Road Safety In Tickhill

Tickhill is a very small but often busy town with snaking roads, on-road parking and very narrow pavements making speeding vehicles a very real and present danger to our community and especially our children who need to cross the busy roads to get to the local schools. Despite the speed limit changing from 60mph to 30mph at the junction with Dadesley Road, motorists frequently continue into Tickhill at speeds well above 30 mph.

Over the last few years Tickhill Town Council have been in consultations with DMBC to try and introduce road calming measures and make our town a safer place for residents and visitors, however, when it comes to investing in road safety, DMBC are data driven, and as there have been no fatalities there is no data to support any investment.

Since DMBC will not invest, it is down to Tickhill Town Council and the residents and local businesses of Tickhill to implement our own measures to ensure our town is a safer place. We do not want to wait until there is a fatality to initiate DMBC to take action so the plan was to purchase and install a flashing road traffic sign on Doncaster Road, which will not only warn drivers of their speed as they enter Tickhill but will also capture data on the volume and speed of traffic, which we will then be able to present to the highways department and the Police traffic department to support our case for traffic calming safety measures. The data is captured anonymously and cannot be used to prosecute offenders.

Whilst there are already signs as you enter Tickhill from Harworth and Maltby, these do not capture data; they are simply a visual warning to notify drivers if they are exceeding the speed limit and cannot be used to justify any funding for traffic calming measures.

In 2022 we set up a Crowdfunding page to raise the much needed funds from this project. We estimated a donation of £2 per household would have raised the funds required to purchase and install the data capture signs. Unfortunately, our campaign failed as we had insufficient support from the community and only managed to raise 1/3 of our target which we returned to all the donators as we had set up the scheme as an all or nothing campaign.

We have not given up and will re-visit this at a later date. In the meantime, we have signed up to the Community Speed Watch Initiative. More details to follow!