Speed Protest
A group of mums and their children staged a protest in Langport this afternoon. The group led by Lisa Pearson took time out from the trip home from school to highlight the problems with speeding traffic and heavy good vehicles in the town centre.
Certainly these are not new problems, they have been an issue for pretty much as long as we’ve had tarmac roads. However as lorry sizes grow and the volume of traffic, it seems hard to understand why nothing can be done.
Langport Town Council have already agreed to monitor heavy goods vehicles going through the town. All heavy vehicles need a permit to use the A road through Langport, however checking lorry movements against a list of permit holders is a time intensive task and the council don’t have the man hours spare to do it.
Meantime one of the 20mph warning lights opposite the Black Swan is out of order and has been since February. County Council Highways seem to be uninterested.
And so the protesters made themselves seen and heard. It was interesting to see that even as they stood for the camera, waving their signs; heavy vehicles, buses and vans swept past making the group look especially vulnerable.
The problem will not go away, but it seems almost impossible to get the various layers of local government responsible together to find a solution. As Lisa Pearson put it “someone is going to get killed before anyone does something about it.”