I doubt there is anyone in politics stupid enough.
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New High tech cameras to enforce 20mph roads
- Thread starter motorbiking
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I used to live on a rat run street that was a 30 zone. This was years back when things like 20 zones and speed bumps were being introduced.
They made the street a 20 zone, installed speed bumps, a pair of which were directly outside our house although thankfully the house was set back and elevated slightly.
I can confidently say, having witnessed traffic on that street for years thereafter until I moved, both the 20 zone and speed bumps made very little difference. To this day we surely all see folk that drive over speed bumps as if they're not there. What that's doing to their vehicles suspension goodness only knows.
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You really have to question the sanity of people who come up with these ideas. Its the same with pinch points.. Road furniture deliberately designed to cause damage to your vehicle.
Speed bumps are even better when they start to crumble, meaning you either have to crawl over at around 10-15mph or drive one side of the vehicle directly over the centre.
This is why I think, although I appreciate it's contentious, it will be better in years to come when the high majority of folk are driving vehicles that won't allow speeding, or tailgating etc. At least this might mean a removal of pesky speed bumps and other 'calming' measures.
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or a rise in unregistered/insured/modified vehicles. its as high as 13% in some parts of london
I do, my car is neatly able to straddle them.
Or properly enforce the limits we already have! Our through road, a bus route to the village centre, used to have none, and was nice to drive along. Now it's covered in speed bumps, potholes, and long lines of parked cars - it's a nightmare to make your way along, dodging the cars, bumps, and potholes. The parked cars, mostly belong to the houses they out in front of, which have a large front garden, and parking via a private road at the rear. Why they even allow parking on such a busy bus route, defies logic - An continuous half-mile of parked cars, and the rest of road only wide enough for one vehicle at a time- crazy!
If only there were some sort of automated enforcement method, perhaps using cutting edge radar and photography systems.
Not around here there isn't.
Different scenario then. If the vehicle wheels don't (or hardly) touch the speed bump, the vehicle isn't relevant to my point.
That takes us full circle though. Unfortunately it's the few that spoil it for the many. And there's no way the authorities have the resources to enforce limits here there everywhere.
What would you suggest? Ask drivers nicely to slow down and stop killing children - please?
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It's always possible, with any speed limits, to find examples where the limit "could be" higher, and indeed ones where it "should be" lower.
But the evidence is clear that higher does correlate with more dangerous. All limits are a compromise between socially acceptable restraints on speed and socially acceptable levels of deaths, injuries and pollution, so there will inevitably be better/worse compromises in different places, but that applies just as much when speed limits have to be chosen to be 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 as it does when the choices are 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70.
Anybody who's been driving for more than a few years will have experienced other speed limits changing - they'll have seen some national speed limit dual carriageways drop from 70 to 60 or 50. They'll have seen some national speed limit single carriageway roads drop from 60 to 50 or 40. I'm sure they grumble a bit about it - I know I have done, but we never see anything like the same intensity of loathing for those changes as we do for the one to 20mph on restricted roads. We don't see interminable posts on social media about the outrage of reducing a dual carriageway to 60. We don't see the tabloid press slavering about a war on the motorist. We don't see people tearing down or defacing signs and cameras. We don't see people starting petitions or whinging on radio phone ins. We don't see people complaining that we should never have introduced a 30mph.
But for some reason changing to a limit quite happily coped with by hundreds of millions of drivers in other countries, in fact for some of them even lower limits, just enrages a subset of the UK population.
The fact is 20mph limits do produce have benefits, those benefits are wider than just improved safety, in practice they make no significant difference to journey times, they are popular, their popularity often increases after they've been implemented, and people want to see them more rigorously enforced.
They are not going away. People can choose to get angry about that, choose to engage in moon-howling and rope-pssng, mount all kinds of fact-denying arguments against them, but it will do no good.
Or they could choose to get on with life.
It's pretty meaningful to the 3 sets of parents not burying their children.
There are people here always banging on about "one is to many". Except when it comes to people dying in road accidents, it seems that one is not enough - we can happily trade more to allow us to drive faster.
You've actually broken your suspension when driving at an appropriate speed?
So are cars stationary behind a bus less safe than ones overtaking one?
They'd be even more offended - that environment really would be seen as nothing more than a moneymaking venture for councils, and the fines just a "tax" on motorists. Without penalty points it just becomes an extra cost of motoring, and the richer someone is the less they will care. The great thing about penalty points is that they bite everybody. (Apart from, occasionally, people wealthy enough to hire a Mr Loophole to get out of an offence or totting up ban, but those numbers are probably insignificant.)
Do you make the same argument against the current "blanket" 30mph limit? Do you say that it's very inefficient? That signage is bad?
What intrinsic nature of 20mph limits make them less "efficient" than 30mph ones, or give rise to worse signage?
Maybe the answer is simply a wholesale change so that all 30mph roads become 20, nation wide, so that we go from this
No coping problems at all.
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60% of people in Wales voted in the 2021 Senedd election for parties that had a national 20mph default limit in their election manifestos.
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And there could be an automated payment system as part of the DVLA infrastructure (could also be used to automatically collect road tax, and be designed to cope with any future pay-by-mile regime).
By the time Mr. Speeder gets home the penalty charge has been taken and his licence has had the points applied.
