New Department for Transport statistics appear to confirm what many Londoners feared — that the heavy-handed, blanket imposition of 20mph limits was not only a waste of time and resources — it has backfired. They show that 81 per cent of cars exceed 20mph speed limits regularly.
It’s no surprise. Anyone with an ounce of sense backs 20 limits in sensitive locations. But plastering them borough-wide over key distributor roads with little more ‘enforcement’ than a signpost has robbed them of meaning.
Even though observance of the limits we already had was questionable and barely enforced, authorities apparently believed that plastering London with 20mph limits — without added enforcement — would somehow fix the problem. It’s a mystery why they didn’t sort out existing non-compliance first.
Surely, compliance is bound to be even poorer when motorists can see no justification for moving along wide, safe trunk routes at a crawl. And once they start ignoring doubtful 20mph limits they ignore important ones too — those put in to calm traffic around schools and residential roads.
It explains the perceived rise — for example, in my residential street, where we backed a 20 limit — of drivers now blatantly ignoring the lower limit where it is sorely needed.
IAM RoadSmart’s director of policy Neil Greig nailed it this week when he said we need to address the “widespread confusion over 20mph that may be undermining a more general trend to slow down.”
The authorities went about it the wrong way and drivers have called their bluff. Why would motorists observe 20 when they didn’t observe 30? There is a speeding problem in London, mostly down to a small, selfish, sometimes breathtakingly aggressive minority. The answer? More mobile, highly visible police speed traps (not hidden behind trees), a big, sparkling TV education campaign of the type that once won Transport for London awards, and speedy retrenchment of 20mph zones to locations where they’re really needed, to restore their currency.
It might deflect what the London Road Safety Council now warns will be a rise in road deaths following cuts to road safety education. Did our authorities take their eye off the ball in their headlong obsession with ‘better junctions’, wider, clumsy attempts to choke vehicle use and roads at a time when thousands of Londoners still depend on highways for mobility, and a bid to be seen to do something, anything? If so, we’re all paying the price now.
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