There is something that has been frustrating me for quite some time in my role as a County Councillor, and I suspect many residents across Leicestershire will have experienced exactly the same thing.
You raise concerns about speeding vehicles, dangerous junctions, poor visibility or roads that have become increasingly busy, only to receive a response explaining that there isn't sufficient accident data to justify taking action.
It's a response I've become all too familiar with, and whilst I understand the reasoning behind it, I genuinely believe we need to rethink how we approach road safety.
I want to make it clear from the outset that this isn't a criticism of our Highways officers. I have a great deal of respect for the people working within Leicestershire County Council's Highways department. They have an enormous road network to maintain, limited budgets to work with and difficult decisions to make about where resources should be allocated.
But I do think there is a fundamental question we need to ask ourselves.
Why should we have to wait for somebody to be seriously injured, or worse, before we decide that a road is dangerous enough to warrant improvements?
Over the past six years, I've raised numerous concerns about road safety across North West Leicestershire. From speeding on residential roads to dangerous junctions, school parking and roads that simply haven't kept pace with the enormous amount of development taking place around them.
Many of these issues are brought to my attention by residents who experience them every single day. These aren't people looking for something to complain about. They're parents worried about their children crossing the road, elderly residents who no longer feel safe walking to the shops and motorists who regularly witness near misses at junctions they know are dangerous.
Yet when these concerns are passed on, the response frequently comes back to the same thing. There haven't been enough recorded accidents to justify further action.
And that's where I believe we have a problem.
Statistics don't tell the whole story
Accident data undoubtedly has an important role to play in identifying dangerous roads and helping councils prioritise investment. I'm certainly not suggesting we should ignore it.
But we need to recognise its limitations.
Not every accident is reported to the police, and consequently, not every accident makes its way into the official statistics used to inform road safety decisions. I've personally witnessed collisions that don't appear to have been reflected in the data, and residents regularly tell me about incidents that have taken place without any official record being made.
Even some serious accidents can go unreported or fail to appear in the particular datasets being used to assess a road. We need to be careful about assuming that an absence of recorded collisions means an absence of danger.
Then there are the countless near misses. The child who narrowly avoids being struck by a speeding car, the motorist forced to brake sharply because somebody has pulled out of a junction with restricted visibility, or the pedestrian who has to step into the road because vehicles are parked across the pavement.
None of these incidents necessarily generates a statistic, but every one of them could be a warning that something needs to change.
We also need to consider how quickly our communities are changing. Across North West Leicestershire, we've seen thousands of new homes built, bringing additional traffic onto roads that were never designed to accommodate today's volume of vehicles.
A road that was relatively quiet five or ten years ago may now be a major route for people travelling to work, taking their children to school or accessing new housing developments.
Surely our approach to road safety needs to recognise these changes rather than relying too heavily on historical accident records?
Local knowledge should count for something
One of the reasons I became a County Councillor was to represent my community and make sure residents' concerns were heard. I spend a considerable amount of time walking around our villages and towns, speaking to people, visiting problem locations and seeing these issues for myself.
I strongly believe that local knowledge and lived experience should carry considerably more weight when it comes to identifying potential road safety problems.
If residents are repeatedly telling us that a junction is dangerous, or that vehicles are regularly travelling at excessive speeds past their homes, surely that should be enough to warrant a proper investigation?
I'm not suggesting that every complaint should automatically result in expensive engineering works or new speed cameras. What I'm asking for is a more proactive approach, where concerns are taken seriously and potential solutions are explored before somebody gets hurt.
Sometimes the answer might be as simple as improving road markings, cutting back vegetation to improve visibility, reviewing a speed limit or making relatively inexpensive changes to a junction. Other locations might require more substantial investment, and I fully accept that these decisions need to be balanced against the resources available.
But I would like to see us place greater emphasis on identifying risks rather than simply responding to accidents that have already happened.
There's also an important distinction between a road being statistically safe and people actually feeling safe using it. If parents are frightened to let their children walk to school or residents are avoiding particular junctions because they've witnessed so many near misses, we shouldn't simply dismiss those concerns because the accident figures look acceptable.
Prevention should always be the priority
I believe we need to move towards an approach that combines accident data with local knowledge, changing traffic patterns, residents' experiences and professional judgement.
As councillors, we have a responsibility to challenge decisions when we believe something isn't right. Equally, we have a responsibility to work constructively with our Highways officers to identify practical and affordable solutions.
I will continue raising these concerns on behalf of residents, asking questions and pushing for improvements where I believe there is a genuine safety risk.
Ultimately, road safety shouldn't be about waiting until a particular number of people have been injured before a location qualifies for attention.
Data should help us make better decisions. It should never become an excuse for failing to act on an obvious danger.
And if we can identify a problem today that prevents somebody from being seriously injured tomorrow, surely that's exactly what we should be doing.
I'd much rather have a conversation about the money we've spent preventing an accident than have to explain to a grieving family why we didn't have enough evidence to do something sooner.
