Renewed vigour for our 2024-25 manifesto

The problem:

Well, it’s been over a year since our last post and you might remember that we made some firm resolutions to get our campaign for safer roads some support from people that could help and have a responsibility to do so, including:

• Essex Police Special Constabulary (@EPSpecials)
• Jaymey McIvor, Local Councillor (@McivorJaymey)
• Alex Burghart, MP for Brentwood & Ongar (@alexburghart)
• Essex Police Rural Engagement Team (@EPRural)
• Ongar Town Council (@ongar_town)
• Essex Roads Policing (@EPRoadsPolicing)

We also threw in some others, like Everything Epping Forest, Epping Forest Guardian, Safer Essex Roads. We used X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook to notify these local news agencies, our local Councillor, Essex Police and others, once weekly about dangerous drivers through Little End, Stanford Rivers using a pretty graphic that was easy to understand, just like this one below. Wow, 70?

The response from people we thought would help? Silence. The actions? Erm, there weren’t any. Nothing from our local councillor, the police, the town council, local media, our MP, blah blah blah…

That’s 52 chances to engage over a whole year. 52 individually made graphics, hundreds of hours collating tens of thousands of data entries, bot scenario development and troubleshooting, site design, social media work, etc, etc. All for free, all for the safety of our community, but, sadly, all for nothing.

We sent messages to the local police force, who wanted some help sorting the data we sent them, after saying: “there seems to be a couple of incidents where the vehicles are well over the limit and they were recorded in the early hours of the morning is this correct or have I read the information wrong, I know the time of the day is irrelevant but just want to make sure I was reading it right.“

So, we sent this:

No of logs at x% of speed limit in year one data.

150-159%	160-169%	170-179%	180-189%	190-199%	>200%
4515	2659	834	247	121	45

We also said:

We think that all of these constitute “well over the speed limit” and amount to thousands of incidents, rather than a couple. These are logged at all times throughout the day and night and not just in the early hours of the morning.

We’ve added a graph of the data below, including the following year to illustrate that this is consistent data. Blue are year 1 logs, red, year 2 and yellow are total logs for both years:

That was about a year and a half ago, we’ve heard nothing despite a couple of polite nudges to remind them!

So, what’s to do? How do we get something done about this?

We’ve sat down and had a long think about things and everyone has evaluated how much time they can spend on the project as it is pretty labour-intensive, and that means time away from their families and very late nights! The developer has given much thought to further financial investment; money out of the developer’s own pocket, and more time spent on the programming side. Nobody helps pay us for this stuff, apart from the Parish Council who kindly met some of the financial responsibility for a while. We are totally non-profit.

The solution:

So, we decided that we need [1] improved visibility of dangerous drivers, [2] help from residents (since nobody else cares) and [3, 4] improved reporting. We’re going to have one more push to make the A113 safer for all, starting with those in Little End, Stanford Rivers – if we still don’t get any support, we’ll consider jacking the whole thing in.

So here’s what we’ll do.

1. Capture still images of vehicles breaking the speed limit and then post the images online. These will be taken at fairly low resolution first of all but hopefully that will be improved in time. We’ve been doing lots of calibration and testing and hope this should be ready soon. More details will follow here on the blog.
2. Set up an online petition for residents to sign, making it quick and easy to get their voices heard.
3. Set up a 200% bot, used exclusively to highlight drivers doubling the speed limit and post the results online (much like we do with the existing bot). This has been tested and we’re pretty sure we can get it to work.
4. Improved graphics on the website to make the data more useful to people. This will depend on what open source software we can find available but we’d like things a bit more elegant and with more automation since we just don’t get time to keep pulling so much data manually.

We’ll give this a fair run and if we feel that local residents don’t care, we’ll probably shut the whole campaign down. We’re all tired and what’s the point in campaigning for something that nobody wants? Then again, who doesn’t want safer roads?

If we get some support, we’re right behind you – we’ll fight your corner for free and we’ll make your neighbourhood safer – that we promise. Remember, there are (on average) 5 people killed on UK roads every day – all pointless deaths, wrecking families and destroying lives. This can be stopped if we work together, don’t let this happen on our road again. Support us and we’ll do the rest. All you have to do is to stand up.