20mph speed limits in Wales

Meh, reads like another:

"IS something we found on Facebook the most SHOCKING thing since the last thing we found?"

TBH if the tone of Facebook posts is used as a gauge you'd expect to find a cyclist hanging from a lamppost on every other street.

People were marching by his house a couple of years back.

Does he have police protection already (like we have in Scotland)?

I don't know - but my guess is that this will blow over.  Probably depends partly on how strongly the Conservative party and the media want to keep "but cars" at the top of the agenda.

Reports from other posters suggest outside of the web calm prevails?

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

Wow, 2.9mph drop in average speed,  I hope it was worth it? As now Wesh labour has handed the keys to the Senedd to whoever can make political headway on this “wedge issue”,  it's a gift to both Plaid, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. This is a vanity project that will morph into a poison chalice,  and it isn't just Welsh Labour who will pay the price for this, but all who live in Wales.  Partially if the party led by RT Davies gain the most traction on this issue. 

2.9mph drop seems quite effective to me. As I live in England, I don't have a strong opinion on this change, though anything that reins in out-of-control drivers generally gets a thumbs up from me. The crucial point though, apart from the so-called political wedging is how many lives will it save? Let's not forget one of the main reasons that this has been seen as necessary.

hawkinspeter wrote:

2.9mph drop seems quite effective to me.

Interesting though that the quoted drop is from 22mph to 19mph. Presumably the routes tested include a variety of different speed limits, (not just roads that were 30 and are now 20), but it highlights the difference between the old speed limit and the average speed people were actually achieving in the real world.    

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

This is a vanity project that will morph into a poison chalice,  and it isn't just Welsh Labour who will pay the price for this, but all who live in Wales.  Partially if the party led by RT Davies gain the most traction on this issue.

Why is this a vanity project?  That sort of accusation would be more appropriate if they'd built another motorway...

- It's about not just "saving lives" but actually preventing accidents (more time to think / react).
 - It's already been shown to have an impact - without even physically changing the road infra OR deploying hundreds of extra police!  Granted, not an amazing one in terms of average speed but that is not the point.  Which is having people driving slower where the limits have changed.
 - The fact that at national level the Conservatives have very recently done a U-turn on "maybe we should consider the impact of all this driving"* and are now playing up "war on the hard-pressed motorist" isn't the fault of those who commissioned studies and made this happen starting several years back.

* Their national policies have trended - very cautiously - towards "careful now!" with mass motoring (or the pollution from it), and a few other changes e.g. Road Safety Investigation Board, a few more beans for active travel etc.

chrisonatrike wrote:

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

This is a vanity project that will morph into a poison chalice,  and it isn't just Welsh Labour who will pay the price for this, but all who live in Wales.  Partially if the party led by RT Davies gain the most traction on this issue.

Why is this a vanity project?  That sort of accusation would be more appropriate if they'd built another motorway...

- It's about not just "saving lives" but actually preventing accidents (more time to think / react).
 - It's already been shown to have an impact - without even physically changing the road infra OR deploying hundreds of extra police!  Granted, not an amazing one in terms of average speed but that is not the point.  Which is having people driving slower where the limits have changed.
 - The fact that at national level the Conservatives have very recently done a U-turn on "maybe we should consider the impact of all this driving"* and are now playing up "war on the hard-pressed motorist" isn't the fault of those who commissioned studies and made this happen starting several years back.

* Their national policies have trended - very cautiously - towards "careful now!" with mass motoring (or the pollution from it), and a few other changes e.g. Road Safety Investigation Board, a few more beans for active travel etc.

It has cost £33 millon pounds! Spend that on NHS cancer screening, childrens early years stuff,  the list goes on. Now how many lives will you save?? Wales is small in pop, so that is a big amount of money.  They should have spent less and rolled out - expanded 20MPH zones as they have been doing so historicaly.

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

It has cost £33 millon pounds! Spend that on NHS cancer screening, childrens early years stuff,  the list goes on. Now how many lives will you save?? Wales is small in pop, so that is a big amount of money.  They should have spent less and rolled out - expanded 20MPH zones as they have been doing so historicaly.

£33m might sound like a lot of money to an individual, but it's 0.15% of the Welsh annual budget.

AidanR wrote:

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

It has cost £33 millon pounds! Spend that on NHS cancer screening, childrens early years stuff,  the list goes on. Now how many lives will you save?? Wales is small in pop, so that is a big amount of money.  They should have spent less and rolled out - expanded 20MPH zones as they have been doing so historicaly.

£33m might sound like a lot of money to an individual, but it's 0.15% of the Welsh annual budget.

33m would pay for about a 1000 Paramedics on 32k, that might help.

Careful you might conflate a one-off capital cost with an annual cost.

And, the full cost of a paramedic is alot more that just the wage of the person doing the job.

No it wouldn't. Training costs, vehicle costs, pension costs etc etc. It wouldn't come close

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

It has cost £33 millon pounds! Spend that on NHS cancer screening, childrens early years stuff,  the list goes on. Now how many lives will you save?? Wales is small in pop, so that is a big amount of money.  They should have spent less and rolled out - expanded 20MPH zones as they have been doing so historicaly.

It looks like the return on the £33 million is pretty good though (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/15/wales-is-bringing-in-a-20mph-speed-limit-why-and-what-will-happen):

Quote:

Opponents say the scheme will cost the Welsh economy £4.5bn. Is that true?

The figure comes from a Welsh government report, which makes it awkward for Labour. The cost is for a 30-year period and the government now says it may not be accurate as it takes into account the impact of every single journey – even if it is just a trip to, say, the local park. It prefers to highlight the cost of introducing 20mph – £32m. It says the policy could save the NHS £92m every year so the initial outlay will swiftly be covered.

Financially, that makes it look like a no-brainer.

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

It has cost £33 millon pounds!

The average fatal RTA in the UK in 2020, according to Statista, cost the exchequer £2.12M. The average serious RTA cost more than £246,000. So it really doesn't have to prevent very many incidents to have paid for itself, and then once it's broken even in terms of saving such costs it will continue to provide a net benefit to the exchequer, saving funds that can then be spent on health, education etc. Additionally, whilst £33M is unquestionably a lot of money, it's less than the cost of a single mile of new motorway.

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

It has cost £33 millon pounds! Spend that on NHS cancer screening, childrens early years stuff,  the list goes on. Now how many lives will you save?? Wales is small in pop, so that is a big amount of money.  They should have spent less and rolled out - expanded 20MPH zones as they have been doing so historicaly.

Well that is a reasonable question.  Do you have the answer?  How much will 33 million (once) do when you put it in to the NHS and how many lives will it save/improve?  (Assuming you can just get it from one budget and stick it elsewhere of course).

Will it accomplish more than this (one off) spend?

I think you could use up quite a few of those pounds just getting your answer above the confidence level of "but it's obvious!" or "but it stands to reason!".  Tempting though it is to propose policy on "it's common sense to me!" we should probably do a bit of due dilligence.

I mean, if it's just the money you could then question why are we putting far more millions into road-building (even in Wales with their new plans this will continue) which is a net cost to everyone (once everything's summed) and certainly not good for health...

If your point is "but that's what we see in the media!" - well, alas.  I recall some other slogans about large sums of money and the NHS too.  We're coming up to elections and the Nasty Party clearly feels it needs to make its image a bit more striking.  And the other side doesn't want to be left too far behind either...

The cost is pretty much irrelevant compared to the estimated savings. Paying £33m once for saving £92m every year is beyond a good deal.

I can understand complaints about how it's being done and obviously motorists generally aren't going to like being made to slow down, but the cost if the exercise is hardly worth discussing if it brings about that level of saving.

There's plenty of other places with 20mph limits and so far, they seem to work really well without evidence of the down-sides that opponents predicted. I hope it ends up working out well for Wales.

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

It has cost £33 millon pounds! Spend that on NHS cancer screening, childrens early years stuff,  the list goes on. Now how many lives will you save?? Wales is small in pop, so that is a big amount of money.  They should have spent less and rolled out - expanded 20MPH zones as they have been doing so historicaly.

£33 million sounds a lot but that is a couple of roundabouts, if you're lucky.

When you consider that every road death costs £2.3 million it doesn't look so wild. Add on the many hundreds of injuries, the vast number of collisions and single-vehicle incidents that require emergency services callouts, repairs to signs / hedges / walls / houses... that will add up to far more than £33 million per year.

And as already stated this is effectively preventative spending. It has been shown to be effective in other countries.

We'd all like to see more money spent on health, education, early years, housing etc etc but there are people in power, especially in Westminster, who have done the opposite. They have been voted back in more than once since 2010 on that basis and unfortunately the devolved government is limited in what it can do to raise its own revenue.

How much extra council tax would you be prepared to pay for these better services?

If you think that Drakeford & co. are doing such a terrible then why not stand for the Senedd yourself? Though you won't want to waste any money so perhaps you'll do it for free. Maybe you'll see how small £33m is in relation to all the other expenditure required by the government, even in a country with a relatively small population.

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

33m would pay for about a 1000 Paramedics on 32k, that might help.

If you have 1,000 extra paramedics they will also need uniforms, training, ambulances to drive (which need fuel, servicing & repairs). And when they arrive at A&E the waiting times will still be just as long because you didn't spend any additional money on doctors & nurses, HCAs, porters, maintenance teams, beds and wards, oxygen, drugs, nursing homes to reduce the bed-blocking and a thousand other things. I suspect you haven't thought this through.

The argument is that the £33m cost is nothing compared to the projected savings from reducing accidents and encouraging active travel. Time will tell. 

EDIT: sorry, late the party. Others got there first.

60kg lean keen climbing machine wrote:

As now Wesh labour has handed the keys to the Senedd to whoever can make political headway on this “wedge issue”,  it's a gift to both Plaid, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. This is a vanity project that will morph into a poison chalice,  and it isn't just Welsh Labour who will pay the price for this, but all who live in Wales.  Partially if the party led by RT Davies gain the most traction on this issue. 

A week is a long time in politics, the next Welsh Parliament elections are in 2026. I'd be very surprised if the current kerfuffle was anything but a distant memory by then.

perce wrote:

Has Nigel gone again? I thought I saw his drivel on here but it's gone now.

Rather splendidly he seems to have been fully banhammered within half an hour of my* pointing out to mods that it was him back again, splendid work chaps! Hopefully his next iterations (sadly you just know they will happen) can be dealt with as swiftly.

*Credit to any others who also complained!

Rich_cb wrote:

Interesting: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/yougov-poll-shows-massive-op...

"polling was carried out in the first week of September"

I'm sure I read that public opposition to such changes grows towards the point of introduction (and let's face it, people just don't like change unless it is something that makes their lives easier / lets them do what they want rather than what they should).

It would be interesting if someone could assess the language used in the media.

Maybe but a large number of people apparently weren't even aware of the changes until the leaflet dropped through their letterbox the week before.

Either way it does blow a hole in the "these changes are popular" narrative.

The concern is that either Drakeford's successor or an opposition party junks the whole policy because of bad implementation.

They should have kept the default at 30 and just continued introducing 20mph zones, as they were beforehand with minimal opposition.

The end result would have been largely the same but without the enormous expense and political bunfight.

Rich_cb wrote:

Maybe but a large number of people apparently weren't even aware of the changes until the leaflet dropped through their letterbox the week before.

Oh come off it, even in the English media there's been huge publicity about this for months and the law was passed nearly a year ago. Anyone in Wales who has a TV, radio, internet access or ever reads a newspaper but still claims they weren't aware of it is either a liar or an amnesiac.

Well, they're certainly a bit slow!

I'm guessing my friends and colleagues who expressed surprise were lying then.

It's amazing how perceptive you can be about Wales from 150 miles away...

And read the daily fail or torygraph.......

I think the 20mph limit was covered by both of those outlets, it definitely was in the Telegraph.

Huge numbers of people don't follow the news at all.

I'm sure that's true, but how are you supposed to engage with them? To be honest, I probably found out through this site rather than any other outlet - but I think I responded to the consultation. I certainly didn't get a leaflet through the door.

I don't think any approach will engage with everyone, hence 25% of people being unaware of highway code changes, but postal probably gives you the greatest reach albeit at the greatest cost.

I got a leaflet through the door, it wasn't addressed though so if you opt out of leaflet marketing you may have missed it.

I'm hopeful that we will see the predicted results in terms of casualties as I think that will settle the debate in favour of the 20 limits.

I'm sceptical as to how realistic those predictions are.

Rich_cb wrote:

I'm guessing my friends and colleagues who expressed surprise were lying then. It's amazing how perceptive you can be about Wales from 150 miles away...

Yes, I've noticed how you refrain from commenting on any England/London issues...get up the street Rich, I assume your friends and colleagues aren't stupid, are you really, seriously claiming that they turned round to you this month and said "What's all this about 20mph limits then?" 

Any other Welsh or Wales-based denizens of this site care to tell us how many of their friends, neighbours and colleagues only heard of one of the biggest Welsh news stories of 2023 in the last fortnight?