Firefighters in drive to improve road safety

Details

Wednesday, 04 July 2012 08:30

Firefighters from Avon Fire & Rescue Service are joining a national drive to improve motorway safety.

They will be at Gordano Services, off the M5 near Portishead, on Friday 6 July with the wreckage of a car that was involved in a collision.

They will ask motorists questions about their motorway driving and invite them to take a pledge to drive more safely in the future.

The event is one of many similar initiatives being run by their colleagues countrywide as part of the Chief Fire Officers Association’s (CFOA) National Road Safety Day.

The key message of the campaign is “only a fool breaks the two-second rule”.

Station Manager Stuart Matthews, from the AF&RS Community Safety Team, said: “Close following is one of the most common examples of bad driving.

“If you’re driving too close, you’re putting yourself and the lives of others at risk.

“Every driver needs to leave a good gap, adjusting their following distance regularly to take into account weather and traffic conditions.

“In normal conditions, two seconds between you and the driver in front could provide the vital time you need to enable you to react quickly enough to prevent a serious collision.”

Casualty figures recently released by the Department for Transport show a disappointing increase in the number of road deaths and serious injuries in 2011.

Nationally there was a three percent increase in such incidents, the first rise since 2003.

In the AF&RS area, firefighters attended 692 road traffic collisions in 2011/12 compared to 635 the previous year.

Avon Fire & Rescue Service is committed to working closely with its partners in the West of England Road Safety Partnership to make the regions roads safer.