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news
20mph sign (CC licensed by EdinburghGreens via Flickr)Wales set to reduce default speed limit to 20mph in residential areas
Wales looks set to introduce a blanket 20mph speed limit in built-up areas from next year, reduced from 30mph, in a move that would see the country become the first UK nation to set a national 20mph default speed limit on residential streets.
The proposed law is to be put before the Welsh Parliament ahead of a vote later today and is backed by both Labour and Plaid Cymru, who together hold almost three-quarters of the 60 Senedd seats.
If voted through as expected, the 20mph limit would come into force in September 2023, and despite the estimated £33 million cost, the Welsh government says improved road safety could result in a £58 million saving with reduced emergency service demand over the next 30 years.
🚗 Speed limits in Llandaff North, Whitchurch & Tongwynlais, Rhiwbina & Heath have been lowered to 20mph ahead of the Welsh Government’s national roll-out.
👉 For more info & FAQs, visit: https://t.co/4x1801yKOa
Lowering the default speed limit to 20mph saves lives. 👇 pic.twitter.com/RFrFTEyv9j
— Cardiff Council (@cardiffcouncil) July 6, 2022
The limit would apply on restricted roads: in residential areas and streets busy with pedestrians, where street lights are less than 200 yards apart. Road users caught speeding could face a minimum £100 fine and three penalty points.
According to police data, shared by the BBC, the largest proportion (half) of the 5,570 people hurt in collisions on Welsh roads happened on roads with a 30mph limit, while 40 per cent of the 1,131 people killed or seriously injured happened in 30mph zones.
While plenty of UK towns and cities have 20mph limits in residential areas, Wales will be the first nation to set the default at 20mph on all roads in built-up areas. Scotland is set to do the same by 2025.
Default 20mph zones in Wales could save multiple lives each year and prevent 1,000 casualties, according to research by @PublicHealthW. We're welcoming the @WelshGovernment's continued commitment to implementing a #20mph speed limit on restricted roads 👇https://t.co/CTGvoNkCGC
— Sustrans (@Sustrans) July 12, 2022
"We want to see that become the default position right across Wales," First Minister Mark Drakeford said.
"We know that 20mph zones reduce speed of traffic, reduce accidents — particularly accidents to children."
"We are united in our belief that this change will bring about a reduction in road collisions and their severity, while creating more opportunities to walk and cycle in communities," said Plaid Cymru's transport spokeswoman Delyth Jewell.
"A 20mph speed limit in built-up areas will allow us to work towards providing convenient, safe, pedestrian access to the places people need to go."
Despite the support within Welsh Parliament and the government acknowledging it may not be appropriate everywhere, with local authorities able to make exceptions — the Welsh Conservatives have slammed the idea as "ludicrous".
Shadow minister for transport, Natasha Ashgar said her party is "not against" 20mph speed limits outside schools, playgrounds, places of worship and high streets "but a blanket roll-out is quite frankly ludicrous".
"Speed limits like this should be decided by councils in their local areas, not top-down by Labour ministers," she said.
The policy has been hailed by active travel groups, with Living Streets suggesting it is a positive step towards "communities built for safety rather than speed".
Sustrans added that it welcomes the Welsh government's "continued commitment to implementing a 20mph speed limit on restricted roads" and could "save multiple lives each year and prevent 1,000 casualties, according to research by Public Health Wales."
Main image: (CC licensed by EdinburghGreens via Flickr)
Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.
Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.
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94 comments
Although the blanket approach to 20mph didn't get through, many local authorities have moved anyway. West Lothian is another. Others have announced the intent (Falkirk back is an example from back in January this year).
It is the way Scotland is going.
I live in one of the test areas in Wales, the community Facebook page was up in arms about it (I love that page it's hilarious) but, I've already seen an increase in people cycling to and from school and shops. It's getting to the point i may have to stop cycling to the train because there's not enough space!
Living in Cardiff and in a 20mph speed restriction zone I can say with utter confidence that during rush hour you'll be lucky to average10mph in a car in the city centre.
Hopefully the effect will be to convince more people to start using public transport, cycle or walk.
Living in Cardiff in a 20 mph zone I can say with utter confidence that outside of rush hour the limits are almost entirely ignored.
Rubbish; most people I know would never get on a bicycle to commute, regardless of how inconvenient car travel is made; meanwhile, the numerous people that drive unregistered unroadworthy vehicles, with stolen plates and don't have a licence to drive, will still drive at any speed they like without fear of camera enforcement.
But if everyone else is driving at 20mph they will have to as well
If you could wave a magic wand and change things overnight - that would be an interesting question. There are factors like habit, social factors like prestige, self-identification etc which act to maintain the status quo. That's apart from just "but my job is 40 miles in one direction, my kids go to school 8 miles in the other and the
shops we likeonly shops are 10 miles away - oh, and no buses or trains".In the UK there have been a couple of serious attempts in the past to start with a dual cycling / driving environment. Result? Where people can easily cycle or drive, they drive. (Actually the driving was a bit more convenient and there were a few other factors at play too e.g. this was at a time of fast-increasing car ownership).
However there are places where it is possible to cycle and drive, both are convenient, and a large proportion of people *do* cycle for some trips:
https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/the-busiest-cycleway-in-th...
It's not just "that place" either - cities as different as Paris, Seville, Malmo etc. have shown it's possible to start from a car-intensive place and get more journeys to happen by bike.
From what I've read about this it doesn't seem there's a great amount of evidence that reducing speed limits to 20 actually reduces KSIs.
At least now we should have some proper data one way or the other.
We've had 20mph limits on city centre roads in Bristol for a few years, so there's data on that if you go looking.
https://www.bristol20mph.co.uk/
Interesting link here on the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-43050841
(Average speeds dropped by 2.7mph and four lives a year saved)
I'm suspicious of those numbers.
Would be interesting to see the overall Bristol data including the roads with no change to their limits.
Manchester found that 20 mph zones had a lower reduction in casualties than other areas but I can't find a similar comparison for the Bristol data which makes me wonder if there's some cherry picking going on.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-39231956
Bristol has had 20mph since 2014, so the data is more significant than the shorter Manchester trial and I doubt that the data has been cherry picked - the study comes from UWE and aside from speed sign installers, I don't see a vested interest in play.
The Manchester shorter term study has some interesting comments/lessons listed here: https://www.20splenty.org/lessons_to_learn_from_manchester
Let's hope the Welsh implementation is more serious and has some backing from the police.
I couldn't see a breakdown of where the improvements in Bristol KSIs had occurred.
Was it predominantly in the new 20mph zones?
Was it evenly spread across the city?
Was it predominantly in areas where the speed limit was unchanged?
The raw Bristol numbers look encouraging but without those details it's hard to attribute the changes to the new 20 mph zones with any confidence.
Given that Wales is a fair bit bigger than Bristol and a huge number of roads will be reducing their limits in a short space of time we should get some really solid data over the next few years as to the effectiveness of 20 mph zones.
I don't know about the distribution of KSIs, but I'd guess that the numbers are probably too small to be analysed by specific roads.
It's likely that they chose the roads with most KSIs as a priority to reduce speed on, so that might be an explanation of the difference.
Although the example used for Manchester was not having a reduction compared to elsewhere was:-
Was there a drop in cycling along the 30mph roads in favour of using the 20mph ones? Was there other causes for safer cycling elsewhere like seperated infra?
One explanation could be that most cyclists eschewed the 30mph roads and instead chose the 20mph roads, so we'd need to look at numbers of cyclists on those roads too as there could have been a change in cyclist behaviour.
As Rich_cb states, it'll be interesting to see what happens in Wales, assuming that they don't stuff up the implementation (probably less likely as it'll be across all built up areas in the whole country).
Keep digging and keep us posted.
Given:
- changing signs leads to *some* reduction in speeds
- this doesn't have paradoxical effects e.g. now the worst drivers actually speed up when they see these
...a reasonable assumption is the outcomes of crashes would be less serious. I'd expect to see e.g. some Killed become Seriously Injured. Also possibly a reduction in seriousness of injuries although finding data for that is something else. I'd also expect less collisions and near misses overall because people have more time for observation / reaction. However other factors might reduce that e.g. drivers becoming more relaxed so casual, more non-motorists using the streets (which I'd still say was a win) etc.
Since lots of places change speed limits over time I imagine there's data from round the world. (NL might be a good start - they might have English versions too). What might be a difficulty for you is that other things probably change at the same time. For example more policing / speed cameras, possible infra changes (e.g. LTNs!), public campaigns etc. And you'd want to confirm that the speeds did indeed change significantly of course.
Pretty confident reducing speeds to 20mph will reduce KSIs.
The debate tends to be whether 20mph limits reduces travelled speeds. Maybe we should focus on enforcement? I was disapointed that the legislation in Scotland did not go through last time. It's time will come again.
Listened to a so called expert give their opinion about 20mph limits on the news earlier and they said the following:
"When I cycle I hate having to overtake all the slow moving cars"
"I agree it will save thousands of lives but i'm still against it"
WTF?
What do they like doing, sitting in the queue with them? That is allowed if they hate it so much!
Exactly! He also said he wasn't a particularly fit or fast rider so I think it was just your typical "I'm a cyclist too" rubbish.
What exactly did he claim to be expert in? Ancient Greek history perhaps?
Probably. I missed his introduction so probably just assumed the 'expert' bit as they were asking his opinion. I think him saying he lived in London and sold his car 15 years ago as it was impractical caught my attention but it went rapidly downhill from there.
I think the funniest thing about this proposal is the online commentators self-righteously announcing that they won't obey the new speed limits, some quite happy to state that they disagree with them, others perpetuating the myths that they are totally unenforced/unenforceable, they should be higher in line with 'improved' braking technology, not going to distract themselves 'watching' their speedometer, etc.
Looking forward to the same commentators whinging and moaning about their speeding fines in a few months time (with the odd CD10 for aggressively tailgating an unmarked copper or something).
As many people mention, the cost is ridiculous. What we need is a UK wide law changing the default speed limit in urban areas from the current 30mph to 20mph, requiring only the changing of signs entering the area.
I wonder if any of the current crop of ne'er-do-wells queueing up to be the next PM would sign up to that; obviously not Penny Mordaunt.
Just listening to R4 news and the change is opposed by Welsh tories.
The question is... why only urban roads? There are plenty of small villages and towns in Wales where the only roads into the in are 50mph (or faster) single single carriageways, generally with no footpath and no cycle provision. This means the only safe way that people can into the town/village from the outskirts or from a neighbouring town/village is by using a motor vehicle.
There was someone complaining on one of the news sites about how they need to drive 15-20 miles to get their children to school... the problem is, because of the way that people drive, those who only live a mile or two miles or five miles from the village school also have no option but to drive.
This has already been implemented in my town and majority of drivers have slowed down. There will always be idiots that disregard limits but overall things have improved. They did have an early police presence, just an hour, but this did have an appreciable affect.
Great idea only concern is the enforcement. I can see myself standing in my street with my hi viz on and pointing my hair dryer at the cars passing faster than 20mph.
I work in Highways for a local council in England, and we have reduced all speed limits in residential streets in our authority to 20mph. It costs a huge amount of money (alongside the legal work, 20mph streets need 20mph signs - unlike 30mph streets where it's indicated by the presence of streetlights and a lack of signs).
Just to complete the sorry tale, they're enforced by the police, not the local authority, because unlike parking offences, speeding isnt decriminalised. The local police force admitted they don't have the resources to enforce the 20s. So it was all rather a waste of money. A lot of money, provided to us by the tax payer.
Signs with a number don't affect speeds anyway, particularly for those drivers who don't care. So, alas it's a good, but very expensive, public relations exercise.
Thanks for notes from experience. Agree - I think that was one of the ideas behind Scotland's "lower the default" idea. That way at least you don't waste money on yet more signs. I think that the number on the sign has some effect. If only in the "when you bargain, the first number someone mentions acts as an 'anchor'". However "sign it better" isn't the best way of doing this. Ranty Highwayman also has an article on managing speeds more effectively. That's more expensive even than signs though - but on new / redeveloped roads this can be added maybe more effectively?
As I said on another post today, without proper enforcement its purely window dressing.
And I see very little adherence from drivers to 20mph limits on residential roads,and nothing in this scheme that suggests that will be changed.
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