Wales’ plan to bring in 20mph roads is just the latest slavio in the war on motorists & here’s exactly why it won’t work
WAR has been officially declared on the motorist.
In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced that on half the roads in London, the speed limit is to be cut to 20 miles an hour.
And tomorrow, Wales is about to follow London and Khan’s Vision Zero — a utopia where there are zero deaths and zero serious injuries.
To achieve this throughout the whole of Wales there is going to be a 20mph default speed limit on most restricted roads.
And it will be coming to your town next, if it hasn’t already.
I am against 20mph zones in any event.
But in Wales, especially, it is totally unnecessary.
First, a few facts: The population of Greater London is now around 8.9million, spread over an area of about 385,000 acres.
London is a highly congested urban area with about 2.6million drivers.
The population of Wales is just over three million, spread over five million acres.
In the whole of Wales there are about 1.6million drivers and most of the country is rural.
To me, it is totally unnecessary and totally anti-motorist. There is no specific function behind it.
We all support road safety. I don’t think you will find any road user who won’t say, “We want to make our roads safer.”
But we can’t lose sight of the fact you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured on a rural road.
It has got to make sense to the motorist, otherwise drivers are just not going to comply with it.
If we are trying to make our roads safer, then what we need to do is tackle the problem by finding the sweet spot.
Instead of a blanket 20mph limit, there should be a “dynamic speed”.
For example, when the kids go to school, introduce 20mph speed limits for an hour on all restricted roads.
And do the same at the end of the day. That would ensure the safety of the most vulnerable users.
Motorists would accept 20mph if it was going to be for a couple of hours during the day. That would be understandable.
But if you are saying to someone like a taxi driver or a professional driver on a deserted road at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning that you have got to stick at 20mph and there is nothing else on the road, it makes no sense at all.
Speed limits need to make sense.
And this 20mph as a blanket speed limit just doesn’t make sense.
You feel like you could get out and walk faster. The motorist then becomes obsessed with the speed limit.
Twenty miles an hour is an unnaturally slow speed and not the sort of speed that cars are comfortable travelling at.
Under pressure
When you are driving, you need to be spatially aware, you need to be looking around all the time.
Who is on the road, what is that car doing, what is that cyclist doing?
You need to be completely observant.
What you don’t want is for a driver to be just completely obsessed with the speed they are going at because it is so slow and they don’t want to creep over it.
The car won’t sit at 20, so you keep dabbing the brakes, which, of course, causes pollution.
The slower you are going, the more time you are going to spend in your car.
Imperial College in London did a survey and described the reduction in speed limit as being “pollution neutral”.
So it is not going to make any difference one way or the other to the quality of our air.
They say it will improve the mental health of people in the area.
It certainly won’t improve the mental health of drivers in London’s 20mph zones.
You see the frustration of people sitting there, travelling so slowly, waiting for lights to change, making no progress, being overtaken by people on e-bikes.
They are in a hurry, they are under pressure. They are people who work against the clock.
Zombified
They become almost zombified, tempted to do things that are actually a distraction and are illegal, like looking at the phone, because they are in the car too long and are just not making progress.
And the enforcement of the 20mph limit is going to exacerbate the already-strained relationship between the motorist and police.
Motorists will perceive they are being unfairly targeted with the imposition of a ridiculously slow speed limit, which has come down by 33 per cent overnight.
That is huge, unpalatable and unacceptable.
The police need the public on side and the driver needs to feel that the police are reasonable, fair and sensible.
We have become a decriminalised society where burglary is a serious offence but there is no serious attempt at detection.
You will get a crime number. But speeding . . . we’ve got you!
You can possibly see an argument in London but the levels of travel in Wales are low.
So you do wonder if the real purpose is to get extra cash from the hard-pressed motorist. They’re easy prey.
I don’t think the motorist will accept it.
The 20mph limit is going to be like Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax — a breaking point.
- Nick Freeman is founder of Freeman Solicitors.