Even with the caveats about limited data and untangling causation and correlation, the statistics are striking: the first year of a scheme in Wales where the speed limit on urban roads was lowered to 20mph resulted in about 100 fewer people killed or seriously injured.
I constantly encounter people who speed in my town in Wales. Then I meet them at the next light. It’s infuriating because they’re making the place more dangerous for everyone but for literally no benefit. The average road speed possible is below 20 mph so speeding just means a longer wait at the next junction.
These selfish fuckwits don’t appear to be able to grasp that though so things are still dangerous due to their childish twattery.
Why is there still debate?
Because “driving beyond skill” needs more than a speed limiter to fix.
The 2023 figures (the latest ones and which had the 20mph change) also changed the way the statistics were gathered.
They state
It is likely that KSI collisions and casualties in 2023 are affected by Dyfed Powys police force migrating to Crash. This is further discussed in our quality report.
(KSI is “Killed or seriously injured”. Crash is the new collection method)
100 people is about a 10% variance. To call that “striking” when there’s also a change in record keeping is bullshit. You need more data.
It seems obvious that a 20mph limit will be more safe in most instances.
There’s the issue with older cars having a gearing not really suited to staying at that speed (meaning revving higher and chucking out more pollution/being louder), but that’s less of an issue with new cars.
There’s also the issue of a car in 2nd gear at 20mph being ready to take off far more easily if you were to accidentally press the accelerator instead of the brake – something which often happens in traffic incidents. But again, the gearing of more recent cars is typically fine with sitting at 20mph in third gear. Car gearing seems to be designed with 20mph in mind now, as more places are enforcing it inside and outside of the UK.
And honestly, in most circumstances it won’t make a serious difference to travel time going 20 or 30. Either way you’re likely going to be stopping multiple times or stuck behind people.
Worth noting though, that the very people who collected this data say that the data can’t really be used for direct comparison and that we need at least a couple more years to see what the effect of the change is.
How old are the cars you’re thinking of that don’t like going 20mph? Do you mean they are more twitchy and will accelerate too easily even in 3rd gear?
For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t be in 3rd gear at 20mph in a modern turbocharged car.
For my car, 20mph is roughly 2500pm in 2nd and 1700rpm in 3rd. I don’t like to live below 2000rpm because I don’t get spooled up that low.
In my home town ALL roads are 30kph, and like 50% of the intersections are roundabouts. The result is traffic just continuously flowing and you arrive much faster than before with the roads at 50kph. Other side effects are less gasoline use, less pollution from gas and tires, less accidents, less noise, basically less bad and more good.
Add to that the great cycle and walking infrastructure and yeah, of course I’m talking about the Netherlands
Queue the replies with "but you could nevah do this in [Canada | United States | England | Mexico | Russia | China | whatever] because [too cold | too many mountains | too large distances | whatever]
We actually have pockets like this in the US. A small town nearby has nothing but roundabouts and max 30mph and it’s makes the area very walkable. Parts of Pasadena CA is similar. It does happen but not on a grand scale. The areas we have adopted this method are very pleasant.
Which always makes me wonder why, if it’s so nice, this isn’t done everywhere
Costs money to rip and replace existing infrastructure. Counties and cities with less income can’t afford to make such drastic changes unless it’s a higher priority than the other 25 things that need funding
I wonder what the optimal speed is to maximize speed and flow while minimizing accidents.
If it’s mixing bikes, pedestrians and cars? 30kph is about the maximum safe speed for cars because of the maximum speeds of bikes, and even then they’d need to be on separate roads
To be fair in NL a lot of people ignore the speed limits if the road invites you to drive faster (not enough traffic calming stuff). Not a lot and still driving safely but for example there’s this huge straight road near my house that they changed to 30 recently but didn’t make any changes to the infrastructure and pretty much everyone still drives 50 on it. Also on highways it’s 100 everywhere during the day but you see a lot driving 110/120 where there’s no speed control.
By that logic we need to lower it down to 1kmh so we’re going to arrive to the destination even faster
So you’re 8 years old, I take it?
is there a fallacy for when you just make shit up?
Sigh.
Look you don’t understand I need to speed so I can get suck on traffic faster. It allows me to get to my destination earlier (I don’t care what proof you have that it doesn’t). Nothing else matters.
I will not be taking questions, just getting mad at people for not having common sense.
Go fuck yourself.
Years ago, my parents set out on a long journey from their home city to a rural location in another country.
Approximately five minutes after setting out, a car went flying past them. It was a bright red sports model that was very eyecatching.
Not long after, they arrived at a toll bridge, right behind the same red car. They noted the number plate.
Past the toll, the red car sped off again, quickly accelerating well past the speed limit.
Over the next few hours, this repeated at a major junction. When they eventually arrived at the ferry again just behind the red car, my father flashed his headlights.
Disembarking, they got another flash from my father, and sped off.
Several hundreds of miles later my parents arrived at their destination, parked up, and got out to stretch, when pulling in beside them was a curiously familiar red car.
Not wishing to make assumptions, my mother casually checked the plates, then saluted the driver and inquired about their journey to the event they had all arrived for.
Nope, they’d made no detours or stops, they’d taken the same route.
My mother has a way in these situations of wording things just so, that totally makes the person she’s talking to feel like an absolute worm without ever getting the escape of thinking my mother was being anything other than lovely and charming to them.
Red car was spotted driving most sedately in the local town the following afternoon.
I think improved road safety is a great idea. 20mph lowers emissions and wear on both roads and cars.
I just wish they made it 20mph in other areas, rather than where I drive.
I think it’s a great idea, and support it. Just… Not in my back yard.“I just don’t see why the neighborhoods next to the school should also be school zones. Most of the kids are dropped off by cars anyway cause its too unsafe for them to walk” - a North American NIMBY
but vroom vroom!? what’s the point of buying a overwrought shitwagon if they can’t vroom vroom?
What wete they before?
21
30mph
Fantastic! wonder how people are adjusting? Walking more, pooling trips, or avoiding slow roads?
I wondered at the definition:
defined as roads where lamp-posts were no more than about 180 metres apart.
Will this result in worse lighting to avoid the reduced speed limit?
I have personally found that roads are nicer to walk along with people going slower, but I haven’t necessarily noticed more people walking. I think part of the issue is the way that new housing has been built where it is still a significant distance away from the places you need to get to is still keeping people in cars.
I have not noticed any differences in the lighting, but the Welsh Gov did postpone all road building projects at a similar time, and for any smaller residential road building I would’ve thought the builders would want it to be low speed anyway.
Not sure why they’d adjust. It’s mostly urban areas where top speed makes little difference to journey times. Journey times are generally decided by how long you spend waiting at every light and intersection.
The thing about the lamp posts doesn’t really have any significance. Roads in the UK have a default speed limit that doesn’t need to be marked with the speed limit - it’s 30mph for “normal” streets with regular lamposts, 60mph for other roads, 70mph if there’s an embankment thing in between each side of the road. 180m spacing must just be the technical definition for what makes a road 30mph. In Wales, they made default 30mph roads 20mph.
I’m ok with the limit itself, I just want a dedicated button on my steering wheel to turn on/off 20mph speed limit.
Pretty much any car that comes with even a very basic cruise control will have a speed limiter option. My car is from 2010 and has it. I think my 2004 Mégane I had beforehand may have had it too, IIRC.
Although it’s a bit more fiddly than what you describe in that you have to turn off cruise control mode, switch to speed limiter, set the speed, then activate.
But yes, it would be an interesting feature to have a “town mode” button that you could set to 20 or 30mph in the car settings. Much more streamlined than the above. I imagine you could do other things, too like trying to keep revs to a minimum to keep the car quiet, (if a hybrid) going EV-preferred or EV-only, etc.
A lot of cars I’ve been in with speed limiters, the minimum speed is 25mph. I’ve never understood why it’s not 1mph (or more reasonably 5mph, which is the lowest limit I see regularly).
Yeah, exactly what I want. My Corolla has all the options, but enabling disabling limiter is not easy (takes at least 3 button presses) and it would be cool to have programmable single-touch limiter.
I’m all for survival of the fittest. If people are too stupid to stay on the pavement, it’s on them. Why let drivers suffer to protect those idiots that blindly run into traffic?
Maybe we should ban ALL cars to get traffic related injuries to 0… 🤦♂️
Higher speeds can cause drivers to lose control of their cars. People are killed on the side walks by drunk or speeding drivers frequently. Instead of blame shifting we should be taking steps to make the whole system safer.
If these drivers don’t obey the rules now, what makes you think they will obey them if you lower the speed limit?
And you don’t just lose control of your car at 30mph or even 50. Especially not in today’s cars with all their safety features.
They don’t have to lose full control. They could be following too closely and swerve onto the sidewalk to avoid a collision with a car and end up striking a pedestrian.
Speeders will stick out even more making them easier to spot in traffic. The reduced speed limit should also be accompanied by lane narrowing, speed humps, and other traffic calming techniques.
They don’t have to lose full control. They could be following too closely and swerve onto the sidewalk to avoid a collision with a car and end up striking a pedestrian.
This is a matter of the human factor - and you can never make that disappear. There will always be the odd idiot driver.
The reduced speed limit should also be accompanied by lane narrowing, speed humps, and other traffic calming techniques.
This is totally fine for housing areas, but definitely not for through-roads. There’s no one-for-all solution in the same way our bodies don’t have only one size of blood vessel.
The reduced speed limit should come with traffic calming relative to the speed limit. If a through road has a 20 MPH zone that area should have lane narrowing and at least raised crossings.
haha yeah, why should we prevent deaths?
so like, would you just accept your entire family being shot as the natural way of things? if i throw you off a cliff that’s just… fine?
Shooting someone or throwing someone off a cliff is a deliberate act to hurt/kill someone else. No driver wants to kill someone. (Well, apart from these extremists that occasionally drive into German Christmas markets…)
People mindlessly walking into traffic, because that funny video on Instagram is more important than watching their surroundings, they are the problem.
Yeah, we should
I’d vote for that without hesitation
In Darwin’s terms, the ‘survival of the fittest’ you referred to means something like ‘those most able to adapt to evolutionary change’.
In this context, your inability to adapt to a change that improves life for everybody, from the direct reduction in deaths, to reduced micro plastics (of which car tyres are something like 25%) makes you the unfit one. You are the idiot.
Let’s not ban all cars, even though it would be a positive development, let’s just ban idiots (to use your word) like you. It is clear by your attitude that you are not safe.
Thinking about the absolute inability of the average Brit to drive like a sane person… we should
The scary thing is British driving ability appears on the high end of the spectrum from my experience.
The worse thing is speeding which is normalised.
The roads are just shit and full. When you go to a part of another country with same sort of traffic and narrow roads its becomes apparent Brits drive well.
Your last sentence is the only one that isn’t idiotic.
More! Child! Deaths!
Don’t worry, the intelligent ones will survive.
Clearly you weren’t one of them, yet here you are
suffering is when someone in a climate-controlled vehicle with comfortable seats gets to their destination seconds later than the fastest possible.
zero road deaths have been caused by drivers running red lights or zebra crossings or mounting the pavement.
/s
That’s not the story of evolution! Read your Darwin! There’s like two pages on competition. Darwin, page after page after page is marveling at: oh my gosh, look at how species are collaborating and cooperating with one another for mutual survival!
