Val Knight talks about her concern over the danger to life at the busy Sompting Road roundabout and surrounding areas
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00:00 I moved to Worthing a couple of years ago and I take my four-year-old granddaughter to her playgroup and now to her school
00:08 and I really believed I'd lost my ability to cross the road because having moved from Brighton, where the speed limit is 20 miles an hour,
00:17 to here where it's 30, in Brighton of course nobody sticks to 20 miles an hour but they do stay under 30.
00:25 Here they don't stick to 30, they stay under 40 and we have so many blind spots on the route to school where traffic can't see children and people crossing
00:36 and we can't see the traffic. Also it's just come off the A27, everybody's rushing to get to work so it's not ideal circumstances for road safety.
00:47 We need to slow the traffic down and we need more signage. We've lost our lollipop lady who left about a month ago because she felt it was unsafe
00:58 and she couldn't keep the children safe because the roads were so dangerous, even with her there.
01:05 She had sometimes got people shouting at her out of their car windows and so on, although on the whole it's not an issue of bad behaviour,
01:15 it's an issue of a dangerous road. Sompton Road is a dual carriageway and it hasn't got a crossing at this end where the schools are.
01:25 It does have a crossing further up where there's a park which is essential and that's not a problem, but down this end where the schools are
01:34 and a library and a playgroup and a community centre in the church which is used all day every day, they don't have any way of slowing the traffic down.
01:47 And people who live locally do their best to keep people safe crossing the road if they're driving, but people who don't know the roads are just rushing to work
01:57 and they don't notice that there are problems. Last year we were told that there were three children got knocked down.
02:05 Thank God not any of them were seriously injured, but we don't want to wait for that to happen.
02:13 We've put in applications for a crossing, a proper pelican crossing on Sompton and a reduction in speed around this Dominion Road area where the schools are
02:26 and around this roundabout because the only way to make it safer with such poor visibility, with legal parking here which blocks everybody's view of crossing Penfold Road,
02:41 the roundabout which has got very tall foliage on it, we're very much in favour of the foliage, but you can't see whether there's cars coming round the roundabout at considerable speed.
02:54 So we would like to make that into a flower garden rather than a bush, which is what it is at the moment.
03:01 I just wanted to say that it's not that people are driving faster than 30 miles an hour, it's a 30 limit, probably most of them are at 30,
03:13 but that is not a correct speed for the lack of visibility, the number of people, the number of children trying to get to their schools all at the same time,
03:23 when people are in a hurry, panicking to get there on time etc.
03:28 And children are encouraged by school to walk to school, it's much better for their health, even to bring their scooters etc.
03:37 There are teenagers crossing here on their own because obviously they go to school on their own, and they are taking their lives in their hands, especially the ones on their phones,
03:48 but that's not all the time.
03:50 So yes, basically we have a big problem around this school area, there's two schools, playgroup, library, community centre,
04:00 we really need the traffic slowed down and visibility improved, and we need a crossing at the bottom of Salton Road.
04:10 [BLANK_AUDIO]