New Road Safety Guidelines

New road safety guide for school communities.

Minister for Roads and Freight Duncan Gay has released a new road safety guide for school communities to compliment the package of resources to improve school zone safety in NSW.

Minister Gay released the guide in a letter to principals at 2500 primary schools across the State.

"Any incident involving one of our children deeply affects our school communities and the families that are part of them," Minister Gay said.

"The recent incidents during school zone hours highlight the need for all of us to commit to taking every step possible to reduce the risk to our children.

"The NSW Liberals & Nationals Government is delivering a raft of safety measures to improve school zone safety across the State including road safety infrastructure, education and enforcement.

"The 2014 Road Safety Issues Around Schools guide we're delivering to schools provides parents reminders about how to get safely to and from school and compliments our ground breaking SafetyTown program.

"Rolling out to schools from this term, SafetyTown is the first resource of its kind in the country and is a great tool for parents as well as teachers.

"I encourage parents to do the online activities on SafetyTown.com.au with their children and reinforce the messages learnt in the classroom.

"Our historic commitment to flashing lights has seen us this year complete the high risk roll out with an additional 680 lights installed at schools across NSW and we are on track to deliver flashing lights to every other school in NSW by the end of next year.

"We have also invested millions of dollars in safety infrastructure including pedestrian overhead bridges and foot crossings, clearer fluorescent school zone signs and pedestrian fencing.

"Police undertake regular enforcement in school zones and our road safety experts regularly meet with police to ensure we're always responding to emerging issues.

"On the advice of our road safety experts and NSW Police we have 19 locations for mobile speed camera enforcement in school zones as well as about 50 fixed speed cameras in school zones that meet the criteria and there are also red light speed cameras near school zones at high risk intersections.

"We've invested in innovative measures like the free Speed Adviser App which provides audio alerts on speed limit changes and when drivers enter and leave a school zone.

"We're supporting the Hi-Viz campaign which is trialling at over 80 Western Sydney schools with 5,400 brightly-fluro coloured ergonomically designed backpacks distributed to kindergarten kids.

"The key for all road users is to remember that our children are unpredictable around roads, we all need to be vigilant and slow down," Minister Gay said.