A public road safety meeting at Harlow Civic Centre on Monday 28 September at 7pm follows a Potter Street speeding petition. Our collision figures inside.
Residents worried about speeding in Harlow can raise it in person tomorrow night. A public meeting on road safety is being held at Harlow Civic Centre at 7pm on Monday 28 September.
It is the second such meeting. The first was held in the Council Chamber on Tuesday 4 August. Both were called by Councillor Nicky Purse, the Conservative councillor for Church Langley South and Potter Street (2024 election result).
This is a councillor’s public meeting, not a formal council committee, so there is no published agenda and no vote.
Who is expected
The campaign behind the meeting posted the details on its petition page. Its update reads:
“Next meeting with Nicky Purse, Essex Police, Essex CC (and Essex Highways invited to attend) on Monday 28th Sept 7pm Harlow’s civic centre.”
(Potter Street petition, update on the next meeting)
The wording matters. Essex County Council is the highway authority for every road in Harlow except the M11, so it decides on speed limits, humps and crossings. Essex Highways is the county’s highways service. The update says it has been invited, not that it has confirmed.
What the petition asks for
The petition was started in February 2025 by a Potter Street resident. It asks for traffic calming on Potter Street, CM17, and it had 558 signatures against a goal of 1,000 when we checked on Sunday.
Its complaint is specific. The petition says there are no traffic calming measures “from the junction with Hillside up towards the Miller and Carter pub”. It says drivers can accelerate between the Prentice Place shops and the war memorial “with nothing to slow them”. (Change.org petition)
What the collision record shows
We checked the Department for Transport’s road casualty data, the police-reported record of every collision in which someone was hurt. We matched each Harlow collision from 2021 to 2025 to within 20 metres of Potter Street itself.
Five injury collisions were recorded on Potter Street in those five years:
| Date | Time | Worst injury | Casualties |
|---|---|---|---|
| 19 July 2022 | 8.25pm | Serious | 1 |
| 6 November 2022 | 11.30pm | Slight | 2 |
| 14 March 2023 | 9.43pm | Slight | 1 |
| 19 October 2023 | 9.36pm | Slight | 1 |
| 16 November 2025 | 6.38pm | Slight | 1 |
That is six people hurt, one of them seriously, and nobody killed. Every one of the five happened in the evening or at night.
Five collisions is a small number, and it does not settle the argument either way. It counts only crashes that were reported to the police and injured someone. Near misses, damage-only crashes and the experience of walking beside fast traffic do not appear in it at all, and those are what most petitions are about.
Across the whole of Harlow district, the same data records 541 injury collisions from 2021 to 2025, with 658 casualties. Seven of those collisions were fatal.
The number where someone was killed or seriously injured has not fallen. It was 22 in 2021, 29 in 2022, 26 in 2023, 24 in 2024 and 30 in 2025, the highest of the five years.
(Department for Transport, road safety open data, collisions for the last five years). The 2025 figures are the newest and can still be revised.
What it means for you
- Go if you can. It starts at 7pm on Monday 28 September at the Civic Centre, in the Water Gardens in the town centre. It is open to the public.
- Take specifics. A road name, the stretch, the time of day and what you see are far more useful to a highway engineer than a general complaint.
- Report problems to the right body. Speed limits, road layout and crossings are Essex County Council’s. Report a highway fault through Essex Highways. Persistent speeding is a matter for Essex Police.
- If you cannot go, the petition is still open.
Getting to the Civic Centre by car this week? Check our Harlow roadworks page first, and our guide to parking in Harlow.
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