Changing roads in your area
We have to make tough decisions on where to invest in traffic and road safety, and this means we cannot always make changes that residents feel are needed. As a top priority we must invest in locations where evidence shows crashes are occurring, which are resulting in personal injury and where there is an engineering solution that may reduce the number or severity of these. In many cases road traffic accidents are caused by driver behaviour, which cannot be reduced by changing the road or what we call ‘engineering measures’ alone.
For on-street resident and limited-wait parking contact your district council to request changes. Or follow the steps below.
What we do
Every year we develop our priority list of changes to locations to be undertaken in the next 12 - 18 months, which is called the Casualty Reduction Programme. The changes to the road are safety focused prioritised, which include changes to the highways layout or new features.
If you are concerned about a location that is not currently included in our Casualty Reduction Programme see steps 1 to 3 below:
Request changes in your area
If you feel that changes are required to the highway in your area there are steps that you and your community can take that will really help us ensure we keep focused on the sites that reduce the number or severity of injury crashes. These steps are:
Step 1: Check the crash history of the site
Gathering data and local knowledge is really important to help with our decision making. We review incidents within the last 3 years involving personal injury (validated by Kent Police). Visit crashmap to check records.
If you require copies of detailed crash reports and plans, these are available on request from the Crash and Casualty data team but will incur a charge.
If there is no history of crashes, then we are unlikely to be able to take forward a scheme unless you have support from your local community representatives. If this is the case, see step 2.
Step 2: Contact your local community representative
To suggest safety changes to the highway, your first point of contact is your local parish council or local district councillor or your county member. They will need the crash data you obtained in step 1 or your reasons for promoting the changes. It may also be that your county member or parish council are able to financially support your request.
If they are not supportive, then it would be very difficult for us to prioritise your request and you should not contact us.
If they are supportive they will contact us and let us know the extent of community support for change.
Step 3: Contact your local community representative for feedback
After we have heard from your local community representative, we will agree a plan of action with them. This may involve developing a system of prioritising measures, if multiple measures are requested. Some measures may also require seeking funding from external budgets.
Do not contact us directly for feedback. Your local community representative will feedback to you, or we will publish information directly to affected residents if the scheme is going to be developed as part of our pre-works information pack.
How and when we decide
When you'll hear back: We'll let your community representative know within 20 working days whether we can take the request any further. We decide with the help of experienced traffic engineers, who identify whether any cost-effective measures to reduce road casualties are needed.
Funding: Once we've identified, assessed and agreed what to do, we'll seek funding from various sources, such as the county or parish council. This can take some time (some schemes can take over a year before the relevant funding can be obtained). We then report the scheme to the local district Joint Transportation Boards. Proposed schemes may be subject to additional consultations.
Design, consultation and delivery: Once funding is approved, we will draw up designs and consult any affected residents to let them know what we are doing, when it may start and how long it will take. We may need to make further changes to the original design as a result of technical considerations.
Feedback: Once the scheme is fully approved we will arrange for implementation. After completion the scheme will be reviewed for its effectiveness.