"A campaign is being launched today at the start of Road Safety Week appealing to drivers and authorities across the West Midlands to 'GO 20'.
Brake, the road safety charity, is appealing to drivers to slow down to 20mph or below in communities.
The charity is also calling for widespread 20mph speed limits in built up areas.
'GO 20' benefits:
Fewer casualties
More walking and cycling
More active, happier communities
Less pollution
Lower public spending"
It won't happen - or will it? Should it?
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are brake affiliated to the ramblers association? any more of this and they would have us all walking !!
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For a safety campaigning organization they have a disturbing inability to distinguish bathwater from baby. Blanket 20 limits will have the same effect as inappropriate 30 limits (yes you, Oxfordshire CC!) and bring all limits into disrepute, rather than having the desired effect of making drivers lose speed when it really matters. (And by that I mean in busy shopping streets and narrow residential roads, not the usual canard of 'outside a school at home time'.)
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The whole speed limit thing is a difficult one, the problem being that 30 or even 20 could still be too fast as you negotiate round parked cars in narrow streets where kids and others are about, but we've got so brainwashed into this speed thing that drivers seem incapable of applying a bit of common sense and driving appropriate to the conditions place and time.
I see umpteen young mums among others driving round residential roads far too fast...''but i wasn't speeding'' you just know is going to be the cry when something dreadful happens.
Taking responsibilty for ones own actions seems to have been bred or uneducated or propagandised out of the people in many aspects of life.
Last edited by: gordonbennet on Mon 19 Nov 12 at 23:09
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I suppose a completely different approach would be to abolish all speed limits and pavements, but say that the driver of a vehicle hitting something else, or a pedestrian, was automatically at fault.
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I live in a Trotskyite-run area and we have 20mph coming everywhere where I live, even main roads. There was a consultation which was a fudge of loaded questions along the lines of:
I want children to keep dying on dangerous roads and the speed limit to remain unchanged. AGREE / DiSAGREE.
The planning-type notices are on lamp-posts now saying when it will be introduced and by which Order.
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>> I want children to keep dying on dangerous roads
If they remained on the pavement and didn't play in the road, then perhaps the survival rate would increase.
With all the Elf n'safety nowadays, whatever happened to the Green Cross Code?
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>> If they remained on the pavement and didn't play in the road, then perhaps the
>> survival rate would increase.
The might also need to cross the road to get to school/shop/granny etc. In fact, if it's a quiet suburban estate road, playing in it should be perfectly all right. My kids did.
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>> It won't happen - or will it? Should it?
>>
They did a short interview with someone supporting this move on BBC Breakfast yesterday.
The upshot was that she wanted a 20 limit because it would actually get drivers to slow to around 30, rather than the 40 that is common past her children's school at present - with a 30 limit, obviously.
Whilst this does make some kind of sense, it makes a mockery of the whole system of speed limits, and creates enormous frustration for others when you actually get people doing 20 and unnecessary stress for those doing 20 with the inevitable continuous tailgating and aggression from other drivers.
I generally try to stick to speed limits so find myself caught between the two.
Perhaps it's better to enforce the existing 30mph limits instead?
Last edited by: oilburner on Tue 20 Nov 12 at 09:41
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You can put speed limits where ever you like. They will get enforced in exactly the same way as they are (not ) now.
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Not sure about your part of the world, but I regularly see mobile speed camera vans round our way, if that's not enforcement, I don't know what is?
Either way, if people like me who try to stick to the limit find it becoming increasingly impossible, then there is a tendency to give up trying completely and shove two fingers up to the whole system. So it may well backfire. I doubt I'm the only one that feels that way.
So what the limit is set to does make a difference, in attitudes, if nothing else.
Last edited by: oilburner on Tue 20 Nov 12 at 09:47
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>> Not sure about your part of the world, but I regularly see mobile speed camera
>> vans round our way, if that's not enforcement, I don't know what it?
Outside schools? in built up areas? not round here.
>> Either way, if people like me who try to stick to the limit find it
>> impossible, then there is a tendency to give up trying completely and shove two fingers
>> up to the whole system. So it may well backfire. I doubt I'm the only
>> one that feels that way.
How can it be impossible to stick to a speed limit?
>> So what the limit is set to does make a difference, in attitudes, if nothing
>> else.
No way. People who speed past schools have fundamentally the wrong attitude.
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It's only a matter of time before technology gets involved with this one. Cars clearly already know how fast they're going, and working out where they are is increasingly cheap and easy, so put the two together, and your car will autolimit itself outside a school or whatever. About fifty quid per vehicle for a manufacturer to implement on a large scale at a rough guess.
Politically, it's a different saucepan of bananas.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Tue 20 Nov 12 at 10:21
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>> It's only a matter of time before technology gets involved with this one. Cars clearly
>> already know how fast they're going, and working out where they are is increasingly cheap
>> and easy, so put the two together, and your car will autolimit itself outside a
>> school or whatever. About fifty quid per vehicle for a manufacturer to implement on a
>> large scale at a rough guess.
>>
>> Politically, it's a different saucepan of bananas.
>>
I personally wouldn't mind 20 limits in built up areas provided they're relaxed at night.
The bigger menace, in my opinion, are people who drive to the speed limit regardless of the conditions. Or my own personal bug-bear - people who pootle along at 40mph on an empty NSL road but then keep doing 40 through any towns or villages they come across.
Hanging's too good for 'em etc.
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>> personal bug-bear - people who pootle along at 40mph on an empty NSL road but then keep doing 40 through any towns or villages they come across.
Granted, that is slack-jawed yokel driving. But your attitude is irrational FF. At least these mimsers stop mimsing in towns and villages. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?
Was following someone yesterday who was going fairly well, close to the limit, on an NSL road, but slowed sharply whenever something appeared coming the other way. An eyesight/dazzle problem perhaps. That's the only charitable explanation. But it's a fact that some drivers are so jumpy and timid that they are actually dangerous.
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I might be wrong, as I have no recent experience, but when I was taught to drive (1979 or so), the idea was the old "it's a limit not a target", and we usually travelled at about an indicated 26-28 in town, bursting to a heady 30 on occasion as that was "keeping up with traffic".
Am I right in thinking that's viewed as old fashioned now, and learners are taught, or perhaps given the impression anyway, that if they aren't doing 30 by the time they're out of second and maintain that at all costs they will fail? Understandable if so, in modern traffic, but doesn't help with the idea that in a 20 limit 15 might be enough on occasion.
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So a bunch of gibbering, motorist-hating nazis have come up with yet another "stuff the car" idea.
Remind me again, which religion is the Pope a member of this week?
Trouble is we live in a "gobocracy", where the self-serving pressure group that shouts loudest usually gets to dictate policy regardless of what a majority of the public might want, so it might just happen.
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>>So a bunch of gibbering, motorist-hating nazis have come up with yet another "stuff the car" idea.
Ah, so you live in Oxford, then.
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But possibly not educated there? Unless, and I think not, TC is being ironic.
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Ah, Brake. Another of those tedious minority pressure groups that seems to confuse itself with an elected government body with a legitimate mandate.
Last edited by: DP on Wed 21 Nov 12 at 12:12
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And which elected Government body with a legitimate mandate would that be? Seems to be a vacancy at the moment which ought to be filled:)
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Lower urban speed limit to 20 mph, says Brake - zookeeper
