The spread of 20mph zones will save lives and cut pollution. And they’re more popular than many think
Not so long ago, I was driving along a familiar road when suddenly a policeman appeared from nowhere and zapped me. Armed with his trusty speed gun, he’d clocked me doing 26mph.
Strange, I thought, why is he aiming his laser at people ambling along at such a low speed?
And then it hit me: I was in a 20mph zone and I’d broken the legal limit. The local council had recently reduced the limit on that part of the road and I’d totally missed the new signs. Caught bang to rights, the fine duly arrived in the post not long after. It was a fair cop, and so was he.
On the subsequent speed awareness course, I realised I was far from alone. At my age, being labelled a “20-something” can feel like a compliment, but in speeding terms that was far too old for the rules of this particular road.
With the growing spread of 20mph zones across the UK, and with the limit set to become the norm on all residential roads and shopping areas in Wales from September, many others will probably be caught out like I was too.
Of course, the real benefits of slower speed zones are in safety. Most of us errant drivers on that speeding course were left in no doubt of the numbers: people hit by a vehicle at 20mph are around five times less likely to be killed than one travelling at 30mph.
And new figures from Transport for London showed that the number in 20mph areas was cut by 25 per cent, with incidence of death or serious injury also cut by 25 per cent.
That’s a quarter fewer families getting the awful news that their son, wife or grandmother has been killed in a road accident. Crucially, it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who benefit most too – as they are more likely to be pedestrians.
Yet on that course I learned something that receives very little attention in the debate about the new zones or their related cousins: “low traffic neighbourhoods”. In most urban areas, driving at 30mph rather than 20mph saves you barely a few seconds in getting from A to B. Given traffic lights, congestion and junctions, driving faster doesn’t get you anywhere much quicker at all.
In fact, traffic can flow more freely at 20mph than at 30, thanks to less standing traffic, closer spacing and smoother junction usage.
Moreover, some councils are using a default 20 limit to allow the removal of speed bumps, which are as loathed by the emergency services and bus passengers (many of whom are pensioners who really don’t like all those jolts on their joints) as much as ordinary motorists.
The fact that a 20mph zone may literally cost a few seconds in most journey times, while ensuring the road flows more freely, should be a valuable asset for those politicians who want to reassure motorists that they really are not “anti-car”.
MPs of all stripes, from Labour to Tory to Lib Dem, certainly worry about being seen as anti-driver. And it’s worth remembering that for many people, car-owning represents personal freedom, whether they’re a young woman worried about the safety of other forms of transport late at night or a white van driver with their own business.
A few weeks ago there was a flurry of shock-jock outrage at the concept of a “15-minute city”, the idea that all amenities in a town or city should be reachable within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride. This idea, first floated by the mayor of Paris, is being embraced by Oxford City Council, with Bristol, Birmingham, Canterbury, Ipswich and Sheffield all interested too.
The ambition is a simple one, to invest in town and city centres (rather than out of town shopping malls), cut pollution and improve road safety.
It has been misrepresented by conspiracy theorists as a “socialist” plot to force people not to drive outside their own locality, when in fact it’s quite a conservative idea of a return to communities. It has more in common with John Major’s famous speech about Britain being a country of “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion” than it does with Soviet revolution.
One Tory supporter of low-speed neighbourhoods tells me that the extremists’ opposition to the idea has actually helped the cause: “The anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown kooks have made it harder for sensible people to be opposed because no one wants to be associated with them.”
Crucially, one person’s freedom is another’s danger. We have speed limits to ensure that pedestrians and others can walk free of the fear of personal injury and death. Overall, most Britons also rightly prize our country’s road safety record (one of the best in the world), which is why smart motorways – which remove the hard shoulder – have proved so deeply unpopular.
Even in the United States, the land of the free, the motorway speed limit is not seen as a basic infringement on personal liberty (and was in fact set federally at 55mph from the 1970s oil crisis until the mid-1980s to reduce fuel consumption and make driving cheaper).
There’s undoubtedly some nervousness about anything that curbs traffic. One Lib Dem MP confided they worried their local council may have overdone the rollout of 20-zones, and Labour and Tory colleagues share the unease. Yet despite some opportunism by all the parties when in opposition at local level, there ought to be cross-party consensus about lowering our traffic speeds.
As he did on climate change, Boris Johnson grasped this whole agenda better than some in his party, giving hard cash to cycling and walking schemes and creating a new Active Travel England agency. But in the last Budget, Jeremy Hunt quietly cut the £710m active travel funding in half to £330m.
In 2021, Johnson put his finger on the shift in thinking needed – that this issue was about choice. “We sometimes think of traffic as like water: if you block a stream in one place, it will find the next easiest way… but traffic is not a force of nature. It is a product of people’s choices. If you make it easier and safer to walk and cycle, more people choose to walk and cycle instead of driving, and the traffic falls overall.”
And for those politicians and parties who are tempted to oppose low-speed zones, perhaps the evidence that should sway them most is the evidence of the ballot box. In almost every case where candidates have opposed road safety measures, they’ve lost.
A look at the past three years’ worth of local elections makes stark reading. The Conservatives tended to underperform, often significantly, in wards where the party opposed new cycle routes, for example.
From Hounslow to Kensington, from Enfield to Manchester and Oxfordshire, the Tory vote fell by a greater proportion in areas where anti-low traffic neighbourhood campaigns were run. In wealthy Dulwich last year, the Tories campaigned vigorously against a low traffic scheme only to find the voters loved it. In many areas, all the initial outrage has been replaced by happier residents, businesses and communities.
Like pedestrianisation of high streets, low traffic areas and 20mph zones are actually more popular than some politicians think. Instead of listening to the noisy minority who oppose them, parties should pay attention to the quiet hum of satisfaction from the majority.
For many of us, 20 really is plenty. It may take some politicians a bit longer to get to that destination, but the future is arriving faster than they think.
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