ePetition - A full road safety audit of Bear Road
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ePetition details
A full road safety audit of Bear Road
Bear road is an unsafe road for pedestrians to use. This is because of the speed that motorist drive, and the way the road has been designed – the pavements are too thin.
Outside the nursery, along the road, there is limited room for parents to maneuver their buggies and there's limited pavement space for general foot traffic on both sides.
Only two weeks ago, there was a serious accident where a police car hit a pedestrian. Recently I started a poll on the facebook group 'Bear Mountain Folk' – there was a high number of residents voting on options that could help with making Bear road safer.
This ePetition ran from 08/08/2019 to 07/10/2019 and has now finished.
297 people signed this ePetition.
Council response
Response provided at the Environment, Transport & Sustainability Committee meeting on 8 October 2019:
"The incident on Bear Road referred to in the petition involving
a Police car and a pedestrian was serious however, the road layout
was not recorded as a contributing factor.
In the past three years there have been 10 other injury causing
collisions recorded by the Police along the length of Bear Road of
which two were reported as being serious. Only one of these
collisions involved a pedestrian who stepped out in front of a
slow-moving vehicle and received a slight injury.
The posted speed limit in the residential part of Bear Road is 20
miles per hour. Whilst no injuries are ever acceptable on the
Highway, for a busy road that is approximately 1.5km long, the
number of injuries is relatively small numerically.
There are relatively few crossing movements in Bear Road as on one
side is a cemetery with the majority of the houses being on the
northern side so the only real need to cross the road is to access
a parked car. Generally, these cars tend to be parked on the
footway making it unusable by pedestrians. On the northern side for
most of the residential length is where cars park and this forms a
buffer zone between pedestrians and traffic.
On the lower part of Bear Road, the road narrows slightly and so no
parking is allowed. The footway at this point is around 1.7m wide
which is average for Brighton, however, at the nursery it does
widen out and guardrail has been provided to prevent children from
running straight out into the road.
Since the submission of this petition, local residents have been
consulted on parking in this area as part of a potential new
controlled parking zone in the Coombe Road Area. To address the
safety issues associated with the footway parking, this
consultation included proposals for double yellow lines along the
southern side of Bear Road. The outcome of the consultation will be
presented to ETS committee in due course.
For the reasons given above, and in line with our current policies
and practices, it is felt that Bear Road is generally a safe road
when compared to others in the city however it would benefit from
the introduction of double yellow lines on the southern side to
improve pedestrian access to the footway and to reduce the need for
crossing movements along the length. We will need to wait for the
outcome of the consultation however in the meantime we will
continue to monitor the safety record of Bear Road as part of our
ongoing commitment to reduce the number of injury causing
collisions in the City".