Preston village crossroads remains risky and busy - in spite of bypass
There are calls for drivers to use the Broughton bypass if they aren't coming into the village itself - and for those who do pass through the central crossroads to stick to the speed limit.
Parish council chair Pat Hastings speaks to local democracy reporter Paul Faulkner.
Parish council chair Pat Hastings speaks to local democracy reporter Paul Faulkner.
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00:00 [Sound of traffic]
00:13 Councillor Hastings, if we were standing at this junction six or seven years ago,
00:17 we'd have traffic lights behind us and traffic stacked back in each direction,
00:21 probably for half a mile or so. This is a far better situation, isn't it?
00:25 Why are you still not content with it?
00:27 Well, since the traffic lights have gone, we've got, in theory, a 20 mile an hour speed limit.
00:32 But we have people going through very fast, trucks, all sorts of things, well over the 20 miles an hour,
00:39 and we have lots and lots of accidents. They don't all get reported to the police,
00:44 but because basically people are generally not injured. It's mainly trauma and damage to cars.
00:50 But we've also got the issue that people use it as a through road. They think it's quicker than the bypass.
00:56 It isn't. And in theory, the road that way is a minor road now, but people just use it as a rat run.
01:02 It will go straight across. They ignore the traffic either way.
01:06 So it's a combination of speed this way and ignorance of the give way along Garstang Road.
01:13 Ideally, we'd like a stop sign at the corner, which would make people stop.
01:17 Physically stop rather than give way.
01:19 Physically stop as opposed to give way, because apparently that makes a difference with prosecutions.
01:23 But really, if everyone slowed down and everyone respected the junction, we'd have no problems.
01:30 Can you believe that people, after calling for the bypass for so long, are now not using it?
01:35 Well, they're not us. The locals use it where we can.
01:39 I mean, people that are mainly going through are just people in a hurry,
01:43 particularly in the evenings. People don't seem to know it's there.
01:47 And most of the accidents have been caused by people just going straight through.
01:51 To start with, they blame the sat-navs. But, you know, five years on,
01:55 you're not telling me that they've not updated their sat-navs.
01:59 Would you like to see cars prohibited from this route or just discouraged?
02:03 No, no, that's not... We've got businesses, we've got people in the village.
02:07 We don't want to stop anything like that.
02:09 I think if we had enforcement of the speed, some sort of speed bumps or something to slow people
02:15 down, we have an echelon through the other end, which makes a slowing difference from that side.
02:20 But from this side, it's a straight road right down to the corner.
02:24 Our speed indicator devices, and we've one over there at the co-op and one down by the War Memorial,
02:29 have indicated that the average speed is between 30 and 40 miles an hour.
02:33 I think it's actually 37 or something like that,
02:36 through the village, which is a 20 mile an hour speed limit.
02:39 The average... We have recorded some speeds in the 60s of people going through here.
02:46 60 miles an hour going through this junction.
02:48 We've been going straight through the traffic through the crossroads at that point.
02:52 We just want people to respect the speed limits, respect the junction and be sensible.
02:59 Are you worried that there will be a more serious accident than a slow bump at some point?
03:03 We don't want a serious accident and we don't want a serious accident to make people listen.
03:09 We obviously don't.
03:11 We've asked everybody locally to report accidents.
03:15 We've got a lot of them from Facebook. I've got about 70 odd from the last 18 months.
03:20 70 accidents at this junction?
03:22 Yeah, of cars, trucks hitting each other.
03:25 You only have to go on Facebook and you can see them.
03:27 Trucks hitting, cars hitting, things getting pushed across the road.
03:31 They're not major accidents, but they are to the person in the car.
03:37 So you'd like fewer cars going slower, ideally?
03:39 Fewer cars going through the village.
03:41 The ones that are going to businesses, that's not a problem.
03:45 Fewer cars going through the crossroads, north, south and everywhere.
03:50 People respecting the speed limits.
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