Today we were asked by Bradford Council to a provide a supporting statement to their press release.

This is what we suggested :-

“20mph limits are the global standard where pedestrians and cyclists mix with motor vehicles. This is supported by the World Health Organisation, OECD, and many global and national NGOs. In many countries, 30km/h (18.5mph) limits are standard across cities, towns and villages. Already 21m people in the UK live in authorities that have already set or are setting 20mph for most residential and city centre streets. 20mph becomes the norm rather than the exception. This delivers across a wide range of city aspirations including reducing road danger, enabling active mobility, child mobility , elderly mobility and reducing emissions and car-dependency.

It is good to see Bradford Council adopting 20mph limits, and we would urge it to go further and deliver a 20mph street environment as the norm for all its residential roads across the whole district.”

Reducing speed limits is the quickest, cheapest and most equitable way of cutting traffic noise. Slower is quieter.

Lower speeds also allow the noise benefits of electric cars to be spread more widely and are foundational for traffic reduction.

Transport for London’s (TfL) current consultation on 20mph limits[1] heralds a concerted bid to reduce speeds across the capital. It includes a range of measures to increase driver compliance. Support the consultation by 10 July.  

[1] https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/streets/20/consultation/

20mph Scotland Poll 72% Support. Policy costs 0.75% of transport budget for 2 years. Leaders should prioritise local streets.

Public opinion is for 20mph - 72% and rising. Scotland’s elected leader– Nicola Sturgeon should back a national change to 20mph. The cost is £10m for 2 years – only 0.75% of the total transport budget. Reducing road danger is like seatbelt and smoking ban laws. On 20mph we need leaders who will lead and make national changes!

When someone says they speed, it’s important to comment rather than be silent.  How do we tackle this edgy topic?  20’s Plenty aims for social communication, changing norms to civilise built up roads. We say, listen to their story, aim to empathise and then explain how their speeding impacts upon you and society.

20’s Plenty for Us welcomes the publication of the long-awaited DfT Evaluation of 20mph limits. It confirms the public support and acceptance of 20mph limits but has failed to meet the original DfT objectives or provide increased evidence on how to make our streets safer.

...or why unrepresentative data is not reliable.

If you don't have a TomTom device in your vehicle then you may be surprised that if you live in one of the places recently researched by Atkins for the their Evaluation of 20mph limits then it doesn't matter how much you keep within the speed limit your considerate driving was completely ignored. And you wouldn't be alone. The report estimated that the actual number of drivers who were also ignored were in the 97% of vehicles who's speed they never measured.

Atkins and DfT decided that in order to gather information on vehicle speeds in 20mph streets in 12 case study 20mph areas and compare them with 3 other 30mph areas then they would use data captured from high end TomTom SatNavs or vehicles with in-built TomTom in-car devices. This is termed Floating Car Data (FCD).

You may therefore wonder just how accurate and representative their statistics and research were if it only included 3% of vehicles. We did as well, so we did some of our own research.

Today the government published its long awaited report evaluating 20mph limit implementations. We welcome the report. It has been a long time coming since 2014 when it was commissioned.

And in that time there have been nearly half a million casualties on streets with a 30mph limit.

The report only evaluated a small number of case studies which in themselves only covered part of an authority. There are some useful indicators in the report, particularly around the negative aspects of police failing to routinely enforce 20mph limits and the need for national engagement and awareness on the benefits of reducing speeds below 30mph in residential and other roads.

However, we have major reservations about the primary data used in the report around speed reductions and the complete failure of the study to look at sufficient casualty figures to be able to draw any conclusions that would be statistically credible. These were key reasons for the commissioning of the report and we are amazed at the choice of data measured which appears to be based on measuring what is available rather than what is meaningful. 

Here are the 60 second videos we recorded at our 20's Plenty for Wales Conference from presenters and delegates.

Note that this page may take a while to load.

A sell out conference of 100 delegates met in Cardiff to share best practice on how to make streets healthier in Wales by reducing road risk at source through 20mph limits with a focus on 20mph as a national urban default.

Click on each presenter to open their presentation or 60 second voxpop