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news
20mph sign (CC licensed by EdinburghGreens via Flickr)“Any road which isn’t safe for pedestrians and cyclists should be 20mph”: Cycling Rebellion says speed limit plan “doesn’t go far enough”, as council urged to “be brave” and introduce default 20mph zones
Cycling campaigners have slammed a council’s plans to restrict the proposed roll-out of 20mph zones to streets which have been deemed particularly dangerous or where serious injuries have occurred, and have called on the local authority to be “bold” in its bid to combat the climate emergency and “act now” by introducing a default 20mph speed limit on all residential roads.
Last month, the deputy leader of Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole (BCP) Council announced that it was the local authority’s “intention” to introduce a “default” 20mph limit in built-up areas throughout the conurbation, similar to the widespread implementation of lowered speed limits in Wales last autumn.
The announcement came three months after the Liberal Democrat-controlled council’s environment portfolio holder Andy Hadley pledged that a full consultation would take place before a decision was made on the introduction of the 20mph zones, which deputy leader Millie Earl said would be “beneficial to people walking, wheeling, and cycling and… benefit public health and air quality”.
However, a report by BCP Council officers this week raised concerns about the council’s ambitions to implement the reduced speed limit on all urban residential roads and high streets, noting that, “although desirable”, a “blanket” 20mph limit would cost more than £300m to introduce.
Instead, the council officers advised that the local authority should prioritise which roads will be subject to the lowered limit, based on how dangerous they are perceived to be or the number of collisions or serious injuries which have occurred on them in recent years.
Dorset Police, for instance, has told the council that it “will not be able to supply additional resources to monitor and enforce” any speed reduction plan, but that it would support a 20mph zone on streets where “clear evidence” indicates that the scheme would lead to a fall in collisions.
The report also noted that by introducing a default 20mph limit, some motorists will believe that their freedoms are being “compromised”.
“The profile of people who proportionately drive more – men, middle aged groups, people without a disability, white British, heterosexuals and Christians – will generally consider their freedoms associated with driving are being compromised, though individual views may vary,” the report said.
In response to the officers’ conclusion that a “blanket” 20mph restriction on all urban roads cannot be implemented, Poole-based cycling and environmental campaigner Adam Osman has criticised what he believes is the latest “silly” barrier to progress, arguing that the council needs to be “brave” to make the roads safer and combat climate change.
“We are campaigning for 20mph as a default speed limit rather than each road being individually picked for 20mph. What the council has proposed is not tenable,” Osman, the founder of Cycling Rebellion, an off-shoot of the more widely known Extinction Rebellion, told the Daily Echo.
“All residential streets, roads with narrow pavements, high streets such as Winton High Street should be included.
“If they removed parking spaces along Winton High Street and expanded the space for pedestrians and cyclists, that would be great – although we don’t want to take away people’s right to drive there. Basically, any road which isn’t safe for pedestrians and cyclists should be 20mph.”
Osman also questioned the local authority’s claimed figure of £300m for a complete roll-out of the scheme and argued that constantly changing speed limits and road signs “would cause more mistakes” by motorists.
“We can look at the information and the data, there are plenty of locations to choose from. There is the straight road going to the university where there have been cyclists killed on the roads,” he said.
“So if there has been an accident, it would be a no-brainer. Most junctions you can apply logic to decide on what it should be.
“There is an environmental emergency, we have to act this decade. It feels silly to halt progress this much. The council needs to be brave and act now.”
In October, Osman and Cycling Rebellion organised a group ride to call for the introduction of 20mph limits and safer infrastructure for “the huge amount of families who want to cycle”, while urging the council to make “radical changes” to ensure that the area is “liveable”.
“We have to think about making cycling for everyone,” Osman said at the time. “You need to look at the current infrastructure and ask yourself, would you feel comfortable with your kids cycling there?”
“Because that is a safe town to live in, one that accommodates every form of transport. That’s why we’re riding today, to show the huge amount of families in BCP who want to cycle, and that we need to make big changes to make it liveable. We’re calling on the implementation of a 20mph speed limit in BCP to make BCP safe for families.”
While BCP Council’s apparent scaling back of its 20mph plans this week has attracted the ire of cycling campaigners, as we reported last month the scheme in general also came under fire from across the political aisle, as local Conservative politicians rushed to condemn the council’s “out of the blue” and “extremely worrying” announcement.
“Many of us warned that voting for these parties would see a return to anti-car measures, and this announcement… shows that we were right,” Conservative councillor Phil Broadhead said.
Meanwhile, Poole’s Conservative MP Sir Robert Syms also added: “I would support 20mph near schools but a general policy I think is nuts. It is unpopular in London and in Wales and it will upset my constituents if implemented.”
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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71 comments
Sod the limits. Have they sorted out their plan on that Rat Run bridge yet?
You mean knocking it down so that cars can travel freely in both directions? I mean most of the time the track is empty, waste of space if you ask me...
As a driver i do find it hard to stick to 20 mph, especially when it has been changed from 30. Therefore I support blanket 20 mph as it will be easier to get used to and to stick to rather than the speed limit constantly changing.
As for £300m, bonkers. Someone thought of a random number and mulitplied by another random number. Wales says it cost £32m to introduce 20mph, so how Bournemouth is suppsed to be £300m I've no idea.
As someone else posted, the £300m is likely an estimate of the economic cost of reducing the speed limit - the equivalent (albeit controversial) figure for Wales was £4.5 billion.
Lol, is that Wales' GDP is now £300m/pa less now because of minor reduction in some speed limits. I'm sure that holds water.
No, £300m relates to Bournemouth. The contested figure for Wales is £4.5 billion - from page 32 here: https://senedd.wales/media/fo3ibze5/sub-ld15187-em-e.pdf.
My thoughts exactly.
So drivers are asked to go 10 mph slower than before in built-up areas and this somehow has a negative impact on the country to the tune of millions of pounds?
Funny how no-one has mentioned the frequent closures and delays on the A55 (and surely many other roads), usually due to crappy, dangerous / careless driving by drivists, and how much that costs the economy.
Meanwhile the Caernarfon bypass was estimated to cost £135 million. Where are the benefits, I wonder? I'm sure the town itself will be more pleasant place now but was it worth the cost? Perhaps it's for the benefit of the Cheshire set, who can race to their overpriced house in Abersoch that much quicker now.
I'll read the document, thanks for the link quiff.
Why would your argument be that you need your own driving behaviour made illegal?
Why not? He's saying that he finds it hard to follow the limits when they constantly change so he would prefer a consistent 20mph limit. It would be nice if all drivers were as accepting of their limitations and willing to support curbs to make them safer.
I wouldn't be driving in the first place if I didn't already think I was capable of gauging my speed correctly. The reason I might be going at a faster speed would be due to the length of sightlines available to me and the conditions at the time, etc. There are people who don't consider these factors, and they are the least likely to obey the lower posted limit.
The reason why the 30mph limit works isn't because people get used to it; it's because that's the speed most sensible people won't exceed in the absence of a limit. I'm far from perfect, but speed limits are meant to single out reckless driving, not to generally dictate speeds. People on this forum tend to see speed limits as a form of traffic calming and overestimate their effect. Traffic speeds are set more by the design of the road and the conditions at the time.
Limits, for what difference they can make to speeds, are most effective when they match the road they're on and 20mph limits have been shown to be most effective on ordinary residential streets that naturally lend themselves to lower speeds, including main roads. Denigrating these limits and preventing sat navs from viewing main roads as faster routes is counterproductive. I've found some 20mph main roads with higher average speeds than some urban 40mph limits.
I wouldn't describe my own behavior as reckless. It's one thing to say my driving behavior is imperfect or wrong; it's another to claim that my normal behavior should be made illegal.
54% of drivers admit to regularly breaking 30mph limits, so the number of "sensible people" out there in charge of cars is clearly pretty low.
Definitely citation needed for the first part! For example - that's why in the US everyone is speeding over the common 20mph limits in towns - naturally those are big straight roads and obviously people won't be able to help themselves... oh, they don't?
It's complicated as usual. As you note the best way is to ensure the infra itself helps set the limits. There are all kinds of "visual cues" of course other than just roads being narrower / sight lines being shorter.
Actually what people are "used to" - or rather social expectations / behaviour of everyone else very much guides how we behave. Fortunately that can change!
The UK does have a lot of sub-optimal spaces where we try to have a street / road fulfilling multiple contradictory roles e.g. distributor + residential area etc. And our approach to permeability for motor traffic (too much) and parking (ditto) also make it tricky to improve things. In fact we're still building this way...
As usual notjustbikes has an interesting (if opinionated) video on this (looking at Amsterdam's recent re-categorisation of most streets to have lower speeds of 30 ... kph - 18.6 mph !)
Unfortunately you may be unhappy with the world! Laws are introduced all the time putting down some more-or-less arbitrary dividing line; suddenly on one side of that it's now illegal...
Most people don't judge their speed based on limits or X amount over or under the limit or because it's what they're used to, people are more likely to default to the speed that feels safe and that's more down to how our brains works rather than a desire not to comply with the law, the road safety charity Stongtowns did a good explanation of this. This is a much better explanation than to make hasty generalisations about people in cars.
That's how you end up with non-compliance levels so high you may as well not bother with a posted speed limit, the law is being brought into contempt whereas speed limit should be taken seriously.
'People' don't do any one thing, because 'people' are not a homogeneous entity. You'll see a range of different behaviours from different people. Yes, some people will just ignore the limit and decide for themselves what does they think they ought to drive at. But many others will (roughly) adhere to the limits because it's the law, while still others will feel obliged to stay around the limit by social pressure, even if they feel a lower speed is appropriate. Lowering the limit makes no difference to the first group*, but reduces the speeds of the other two, so while it may not improve adherence, it has reduced the potential for danger.
[*except where they find themselves behind one of the other groups, in which case their speed will be reduced too.]
The video above explains how non-compliance with speed limits is often not due to a willful disregard for the law. When I see non-compliance levels as high as 99.4%, with over 90% being common, I’d say that’s a good example of homogeneity.
It’s actually surprising how much uniformity there often is in traffic speeds. For example, the 85th percentile speed is typically only about 15% faster than the average speed.
At those levels of non-compliance, you might as well not have a posted limit at all. It’s unclear who such limits are meant to single out or target. It seems to be an attempt to misappropriate limits as a form of traffic calming rather than a tool to identify dangerous drivers.
What happens then is that the prohibition is placed on the most sensible drivers on the road, forcing the police to focus on them rather than on those more likely to cause harm. Additionally, if you have to drive significantly slower than the mean speed of traffic, causing others to bunch up behind you just to follow the law, that can also be dangerous. It increases the risk of accidents for yourself and others, there' a reason why rule 169 says not to do that. So, there often isn’t a clear right way to drive on many of these roads.
Genuinely - where do you have this idea from? I'm pretty sure I've never seen this in the Highway Code or the few bits of legislation I've read.
Would it make sense to say "These 'no smoking' signs are an attempt to misappropriate this rule (no smoking) as a form of public health / environmental improvement rather than as a tool to identify those reckless with people's (or their own) health"?
Again there are some interesting notions!
Presumably (I think you alluded to this elsewhere) the "sensible drivers" should be trusted just to drive however they like (milder form - "trusted to drive appropriately without bothersome interference from the law"), because they're ... sensible? How would the police judge that again?
Or is this really an "elite" thing? "I know I'm skilled and "sensible" enough so petty rules shouldn't apply to me."
Also an interesting interpretation! They don't spell it out and there are points where Highway Code guidance seems to conflict but
a) this is a "do not" and the Highway Code says you MUST NOT exceed the speed limits.
b) The Highway Code itself isn't law ... but the actual law is clear that you mustn't exceed the speed limits.
You're ... not a driving instructor, are you?
I don't really understand what you're saying. What level of non-compliance or average speed over the limit would I point to as an example of the speed limit being set incorrectly? It seems to be dismissed with an appeal to the law.
The reason why the guidelines say to look at traffic speeds as a function of how you set limits is not to let people drive as fast as they like. In reality, even if there were no speed limits, the majority of motorists wouldn't drive recklessly. However, the assumption persists that they would.
I've asked ex-coppers what they think the average speed is on some rather generous urban 40mph roads in Gloucestershire. Even they estimated 50mph, when in fact the figure was closer to 30mph, with a non-compliance rates often less than 10%.
Yes, there should be a presumption that most people are sensible and genuinely don't want to run people over or cause crashes. When non-compliance is that high, you can't just attribute it to a few bad eggs or make a hasty generalisation about motorists. When limits are set properly, you'll find that the same people who exceed them are most likely to close pass cyclists, run red lights, and generally drive like twats. This allows the police to concentrate on them.
The video I linked to also gives a good explanation as to why non-compliance with speed limits isn't comparable to issues like smoking bans.
Obviously, the limits override rule 169 of the highway code. My point is, if you're having to do something that would normally be against the highway code to follow the law, that's problematic.
There's a fundamentally flawed assumption in the thinking presented in that video (which mirrors a flawed interpretation of the 'System 1'/'System 2' metaphor) that there is some inherent 'safe speed' for any given road, which we can mysteriously intuit. The 'felt' safe speed for a road isn't something that comes directly from the road itself - it's an interpretation of the road, mediated through years of conditioning that has told the driver to expect to drive at that speed on roads like this. If you change the speed limit on a single road, that's not likely to shift that conditioning, and many drivers will continue to feel that they can safely drive at the higher speed there. But if you change it across all such roads, there will be some cognitive dissonance at first, but over time there will be an adjustment to the new normal that on this type of road, the lower speed is what is expected.
That's not a misappropriation - that's the purpose of them.
That's not what Rule 169 says. It says if you are holding up a large queue, then find a place to safely pull in and let them pass. If you are driving at the speed limit, by definition, you are not holding anyone up, because they couldn't legally be progressing any faster anyway.
If someone drives too close behind you, it's not your driving that's increasing the risk of accident - it's theirs.
There is absolutely a clear right way to drive on these roads - it's to respect the speed limit.
No, but the problem is that people making this assumption that leads to speed limits being set so low that you end up with over 99% non-compliance. While speed limits can influence traffic speeds, they need to be aligned with the road's engineering to be effective. They generally don't dictate speeds outright.
Legislatively, yeah, they do.
Any presumed deviation "offered by the enginnering of the road" is the influence of expectation and motor-normativity, and falls scarily close to logic that results in excusing aggresive behaviour because of arbitrary things like the victims' clothing.
Speed limits are to protect the most vulnerable, not permit the most capable.
That's not really a counter-argument; that's an appeal to the law. In some cases, when the speed limit is lowered, the average speed barely changes or even increases. You can't just keep insisting 'it doesn’t matter because they’re breaking the law.' This overlooks the nuances of real-world human behaviour. Understanding why limits that are set either too high or too low, relative to the design of the road, can make a road more dangerous is important.
One purpose of a speed limit is to inform the most vulnerable road users of the speed at which the majority of traffic will be travelling. If there is extreme non-compliance, the limit fails in this regard.
The video I linked explains that it's not just about motor normativity. If setting very low limits were effective, we would have set them like that. As long as I can remember, there have been calls to lower speed limits, usually after severe accidents involving reckless drivers. If only the police focused more on ticketing typical driving behaviours, maybe we would see fewer late-night, stupidity-induced accidents.
This is another principle I've never heard of! I'm pretty sure I judge the speed that people will be going by ... the speed drivers pass!
This is another one where environment and design cues - which you are correct to keep emphasising - run into the "evolutionary development" of the UK's road systems. In a much better imperfect world if I was dropped somewhere with houses and shops either side of a carriageway I might assume people would be driving slowly. But in the UK that "high street" could be a through-road also serving as a "route".
We have plenty of overly-wide roads with wide turn radii in places where this design is inappropriate. We also have places with rather narrow roads with limited sight lines which get higher limits because "countryside".
It's a mess!
I'm cautious about the degree of effectiveness of that. While we are clearly vastly "under-policing" road crime I doubt even rather expensive interventions (say doubling - or more - the road police force numbers) will have a significant effect. I suspect the truly reckless will remain reckless (because they simply aren't planning). Then there are the great proportion of "good drivers" who won't feel this means much because they're already "careful law-abiding drivers". They don't set out to have a crash ... but because they're human (and not trained and motivated to the level of e.g. airline pilots) will go wrong / have "medical issues" at a small rate. When combined with the number of them that means a significant number of incidents.
I haven't yet found a good source for the proportions this - and certainly reckless drivers do a lot of damage (including those who have previous, have never passed a test or are already banned...)
I think we can make some progress (or keep our current level of safety but have a much greater of non-car trips) but it needs a completely different philosophy, training and infra changes as well as fixing the policing.
Yes, I live close to a 40mph road in Nailsea, and when we first moved here, my (then 9-year-old) niece came to stay. I made a point to her that the 40mph speed limit signs indicate the road is especially dangerous. In extreme cases, I've observed that the fastest average speeds on 20mph-limit roads are higher than the lowest I've seen on 40mph-limit roads. There are plenty of examples of modern roads with a similar design to this one where the 40mph limit has been removed, yet a FOI request showed that 30 mph-limit roads have the same or higher average speeds. This is in line with the DfT's claim that the introduction of 40mph limits led to either no significant change in actual speeds or a slight reduction.
My point is that people driving below 25mph on roads designed for 30mph are likely to be the more sensible drivers. I still see people going well over 40mph on some residential 20mph limit roads, yet their behaviour is often cited as a rationale for lowering the speed limit. This seems to be based on the baseless assumption that reckless drivers only dare to drive 5 or 10mph over the posted limit.
The reason for the 60 limit on country lanes isn't "because countryside".
It's not really a 60 limit per se, it's derestricted however the national speed limit applies which happens to be 60 mph, that's also why it's set by a symbol rather than a number. On most of those lanes, you'd struggle to get close to that even if you tried, you could hit a child at half that speed on those lanes and potentially be up for a reckless driving charge.
Clever thing about all these 20mph limits and enforcement is that in a few years the euro regulation speed limiter devices, road charging and insurance black boxes will force everyone to stick to it. And by then they'll be well established all over the place.
I'm all for it and happy for speeders to think they are "getting away with it" for now.
It's a nice thought, however the technology needs to improve massively for it to become accurate and effective. I drive a 2021 BMW Touring with a HUD, and every time it spots a 20mph limit in a side street it constantly nags me to slow down even when I'm doing considerably less than 30 in a 30mph zone. Driving past the garden centre it nags me for a couple of hundred metres that I'm doing more than 5mph!
Fortunately it doesn't slam the brakes on (yet) as dropping to 5mph if someone behind wasn't paying attention (or just, understandably, wasn't expecting it) could be disastrous. Unlike an Audi I had before that would suddenly slow to 40mph when staying on the A2 dual carriageway but passing a slip road with the lower limit 😱😱
Speed limiters and black boxes do not run off the camera technology your BMW is using for this purpose. These are much simpler and are inexpensive to spec, especially for a small city car, and can be fitted aftermarket quite easily. A limiter will only have a max set limit (i.e. the NSL) and the black box will monitor your speed and GPS on lower limit roads.
I'm fully in favour of people driving at 20 throughout urban areas. They've put a 20 mph limit on my road. What happens now is that once people are past 20 there's no longer a limit - you're already speeding so driving at 40 or 50 is still speeding.
A 20 mph limit with no enforcement is worse than 30.
The Village I live in changed to 20 mph a few months ago, and it has reduced the average speed. When it was 30 mph, the majority of people used to drive through at 33. Now it seems that 24 mph is what people seem to think is the acceptable speed, persumably because +10% isn't quite enough when it is 20 mph.
A few people stick ridgedly to the speed limit as they did before and a few break it by a ridiculous amount, as they know there is no enforcement whatsoever.
Overall it has improved things, but it would be much more effective with even a minimal amount of enforcement.
Fully agree with this.
20mph limits are a powerful road safety tool when used strategically, blanket limits will only generate greater less adherence to all speed limits.
You mean like blanket 30mph limits?
What is the "strategic" use of 20mph limits? Is this like "200 yards outside a school is now 20mph, but you can sill hoon it at 30mph+ before and after"? That sounds more like "tactics" - and ineffective ones at that...
"It's complicated" because if you change rules people may feel they're arbitrary. And people are very sensitive to "loss".
OTOH "it's complicated" because people have actually been shown to slow down in real life in the UK just by changing numbers on signs.
And in fact for all the moaning drivers in urban areas almost always average less or indeed far less than the speed limit. That's simply because other motorists - it's the existence of those other motorists which mean we need traffic lights etc. And it sometimes even turns out that slower speed limits make for more efficient / smoother flow and actually don't lead to much change in journey time.
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