highway’s department to our local Councillor. The response is very disappointing but not entirely unexpected. The way our Council assesses the need for measures is flawed in my opinion and change is needed. I will reflect further on the response and offer a further update in due course with any potential next steps.

I include the response in full below for you to digest and would encourage you to contact the Moseley councillors to express your views on this:

Dear Councillor Knowles
 
PETITION 2545 – INSTALL TRAFFIC CALMING MEASURES ON YARDLEY WOOD ROAD
 
I refer to the above petition which you presented to City Council on 11th October 2022 on behalf
of the residents of Moseley Ward calling upon Birmingham City Council to implement traffic
calming measures on Yardley Wood Road.
 
Yardley Wood Road is an unclassified road, it carries a significant volume of traffic including
buses and emergency vehicles and has a 30mph speed limit. The section of Yardley Wood Road
that is in the Moseley Ward runs from Stoney Lane to Swanshurst Lane and is approximately
1.4km long.
 
The City Council has a finite amount of resource available to invest in road safety schemes, and
so a prioritisation process is used to ensure that the locations with the most urgent need are
treated first in accordance with City’s current Road Safety Strategy for the identification and
prioritisation of Local Safety Schemes. This strategy contains numerical criteria that where a site has at least 9 reported road traffic injury collisions per kilometre in the last three years, then it will be considered for further action.  If there are a number of collisions involving vulnerable road users (children, pedestrians, cyclists), or a site is specifically identified by the emergency services as a focus for concern, then a smaller number of collisions may be considered to warrant any further action. This prioritisation process only takes into account injury collisions reported to the Police and damage only collisions are not recorded by the Police and therefore are not taken into account when assessing and prioritising sites for safety improvements.
 
For all locations, a treatable collision pattern is required in terms of deploying any engineering
solution to carry out safety improvements. For example, a site may satisfy the numerical criteria
but if all the collisions have no common causation, then it may be more difficult to identify an appropriate engineering solution to improve road safety. In some cases, further feasibility studies are carried out to determine a solution to the problem, identify cost savings and produce a First Year Rate of Return (FYRR) and therefore schemes giving better FYRR gain higher priority for allocation of funding.

An investigation of the collision records along the 1.4km length of Yardley Wood Road has been carried out. The result of this investigation has indicated that there have been 13 personal injury collisions reported to the Police as having occurred in a three-year period ending on 30th June 2022 (latest available data). A further analysis of these collisions showed that 5 collisions occurred at the traffic signal-controlled junction with Wake Green Road due to poor manoeuvres or disobeying signals, 4 at the junction with Belle Walk due to failing to give way or poor manoeuvres and 4 along the rest of Yardley Wood Road with speed not attributed as a contributing factor in any of them by the Police.
 
Based on the above analysis which has not identified a treatable pattern in the injury collisions, Yardley Wood Road has not received high enough priority to justify traffic calming measures when compared with many other locations across the city with adverse collision histories.
 
Unfortunately, we have no record of the recent collisions that are mentioned, and so we have
requested further details from the Police as the they hold and update road traffic collision
database. We rely upon their database, and so when Highways are contacted regarding recent
collisions on the network, the details are not always readily available to us. However, once the
full facts about any collisions become known to us, we can revisit the matter and consider if any
further intervention may be appropriate for this location.
 
Whilst it is acknowledged that some inconsiderate drivers may be violating the speed limit, this issue will be informed to the Police with a request to monitor vehicle speeds along both roads and taking any enforcement action as they deemed necessary.
 
Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention and taking an interest in road safety matters.
 
Yours sincerely
pp
Kevin Hicks
Assistant Director Highways and Infrastructure