The NSW Government was recently handed further recommendations to improve the safety of school zones. Ian Faulks discusses the possible measures.

By Ian Faulks

 
The traffic environment around schools is one of the most complex road transport environments the majority of motorists would normally encounter – and easily the most complex traffic environment children would normally encounter.

For periods of 30 minutes or more during the morning traffic peak – and for a very intense 10-15 minutes in the mid-afternoon – the immediate frontages of schools experience traffic volumes and a diversity of road use that is more typically seen in busy commercial and shopping centres or associated with mass movements of people to sports and other large community events.

It is perhaps the complexity and ephemeral nature of the traffic environment around schools that has tended to hide the significant risks posed by this environment to all road users, but particularly to school children seeking to travel from home to school and return.

For this reason, the NSW Parliament’s STAYSAFE Committee has conducted two inquiries into the safety of road use in school zones. The first, during 2000-2002, resulted in 87 recommendations for action, most of which were implemented.

That resulted in the safety measures now commonly seen at schools, including flashing light signage and dragon’s teeth road markings.

A second inquiry, the initial activity of the STAYSAFE Committee under the O’Farrell-Stoner Coalition Government, reported earlier this year, making 19 recommendations for action that confirm again the need for continuing action to improvement safety in this area of the road transport system.

Safety issues within school zones typically make up a sizeable proportion of matters dealt with by local traffic committees and thus contribute significantly to the workload of local council officers and the elected representatives.

A principal area where local councils can take appropriate action to improve the safety of school travel is in the management of the 40-kilometre-per-hour school zones.

Observance of school speed limits is one of the most problematic aspects of speed management in the NSW road transport system. Continuation of the normal travel speed – the speed limit outside school hours – within the school zone is rife, with 70-75% of drivers continuing with an illegal speed at entry or departure from a school zone (see figure on opposite page).

The addition of flashing lights to signage at the entry to school zones has been a successful means of increasing the awareness of motorists of operational school zones, both temporally and spatially. However, illegal speeds continue to be seen in school zones. This is commonly thought to be an intentional choice by drivers, and has resulted in the installation of fixed speed cameras within school zones to detect such speeding behaviour.

However, recent research indicates that drivers may be distracted from their target speed of less than 40 kilometres per hour and revert to the regular speed that operates outside of school hours.

Therefore, a better solution may be to replicate the flashing lights within the school zone as reminder cues to drivers about the 40-kilometre-per-hour limit.

Such a flashing light cue need not be the relatively expensive flashing lights used at the entry points to school zones, but could be as simple, and cheap, as the ‘Check Speed’ flashing lights developed by Peter Olsen and licensed freely to the NSW Government.

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