No reason for A10 Setch speed camera site says Lynn News reader from Stow Bridge
They have just sent me the full survey and analysis for the Garage Lane/A10 speed camera site.
I can’t see any specific justification for putting the camera at that site, in fact the report seems to focus not on road safety but making a case for that location.
There are a number of other places it could have gone but they seem to have fixated on this one. Not the first time I’ve seen that over the years. As for overall stats on the road?
Considering the traffic volumes, the fact it’s fairly narrow and windy for a main route like this plus the regular obstacles like slow-moving farm machinery and bin lorries making collections you encounter along there I’d say it’s remarkably safe. This is the data for that area –
First – there are no reported collisions actually at the Garage Lane junction.
28/6/16 – single vehicle serious just to the North and West of the Garage Lane junction but not actually on the A10
20/4/17 – single vehicle serious South of D&H Direct
18/5/17 – three vehicle minor North of D&H Direct
12/12/18 – two vehicle minor South of D&H Direct
20/4/19 – single vehicle minor outside Setchey House
25/7/19 – two vehicle minor Setch Road junction
19/7/19 – two vehicle minor Willow Drive side road (Eastview?) junction
10/1/20 – three vehicle minor Willow Drive side road (Eastview?) junction
Or in other words that road is a lot safer than I would expect for a fixed speed camera route. In fact if you go a few miles further south on the A10 there are three distinct hot spots with a far clearer casualty pattern.
Yet in the Lynn News (9/1/22) Martin Wilby, Norfolk County Council’s cabinet member for transport, said: “The safety camera has now been successfully installed to help tackle ongoing road safety issues at an accident cluster site which has sadly seen seven injury accidents over this 500m stretch of the A10 near Garage Lane during the last five years.” The story continues: "Officials say that three of the recorded incidents resulted in serious injury."
In another news source, Norfolk County Council is quoted as saying: “The A10 was identified from a list of potential sites across Norfolk. It has been prioritised because of the number and severity of collisions recorded on it in the last five years.”
There is a term to describe those quotes but I’m too polite to repeat it here. Unlike the locations to the south on the A10 this site doesn’t remotely constitute a ‘cluster’ of collisions and the two serious injury crashes were not only single vehicle but according to the data NCC supplied one wasn’t even on the A10. It looks to me, and I’ve seen this several times before with SCPs, that there’s a hidden agenda here and it’s got nothing to do with road safety.
John Evans,
Stow Bridge
