Seven in 10 oppose default 20mph speed limit in Wales, new poll finds – as Welsh government vows to ‘listen’ to concerns
https://news.sky.com/story/seven-in-10-oppose-default-20mph-speed-limit-in-wales-new-poll-finds-as-welsh-government-vows-to-listen-to-concerns-13200258
Posted by topotaul
18 Comments
Ppl in Wales are pretty car crazy; there is no public transport; what there is is expensive; it rains a lot.
If you are reducing the viability of cars, you need to provide an alternative via public transport.
I’m not in wales, but for instance I need to get the train every morning when I’m in my home town, they have created huge traffic jams by reducing 2 lanes to 1 for bus lanes
The bus turns up when it wants and takes an hour to get 3 miles to the station. Making it more viable to sit in traffic
I get we need to have better public transport, but it’d also be nice if we stopped bending over backwards for motorists.
Can’t really take this poll seriously with more people believing the 20mph default speed limit increases traffic noise in residential areas and worsens air quality. As many people believe it endangers drivers as think it makes them safer. We really need to do something about education, something has failed.
More than 8 in 10 car drivers speed through 20mph zones so I guess that tracks (source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/vehicle-speed-compliance-statistics-for-great-britain-2022/vehicle-speed-compliance-statistics-for-great-britain-2022). Of course the majority speed when it’s a 30mph limit as well.
Still, reducing the speed limit does reduce speed (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmmmryl621qo) and having spent much of my holiday driving through Wales, it was a complete non-issue.
30mph is just the sensible default speed for urban areas.
20mph makes sense in certain areas, namely for purely residential streets (which should only be making up the first and/or last few hundred yards of anyjourney anyway), and when in areas with particularly high or vulnerable pedestrian traffic, such as high streets or past schools. Any other main route in a town or city should be 30.
In London it’s got to the point that the fucking south circular is 20, which is just absurd. Again, 20 is fine on a main road in small sections, where the road passes a school or has lots of shops/restaurants etc, but not for its full length. Now yes, during rush hour you’d be lucky to hit 10 on the S circular (and at that point the speed limit doesn’t matter, it could be 50 and you’d be going the same speed), but in the middle of the day, at weekends, or overnight 20 is just painfully slow on a main road like that.
I think 20mph on side residential roads is fine, but not on main roads. If they kept the 20mph limit on main roads, i’d have allowed buses to go up to 30mph in a 20 zone so long as it’s in a bus lane
I think people would be far more receptive to making driving a worse experience, by being slower, more expensive, inconvenient etc if public transport was a suitable alternative
But outside of London, and major cities, it’s completely impractical.
Having a First Minister who was banned from driving after repeatedly being caught speeding is going to make retaining this policy a bit of a tough sell
I love this thread, every now and again you see a thread where the polar opposite opinion is touted and a bunch of gormless cunts come out the woodwork to mock how it ‘makes no difference’ and people dont like it should basically grow up and get over it.
When the truth is we are all sick to fucking death of driving at 20mph on roads that were perfectly safe at 30mph. I drive about 6-8 miles per day, minimum back and forth to work in 20mph zones and pointless, boring, painful and frustrating.
They’ve also reduced many dual carriageways from 70mph to 50mph (Abergavenny is a prime example) and large sections of the M4 are now 50mph with average speed cameras and its again pointless.
I have absolutely NO problems with 20mph in certain areas, schools should always be 20mph, residential areas I think should always be 20mph and other enclosed areas like high streets.
But blanket putting the speed to 20mph has just resulted in people who are afraid of getting points pissing off everyone else. And I say this as someone who is the one pissing people off as I can’t afford the points!
There’s a lot of long stretches of road where I live that are 20mph now. And the police will occasionally stand about with their speed guns, clocking everyone who goes past. I try to stick to the 20, and the thanks I get is people driving right up my ass, beeping me, overtaking THEN beeping. It’s annoying. I wish they’d just get rid of it.
This is to be expected, as it’s always the case with changes to infrastructure or regulations. It takes a minimum of around 2 years for people to become accustomed to the changes and alter their opinions on them. Now, should this poll be taken into consideration and respond to legitimate and valid concerns? Absolutely. Should it be used to scrap the entire trail? Absolutely not, there just hasn’t been sufficient time yet for the full benefits to take affects and for people to get accustomed to it. The bottom line is; it just needs more time, revaluation, and adaptations made.
The problem isn’t 20mph as such. It’s the application of an arbitrary speed limit to roads that don’t match the road itself.
Simply lowering speed limits and calling it a day is not a good way to make roads safer. Speed limits are only one part of what makes safe road design. The road has to be designed so that the speed you want drivers to go at is the speed they feel is right.
It would make sense for certain times of the day only
Politicians need to understand that they are NOT people’s leaders they are the people’s employee’s.
Probably the biggest Welsh govt fuck up this policy. An absolute farce from beginning to end and everyone would have told them if they cared.
About half of all drivers break speed limits anyway. So maybe we shouldn’t pay too much attention to what lawbreakers think.
The problem with these unrealistically slow speed limits is that most people don’t actually stick to them but some do so you have a huge amount of tension between these two groups focusing on the speed limit instead of on actually driving.