The London Borough of Bromley publishes a newsletter for residents. The latest edition contains a very interesting article comparing the road safety record of Bromley with other south-east London boroughs. The table below was included in the article.

It is particularly noticeable how much better Bromley has been at improving road safety than adjacent boroughs such as Lewisham or Croydon. The borough of Croydon spent millions of pounds on wide-area 20 mph speed limits, clearly with minimal impact when they could have spent it on more targeted measures. Likewise Lewisham imposed 20 limits across the whole borough but have lagged behind in reducing casualties.

In 2020 Bromley reduced KSIs from 107 to 77 which may only be partly explained by the reduction in traffic from epidemic lock-downs.

Keep up the good work Bromley!

But boroughs such as Lewisham and Croydon are driven by dogma which undermines a lot of sensible road safety improvements. Will they ever learn? Perhaps only when more intelligent councillors are elected and more reliance is placed on expert officer opinions with adequate budgets.

Roger Lawson

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