Stratford District Council is making its annual request to residents to help identify areas on local roads for minor improvement works.

Acting Director Operations Barry Jagersma said, "We inspect roads on a regular basis and have identified a number of sites to be improved. However, there may be places on our roads where there are safety issues that the locals see and we are not aware of. We are asking the community for their input."

Works that can be done under the Minor Improvement category are:

• Widening or realignment of corners and brows on roads to allow safe passing of oncoming vehicles.
• Improvement to intersections such as sealing and improving approach visibility.
• Traffic calming measures such as road narrowing at entrances to urban areas, traffic islands at intersections and pedestrian refuges at pedestrian crossings.
• Sealing bridge approaches to allow safer transition from a metal surface to a bridge deck surface.
• Improvements to areas of roads prone to flooding or slipping

"In thinking about problem areas, we need to be concerned with improving safety, not increasing speed. For example, someone may want a corner widened to improve the alignment but the result of that may be an increase in speed which may make that stretch of road more dangerous."

Issues such as vegetation encroaching onto roads and affecting visibility are dealt with under general maintenance and anyone with that type of concern should contact Council.

"We are not promising that we’ll be able to address every issue that locals may have about their particular road, but we want to make sure we are addressing the more serious problems in our District according to the set criteria, and plan our work accordingly."