A CAMPAIGNER has said she will keep battling to get improvements to the A140 despite road safety bosses deciding not to reduce the speed limit to 30mph.

The Suffolk Road Safety Partnership met this month to discuss reducing the speed limit in the road in Brome at the B1077 junction from 40 to 30mph.

Janet Norman-Philips clerk for nearby Redlingfield Parish Meeting has been fighting to also get a speed camera which had been switched off back on.

She said: “It’s not an issue that’s going to go away. It’s going to get busier. We gave them a lot of research demonstrating if you put a speed camera up something very strange happens - within a mile of the camera people slow down by on average five miles an hour. The fact that the speed camera was there changed people’s behaviour. As soon as it was boarded up it’s changed again.

“I believe it would be good to have the speed limit lowered as the accidents that do occur would be 10mph slower and less people would die. It’s the volume of traffic that’s the problem, people do try and cross and they are endangering their lives by doing it. They have to do something.

“There’s an enormous plan for developing Eye Airfield as a real business centre and it would be really good for the area but it would generate an awful lot of traffic. I find the road quite intimidating to drive through. It’s a really dangerous road, we had a couple of really serious accidents recently and it’s not going to get any better. We are going to keep battling away at them. We do not want to let them off the hook.”

The review into the site, near Eye, began when a young mother died in a crash at the junction last November.

A spokesman for Suffolk Road Safety Partnership, which includes Suffolk County Council and Suffolk police, said: “After careful consideration of all the evidence and professional advice available to it, we have decided that lowering the speed limit at Brome was not in the best interests of road safety.

“We looked in detail at analysis of the collision history at this location, the causes of collisions, the current road layout and relevant national guidance. Also considered was the likely impact that lowering the speed limit would have on driver behaviour, such as ‘bunching’ and overtaking. All parties concluded that, on balance, imposing a 30mph limit on this stretch of the A140 was not the most effective way to improve safety on the road.”

He said extra visits by mobile safety cameras would be arranged and council highways staff would be asked to present engineering options to improve the layout of the road to its next meeting.