Chairman paints positive picture at LARSOA AGM

Around 60 delegates attended the 2004 LARSOA AGM at London’s Royal National Hotel last Tuesday 22 March.

Chairman Steve Whitehouse (pictured) opened the meeting with a brief resume of the high points of the past year. First, he welcomed former members of ALBRSO – who now make up the LARSOA London region - describing it as a ‘strong and vibrant region'.

He also congratulated the eastern region for its work in producing an ‘excellent’ occupational road risk CD ROM resource, and the North West region for achieving a Prince Michael Award for ‘Teddy Takes a Tumble’.

He cited improved dialogue and relationships with a number of other organisations including CTC, the motorcycle fraternity and Brake as a very positive development.

He also paid tribute to Tony Allsworth who has moved on after a lengthy period as head of road safety publicity at DfT, and to the LARSOA website project team for its work during the year.

Steve Whitehouse and Simon Ettinghausen – currently on secondment in Iraq – will continue as chair and vice-chair as they are mid-term in a two year period of office. Rosemary Welch agreed to stay on as treasurer in the absence of a new nominee and Liz Barkwith agreed to continue as press/publicity officer. Alan Fisher was appointed secretary, though Brian Hogarth will continue to offer invaluable administrative support to Alan and the other officers.

There were two presentations before lunch.

First Kevin Clinton, head of road safety at RoSPA outlined the Society’s key road safety objectives and activities. He touched on issues including the desirability of graduated driver training and (ultimately) mandatory refresher training, of persuading the Government to reduce the drink drive limit and the need to engage the Conservative Party over its position with regard to raising speed limits and removing road humps.

He also emphasised the need to move from simply forcing motorists to slow down to creating an environment where motorists will opt to slow down – through more 30mph repeaters, road design, speedometer design and limits on power/top speeds. There was strong support from the floor for more speed limit repeater signs.

Nick Rawlings, editor of the LARSOA road safety newsfeed and website, then gave an overview of the progress the site has made and feedback from a reader survey.

The survey recorded an overwhelmingly positive response from the vast majority of respondents but no clear mandate to move from weekly publishing to daily publishing – one of the issues raised in the survey. The survey findings will be covered in more detail next week.

At the end of his presentation Brian Hogarth made a small presentation to Nick to mark the recent passing of 100,000 hits on the homepage since the site was re-launched in June 2002.

The presentation of the Linda Chalker Awards, and the afternoon session on cycling and cycle training by Ken Spence and Philip Darnton, are covered elsewhere in this issue.