Speeding. Speeding. Speeding. It is the number one issue that residents raised on my Big Community Survey.
So, last week I sat down with Inspector Andy Bridgewater, Neighbourhood Policing Manager for Solihull North, on your behalf, to put the question: what are we going to do as a community and as a partnership with the police to bring this menace under control?
Too many people in our community have gone through the horror of losing someone they love to an idiot behind the wheel. And it’s not just our community at the sharp end of the problem. The Road Safety charity, Brake, tells me that the latest stats show that 57.7% of fatal collisions were caused by speed – the biggest contributing factor to collisions.
Speeding MUST become as unacceptable as drink-driving. It is as irresponsible as ‘one drink for the road.’ So, we need our police to get tougher and we need to help them do their job, safe in the knowledge that we are the police’s eyes and ears.
I’m glad to say there was a real meeting of minds between me and Inspector Bridgwater. He’s making progress and he’s ambitious to go further.
He knows speeding is a blight on our community. It is a danger afflicting our neighbourhood; terrified residents are afraid to walk along footpaths, fearful parents are prevented from letting their children walk to school and headteachers are driven mad with frustration about the threat to their pupils.
The good news is that our community police team has already had success tackling antisocial use of vehicles, especially regarding perpetrators persistently riding off-road bikes dangerously on roads and park land. In fact, since June 2024, 51 off-road bikes have been seized and 11 public nuisance warrants conducted.
Even better, there are extra officers on the way. Our local police team is set to get a boost to its resources, with more PCs and more PCSOs. So, we should see more of them around.
But I wanted to ask Inspector Bridgewater, what do we need to do together? And the reality is that the police neighbourhood team needs our help. So, here’s my ask. I’m building an intelligence picture of where the speeding nuisance is at its worse. We’ve already clocked some of the longer roads – like Chester Road and Auckland Drive – as hot-spots.
But if you can tell me that your road is speeding hell, then I can work with our community police team to set up speed watches that will help us deter the idiots – and work with Solihull Council to campaign for traffic-calming where that makes sense.
I am also meeting with representatives from Brake next week to try and understand why speeding is out of control and, more importantly, what WORKS in terms of combatting speed on our streets.
So: please email [email protected] to report the worst streets for speeding in your neck of the woods. Speeding is the anti-social behaviour that isn’t considered ‘serious’ – that is no longer the case. In Solihull it is a very serious matter indeed.
