If you thought blanket 20 mph speed limits (now prevalent in Wales and London) were silly then you’ll be astonished to hear that the charity Road Safety Foundation are calling for 10 mph speed limits in urban areas where pedestrians and cyclists are commonly seen. This is part of their Vision Zero policy to cut road deaths to zero.
Vision Zero was adopted as a policy in London in 2018 but has been an abysmal failure in reducing road casualties – see this previous blog post for an analysis: https://freedomfordrivers.blog/2021/11/20/vision-zero-failing-but-the-mayor-thinks-otherwise/
Ten mph is surely even dafter and impossible to comply with – just try driving at 10 mph and wait for the reaction from drivers behind you!
The Spectator have published a good article on this subject which you can read here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-blanket-city-10mph-speed-limit-is-preposterous/ . They rightly call it preposterous. Such a policy is only being pushed by those cyclists and pedestrians who would like to get rid of all cars and vans from our streets which would cause major problems for the elderly and disabled who rely on them. It would also slow down our roads to walking pace. Car users need to fight such policies whenever and wherever they are proposed.
No Motorway Building
The FT have published an article that shows how pathetic the UK has been in building more road capacity, particularly motorways in the last few years. This is some of what they said:
“Britain has added just 65 miles of new motorway in the past decade, with a large proportion of this figure the result of a statistical quirk rather than actual construction, according to data from the Department for Transport. Some other European countries have built thousands of miles of new highways during the same period. Only three new stretches of motorway were opened in that period, on the A1(M) to Newcastle, the M8 near Glasgow and the M90/Queensferry Crossing”.
Why is the UK so bad at building new roads? Because of lack of forward planning, national government policies that inhibit spending money on roads while railways get largesse that cannot be justified on any rational cost/benefit analysis, and because of opposition from nimbys. Lack of sound political leadership is the essence of the problem.
But the UK has suffered from the same leadership failure over excessive immigration. Labour, Conservative and LibDems have been the problem in failing to act wisely and decisively. Let us hope the Reform Party will get a chance to do things differently.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://x.com/Drivers_London )
You can obtain notifications of new posts in future by following me on Twitter (now “X”) – see https://x.com/Drivers_London where new posts are usually mentioned.