The Speedwatch Team have been active since March checking the speeds of vehicles on the roads of Sutton. We now have sufficient data collected to be able to determine and describe the driving characteristics of vehicles driven into and out of the village. We prepare a monthly report that we share with the Police that includes the VRM’s (Vehicle Registration Marks) of the vehicles that we record speeding (+35 mph).
Our June 2023 report follows:
During the month the Speedwatch Team conducted 8 sessions on the roadside. The sessions were located: 2 on Town Street, 1 on Station Road, 2 on Mattersey Road and 3 on Sutton Lane. The road closure on Sutton Lane restricting our activity on Station Road and slowing traffic on Town Street. There were traffic queues on Station Road as vehicles waited for the level crossing barriers to lift so speeding cars were not so in evidence.
The cumulative results, March 2023 to 30th June 2023, are shown in tabular form and graphically as a bar chart below. Speeding vehicles are expressed in 3mph speed bands. Grouping in speed bands rather than recorded as individual speeds allows for analysis in an Excel Pivot Table and subsequent plotting as a bar chart.
Several band widths are still missing and will appear in the results table when populated. Worth mentioning that unlike the Police who register and prosecute at 33mph we record speeding vehicles from 35mph so we understate the outcomes that the Police might record.
In addition a simple and separate spread sheet is now used to record the number of vehicles that travel through each SpeedWatch location. (transposed below) The numbers of vehicles per location allowing us to express as a percentage the speeding per location. By aggregating vehicles per location (from March to June) we obtain the percentage speeding on Sutton’s roads overall.
Thus results to date of speeding vehicles, percentages as follows:
Town Street 32 speeding vehicles on 1510 through zone, approx 2%.
Station Road 4 speeding vehicles on 296 through zone, approx 1%.
Mattersey Road 190 speeding vehicles on 1273 through zone, approx 15%
Sutton Lane 230 speeding vehicles on 2257 through zone, approx 10%
Percentage over speeding on Sutton’s roads overall, from 5336 vehicles through all zones and 456 recorded speeding, approx 9%.
The two hot spots are Mattersey Road and Sutton Lane. Mattersey Road in particular must be a considerable concern to residents and will we hope likely feature as a prime location for the Police’s own mobile speed camera team on 8th July.
We have now registered 24 drivers as repeat offenders with 2 instances each of speeding (+35mph). Two drivers have accumulated 3 instances and will be highlighted in our report to the police. So 26 drivers are as repeat offenders accounting for 54 separate offences which as a percentage of the total number of offences 456 approximately 12%.
In the coming month we plan to revisit Station Road as a location and Town Street in the early morning between 05.30 until 06.30 as we are lead to believe that some vehicles travel at high speed through the village in the early hours. Traffic on Station Road is generally light, is time of day dependent, with from observation, most speeding also occurring in the early morning between 05.00 and 07.30. That being the time when rail traffic is light and the barriers are up.
