Cllr Chris Jones' commitment to road safety in Sealand

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An email to Cllr Chris Jones

cc. Home Secretary, Chief Constable Mark Polin and others

Dear Cllr Jones 

I read your letter in The Flintshire Chronicle with interest. I have followed your protest campaign also with interest. I live in the village of Penyffordd nr Buckley on a major route to school in the middle of the village. Where you are interested in road safety my community council Penyffordd are completely disinterested in fact I'm sure they would rather I just go away. When someone gets run over one of our elderly cllrs who lives up a cul de sac will be wheeled out to say that they had done all that they can which is a lie because they have all foot dragged for three years plus.

Whilst I admire you standing up to the speeding in your community I feel less enamoured with what you say about the Flintshire Road Safety Team. My experience of the road safety team is the following. They come out to your community once every Preston Guild. They carry out speed education in working hours when few of the main culprits are on the road. They measure speeding vehicles for you then refuse to hand over the data. They conspire with North Wales Police to down play the level of speeding. Recently our CBM told our community council that speeding was 5% over 30 mph when the actual figure is 34%.

You mention that education is the way forward. Cllr Alex Aldridge (former Flintshire County Council Leader) recently made this claim in The Leader. The Leader were good enough to allow me to ask Alex through the letters page how he would educate the legion of low life that race around our roads Alex never came back.

I consider your letter propaganda and little more. There is a speeding epidemic out there that is not being addressed.

1. We currently get around 700 speeders a day through the Penyffordd village. NWP, FCC, Penyffiordd Community Council  are not interested at all.

2. At night the roads are left to the youth to tear around with the results such as in your manor where two fatalities happened on consecutive nights

3. North Wales as whole is used as a race track at the weekends by bikers and tourists.

4. We also have the additional insult where bikers with illegal exhausts can be heard two miles from the road on which they are screaming along.

The new policing is engaging with the bikers and the young drivers. So people will go on killing themselves and others such as Danny Evans. I note his mum wants the death penalty for the offender.

 Engaging with speeders is doing nothing and allowing NWP and FCC to get off from doing their job which is to police and control the roads so they are safe for us to travel on. I would hope you will consider this before appearing in any further propaganda exercises which do nothing to alter what is actually happening on our roads.

You say education is the key factor. I would say humbug. Good luck on your attempt to get a pedestrian crossing.

Colin Hughes
Penyffordd

keywords: Cllrs Shelley Webber, David Wisinger, John Dodd, Mary Southall.