Road safety could soon be made a priority on a street targeted by the Leicester Mercury as needing improvements.

The paper is fighting for traffic calming on one of the city’s housing estates after Mitchell Tebbutt (10) suffered fatal injuries in an accident involving both a motorbike and a bus.

The local council is listening to campaigners, backed by the Mercury, who immediately set up a petition for changes.

It is being distributed by two ward councillors and a young friend of Mitchell who was with him at the time of the accident.

The council initially said its traffic calming priority list was not due to be updated until 2002 but may be about to have a change of heart.

Councillors could now order the road to be made a priority – a move which might spell success for the Mercury campaign.

Councillor Brian Roberts, chairman of the planning and transportation committee, told the Mercury: “Officers are going to reassess the situation. Accidents are increasing.

“If traffic calming is needed there is no reason why we cannot bring it forward in the programme.”

The road, Astill Lodge Close, Beaumont Leys, did not figure in the current three-year priority list because it was drawn up last year using figures from 1995-7, when there were just five accidents.

But 13 people have been injured there in the last year, and two calls for pedestrian crossings have been turned down.

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