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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
*Pedantry - but important* in the foreseeable term emissions are not going away, they're going elsewhere. They've been going down a bit and we hope they'll continue going down - but Jevons paradox suggests that this is not guaranteed.
Roads certainly don't last forever either. Especially not how we build them and maintain them in the UK. We have to be careful not to fall into the US trap (they have it much worse of course) of trying to develop / road-build our way out of debt racked up by urban sprawl and provision for a hypermobile population! (It's not even necessary that the route of the road for motor traffic lasts forever).
Further nit-picking:
In fact this is normalised in the UK I'd say! We build "concrete trenches in the sky" for pedestrians / cyclists / whatever where "proper infra" (road or rail) has made a more compelling claim to a route. Or stick in a dank, dark underpass for people to quietly shoot up, drink and/or wee in. I do agree we need fewer dangerous or inconvenient "at-grade" crossings. What we need to normalise though (only if we want more people to cycle though...) is something more challenging and expensive: whereby we e.g. send the motor vehicles down and have a cyclist / walking flyover with a very moderate gradient passing above, or send the cars up so that vulnerable road users can pass under it without needing to descend into a pit and back up again.
As far as "by-passes" go there is complexity. I agree that some places we've just stretched and stretched what were originally "streets" into narrow, often-congested urban distributor / connectors. Likely several roots to the issue e.g. a conscious choice back when to go all in on the car (e.g. over rail etc.), the UK's "multi-function roads" (as opposed to e.g. this). Also we do have some examples of places that went hog-wild for them (e.g. Glasgow's inner-city motorways) but they don't seem to be great either.
The general idea of "motor traffic takes the longer / less direct route" however is sound. And decoupling / "unbundling" modes as you've mentioned before.
Agree it's not easy change (if we do make a change) at all!
According to here...
https://www.gov.wales/introducing-20mph-speed-limits-frequently-asked-qu...
... this figure was calculated for 30 years, including e.g. "leisure" - and there's some debate about it. OTOH "the casualty prevention savings, which includes but is not limited to reduced impact on the NHS and emergency services, could be up to £92m overall every year." - Not sure if that was deducted from the overall "cost"?
Injuries cost a fair bit too, not just deaths...
Perhaps - but maybe your expectation needs some numbers? I think the Welsh numbers reflect what's actually expected (e.g. presumably they aren't inflating the numbers by including roads which are unaffected) - though I've not trawled through their details.
This has the actual numbers in an accessable graph:
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/welsh-governments-report-s...
It's not particulary close in terms of the disbenefits vastly out weighing the positives by nearly an order of magntitude.
The justfications from the government are very "handwavy". Ultimately the reason they could do this is because the costs are an externality as far as the the government are concerned.
Thanks. At the moment I'm content to go with what's written there e.g. "There is a LOT of uncertainty around these figures". Handwavy, some of them!
Hopefully a) we'll pick up on some of the other measures you've rightly suggested are a part of the picture (enforcement, road redesign, investment in other modes, change to development etc.) and b) monitoring of this will continue. Although TBH if there isn't some kind of "failure"* it's going away out of the news fast...
* Or whichever party being able to spin having a normal-volume conversation in town as an atrocity and taking an extra minute to get somewhere as breach of human rights. We already have lots of people paying not inconsequential costs every day with the motor traffic we have.
Any story I've read about BCP is how much congestion there is, so I doubt average speeds will change very much.
It isn't entirely outside of the realm possibility that decreased maximum speeds could result in higher average speeds.
Not sure that works for motor vehicles - because traffic lights / bottlenecks are the limiting factor for average speeds. So it's stop - wait - wait - wait (etc.) - get up to MSL (minimum speed limit) as quickly as possible and keep the foot down until the next bottleneck.
Pretty sure that even if you were correct this is still a win because if we can take out those doing higher speeds e.g. doing over 30mph in a 20mph limit there's a significant danger and potential harm in collision reduction. There's a deep dive into speed and safety here from SWOV if interested.
Is it possible though that reducing the overall system speed reduces congestion at those bottlenecks and improves flow (e.g. you may wait for for one change of lights instead of two) with a benefit for average speed?
I believe this is true and is why Thatcham recommended reducing speed limits on congested motorways
It could do I guess, would be a nice benefit (avoiding heavy braking / rapid accelleration also has benefits for all). Presumably this depends on the particular local system characteristics e.g. what are the flows, distances / speeds / light phases etc. and the feedbacks between them).
Certainly that's a strategy for improving people's average speed on cycling infra / routes e.g. just avoid people having to stop. (Aside from stopping being much more inconvenient for cyclists than drivers as drivers only have to push the pedal down a couple of times - or once, for an automatic...)
I think there is also an aim to improve air quality and get more people travelling actively, with benefits for public health beyond just casualty reduction.
In congested areas though, the actual speed reduction is typically not 10mph because it isn't flowing at the 30mph speed limit now - so the journey time increase is not that large.
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