Full 20 mph city limit - a return to non drivers owning their town?

[albion]

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/mobile/news/towns-set-for-pilot-20mph-plan-145696n.22975778

One of the most interesting developments since the congestion charge?

 

[glasgowcyclist]

To be accurate, these are not cities but very small towns.

It's difficult to imagine these new limits being widely respected. As the related BBC news article states:

The proposal does not include traffic calming measures. The limits are to be "largely self-enforcing".​

GC

 

[booze and cake]

.....where 'self enforcing' is replaced with 'ignored'

 

[glasgowcyclist]

.....where 'self enforcing' is replaced with 'ignored'

Precisely.

GC

 

[Linford]

Blanket limits = real problem area's at any speed just vanish into the morass

 

[snorri]

I find this line disappointing......
" If successful the policy could be extended to other areas where there are higher accident rates."

Using accident rates as a measure is quite out of date and unsatisfactory as it fails to recognise that the accident rate is already minimised by the actions of local people who realising the dangers of particular locations adjust their lifestyle and find alternative modes of transport or routes. There are actually few accidents at the places where the reduced speed limit is being introduced, but the quality of life and development of the towns is adversely affected by the speed and volume of motor traffic.

 

[User482]

[QUOTE 2825841, member: 45"]It works in my town.

I tire of the "it'll never work so I'll find loads of silly reasons why we shouldn't bother" mindset.[/quote]

It doesn't work in Bristol. But that's purely a problem of enforcement, which would be easily solved with some political will.

 

[steveindenmark]

I we going back to guys with red flags in front of cars. It could reduce the unemployment figures.

 

[PhilDawson8270]

They are pretty much ignored around my way, current ACPO guidelines state that they will only be enforced if the areas are landscaped and engineered to feel like 20mph limits rather than 30mph limits with different signs.

 

[glasgowcyclist]

[QUOTE 2825841, member: 45"]It works in my town.
.[/quote]

What makes it work in your town? Is it general compliance and acceptance or is there enforcement?

GC

 

[Platinum]

What Keith Brown is either forgetting or he's too stupid to realise that it's not only the speed of vehicles but the number and type. When you've got town centres that look like this

then obviously speed limits are not the only answer. The road in that video is the A7, and if you're going from Carlisle/west of England to Edinburgh/east of Scotland you'd either pick that road or the A702 through Biggar. As well as pushing straight through every town they come across they're also single carriageways, so lorries should technically be limited to 40mph but I don't think I've ever seen one in my life that actually sticks to that.

If you want to avoid driving through these small towns where people live work and play than you could go up to Glasgow then across to Edinburgh and have motorway the whole way, but who in their right mind would choose to cover two sides of the triangle? The A1 in the east also takes a meandering detour around the coast so if you want the direct road south you've got to go through Jedburgh or Coldstream. It's a pattern repeated everywhere. Let me repeat that, the only roads from the South to our capital city look like the one in the video. Keith Brown has got a much larger problem than simple speed limits can solve.

If it was up to me we'd start a programme of building bypasses and filtered permeability in towns and villages on major through routes. However that costs a lot more and is more political than putting up a few non-enforced sign posts.

 

[glasgowcyclist]

[QUOTE 2825965, member: 45"]I think it's a combination of things. There is traffic calming and street furniture. The majority of the residents drive within the limit and so others are forced to. There are a lot of pedestrians and cyclists, and they are more confident in using the roads so drivers are learning to be more aware. And above all the residents of our town have a large ownership of the place and a strong community. It's the culture that needs to be fostered.[/quote]

Sounds great. At least you've got some traffic calming; the plan for the towns mentioned in the OP is not to have any of that, hence my cynicism.

GC

 

[Linford]

^ this implies that where people don't own their own houses, that the problems are worse ?

 

[Linford]

The Asian communities are bound together to a much greater extent than their British counterparts by religion. Go to the mosque/temple etc, get a sermon on howto be a good person, come out and then chew the fat with ones neighbours.....With the demise of the church in the UK, the majority of communities don't live like this any more....nobody even wants to make eye contact on a train or in a public space, and so we fret about the issues to our peers, but don't really deal with them as we don't really have a community spirit in the towns. Very much mind my own business, and you mind yours.

 

[glenn forger]

[QUOTE 2825997, member: 45"]No. We have a huge amount of rented housing.

This implies that rather than moan about it or make excuses not to do anything we get out of our swivel chairs and do something.

Slightly OT but relevant -in Balsall Heath (Birmingham) 15-20 years ago the locals got fed up of kerb crawlers. So they did something about it. They set up a rota and met on the relevant streets. You'd find groups of Asian men sitting around a table on a corner playing cards, people wandering up and down the roads logging registration numbers. And the problem moved away. It might have gone elsewhere, but the locals took ownership of the issue and did something about it.

Unless you're going to be part of the solution then I don't see that you have any right to complain.[/quote]

Exactly what happened here:

Prime Minister Joop den Uyl and his wife accepting a record with a protest song by ‘Stop de Kindermoord’ with the radical title: “playing on the streets: death penalty”

http://lcc.org.uk/pages/holland-in-the-1970s