Surround a town

The Surround A Town (SAT) Activity is one of the Safer Essex Roads Partnership’s (SERP) responses to driving a step change in reducing KSI figures and to extend the good practice. It addresses the ‘fatal 4’ issues; a recent report by TRL on ‘The effectiveness of roads policing’ suggests that the elimination of these issues would reduce KSIs by at least 20+%.

Essex previously saw a very successful downward trajectory in Killed and Serious Injury casualties when the Surround A Town concept was trialled from 2007 to 2009. The challenge was that in recent years the trend in KSI has plateaued and the partnership needed to re-invigorate and build on the previous success. The campaign combined overt and covert enforcement together with high profile targeted publicity to increase public levels of awareness of this additional policing and to enhance their knowledge about ‘what’ and ‘why’ the campaign was addressing.

Surround A Town allows us to focus a massive amount of resource in a very concentrated and geographically targeted area. This allows us to address a wide range of poor road using behaviours by appropriate use of engagement, education and enforcement that would otherwise be difficult to capture; each partner being able to contribute its own area of expertise.

The SERP uses an overarching campaign message of  ‘no excuse for poor driving’ at the Surround A Town events which focus education on motorists and motorcyclists on the following:

Seat belt wearing

Mobile phone use

Drink and drive/ride.

Exceeding the Speed limits / drive according to conditions

Anti-social driver/rider behaviour