Long Newnton Parish Council using flowers to reduce speeding

The village sits between Tetbury and Malmesbury with traffic regularly travelling between them

Flowers have been grown beside the main road into a village to encourage drivers to slow down when they pass by.

Long Newnton Parish Council planted flowers by the roadside during the pandemic to help improve biodiversity.

As well as attracting more wildlife, it noticed motorists slowed down when they passed the flowers.

Resident Sue Wykes said: "Anything we can do to slow the traffic down in the village is going to be beneficial for the community."

The parish council has implemented various methods over the years to deter speeding through the village in Gloucestershire.

As a small council it receives limited funds from the government.

Resident Michael Norton said the flowers were "such a riot of colour that people couldn’t help but slow down and have a look"

A crowdfunding campaign has raised almost £8,000 for traffic-calming measures.

The money will be used to fund a three-year care program for the wild flowers.

A sign that flashes and records data when people are breaking the 30mph (48kmph) speed limit was also installed by the council.

According to the data, 90% of motorists drive above the speed limit.

The data will be checked weekly to monitor the effectiveness of the flowers

Di Thomas, the chair of Long Newnton Parish Council, said: "It's a shocking number.

"As a community, we are trying so hard to work out how we slow the speeding".

Jenny Forde, cabinet member for health and wellbeing at Cotswold District Council, said: "Evidence has shown that if you introduce things like wildflowers, drivers will slow down because they feel like they're coming into somewhere that's looked after."

The data will be used to measure how effective the flowers are at deterring motorists from speeding.