Well, no, but I think we can put London down as “special case.” They have their own rules and everything, via TfL.

I’m sure you’re not advocating kids playing in traffic in London, but from what I’ve seen there is an argument for driving more traffic out of central London and forcing people onto public transport. All those side streets beloved of cab drivers don’t all need to be open access, do they?

We could but appraising every road in the country seems like a lot of work. And having no default means you’d need to put up millions more speed signs.

If you have a default 20 then people will complain when it is too slow and a 30 is more appropriate. It’s like crowd-sourcing by complaint.

And again that’s just the opposite of what happens now, where people currently need to campaign to get 20 zones put in.

The difference is that defaulting to 20 is safer overall. Defaulting to the safest option is a pretty good approach in my experience.

You’d have to do that anyway.

Why not default to 15 then? 10? Getting out and walking?

I take your point, I do. But it’s a simplistic answer. It’d be ignored en masse, just like the 30 limits largely are now; it’s a bigger problem which requires a bigger solution than just replacing one arbitrary number with another one.

The problem IMHO in this country is we suffer from ‘the boy who cried wolf’. Limits are inconsistent, too high in places, too low in others. Therefore, many drivers (rightly or wrongly) treat them as advisory. If they were more appropriate generally then the great unwashed would take them more seriously.

I saw this in action recently, on holiday in France. Limits are actually lower overall than here, but they are much better at letting drivers make progress when it’s safe to do so and then slowing them down again when it’s not, that almost everyone drives at the speed limit or close to it. At 70mph in the UK you’re constantly either overtaking or being overtaken; at 110kph in France everyone’s moving at pretty much the same pace (and lane discipline is SO MUCH better).

Our “intelligent motorways” are a massive step in the right direction; drop the limits when there’s a problem, raise it when there isn’t. The system demonstrably works. But a blanket dropping of urban speed limits will make precisely no difference until we’ve got SPECS cameras everywhere, or satellite monitoring. Which is probably only a matter of time.

There can be no reason to object that isn’t plain selfish. An objection to the extra tie taken is easily overcome. start a few minutes earlier.
Equally there is no reason to object to reduced motorway speeds. Start earlier.
Anything else is just typical of the selfish world we live in.
There is no justification for anyone saying that they need to exceed any speed limits. The suitability of the road to do so is irrelevant. Better minds than yours have decided otherwise.
Speeders = selfish beyond contempt.

It’s a maximum speed, not a target. You can drive slower if conditions dictate.

& so when they lower the limit, a speed which was safe yesterday no longer is today?

No, the speed yesterday was still less safe than a slower speed today.

It’s about relative risk. An absolute value of “safe” or “not safe” makes no sense at all.

But you knew that.

New about-town limit is 5mph. New motorway limit is 10mph. There’s no reason to object to that unless you’re selfish. Off you go.

“Better” minds decided fairly arbitarily based on road conditions in the 60s.

You can, but you’ll fail your driving test for “failure to make progress” if conditions don’t dictate and you don’t drive at the limit.

Old chestnut, anyone?

But at those speeds there is no way those organs I donated will make it to the recipient in time.

There you go 😉

You say this as if traffic engineers are looking at modern roads and saying “well we better make that road a 30 because there is no way my Morris Minor will make it round the corner at 40.”

Has that ever actually happened to anyone?

Not knowing the limit or hesitating far too long at a clear junction would be an issue, but has anyone really failed for doing 25 in a 30?

My instructor advised me to do 20ish in all residential streets and slow further if there were kids about. I did and I passed. If I’d done the limit I’d have failed.

I remember being told to make progress by my driving instructor on hitting a 40mph or 50mph road coming out of town in a 30.

I understand almost the opposite is true. If the engineers are told it’s a 30 limit they have to engineer the corners and sightlines for a heavy vehicle (eg rubbish truck) to take them at that speed. That means conventional vehicles are encouraged by the road design to go much faster. Look at the Dutch approach to roundabouts – adverse camber put on to force people to slow down. If that was done here you’d have Daily Mail stories about ‘dangerous road design’ after people crashed taking them at 40.

Look at this FFS – Wimbledon Bollard

A bollard put in place to protect the pedestrian crossing cause spate of collisions because drivers are trying to cut the corner to take the junction quickly instead of slowing down.

Woman rolls car in petrol station hitting kerb. Story is the ‘dangerous kerb’ of course. How fast adn incompetent would you have to be going to roll a car in that situation? http://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/local-news/motorist-in-danger-kerb-call-1-6590725

Sorry, I should have said “in my experience.” Thatwas talking about 850 miles over a fortnight driving from Calais to Senonches and back with various sight-seeing over those two weeks. Whether it’s representative of France as a whole or not I don’t know, but it’s not really important; point was, I’ve seen a working system, whether or not it’s a microcosm.

Yeah, they have those near me, only they paint them black.

Could do with some reflectives on that bollard, but honestly if you’re in a residential 30 in “poor visibility” then you really should be going pretty slowly (say < 15mph) so hopefully you’d have no trouble spotting it… or a child’s face.

OP – why don’t you just come out and say that you find other people setting limits on your behaviour infuriating, and then accept that pretty much everyone else is going to say, “Yes, sometimes you can’t do things you want to do, because its been deemed by the majority to not be appropriate”.

When you cycle you see a lot of dead/totally flattened/dying animals on the roads. It’s quite sad that no-one seems too concerned about it. It’s actually pretty horrible to ride past a half-dead squirrel writhing in agony 😯

No arguments here (pretty sure that’s what I just proposed), so long as you teach your kids how to cross roads when they venture beyond the borders. I think that’s a great idea at least in theory.

Is there really a problem in kids not knowing how to cross roads or is this just something you’ve made up for an argument? Or is the issue really that roads are increasingly difficult to cross because of lazy motorists who can’t be bothered to stay within the speed limit, stop at amber lights or even indicate to let other know their intentions?

Should I mention how pavements are increasingly unsafe as well because of cars parking as far onto them as possible?

It’s my perception, I may be wrong. I’m basing it on the number of kids I see regularly frolicking on main roads around where I live, and the propensity for mouth breathers to cross roads by walking diagonally across them (offspring in tow) with little or no warning before they drift off the kerb into traffic. I can only conclude one of two scenarios are the case here:

1) No-one’s teaching road safety any more, or

2) They’re teaching road safety and are being ignored.

That may well be the case too. Though I don’t see what speed has to do with your ability to cross; are cars safer to stroll out in front of if they’re doing 20mph? Traffic volume is your issue there surely, rather than speed?

Have you considered using pedestrian crossings? They seem to work really well in my experience.

I agree that’s really selfish and annoying, but how does that make pavements “unsafe” exactly? Are you talking about blocking them completely, forcing people onto the road?

Have you never started to cross the road expecting the distant car to be within the speed limit only to have to skip across the last few metres when you realise that he’s actually doing 40mph?

Imagine if you are a 10 yr old and not used to judging speed, or experienced enough to understand the stupid things that drivers do. Or maybe imagine the day when you are not too mobile and not expecting cars to be doing 30%/50%/whatever over the limit.

Patronising? Have you considered travelling within the speed limit? 😉

Hmm, yes in theory. Until you have cars sailing through the red light. I reckon that I’d need to wait at the crossing near my house for all of 10 minutes before I spotted my first RLJer. Not safe for a child who’s not expecting cars to do it. We have a big problem there but the council won’t do anything because nobody has been hurt.

I live on a main road with cars parked on the pavement all the way along. I’ve stepped out of my front door and had to jump back to avoid being hit by a parking car. I’ve had to stop my kids from running down the pavement ahead of me when I’ve seen a car about to park on the pavement and know that he won’t see small kids hidden by the other parked cars. I’ve actually been hit by a minibus who pulled away seemingly unaware that the back end would swing further than the front end as she pulled off the pavement. I could add many more incidents to this but it would get very boring.

Yeah, and add in the pavement being blocked so that you have to walk in the road, etc.

This really isn’t difficult stuff to work out?

Bingo, heavy traffic at speed is a nightmare to cross in, reduce either the speed or volume and it’s a lot easier, fortunately on most roads where this is a problem there are decent (lighted) crossings. But it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem around some residential streets used as rat-runs and schools on big roads here.

Sadly life doesn’t always live up to expectations 😉

I try to as well whenever there are roads like that, not always possible in some cases, and not everybody has the same presence of mind, and I wouldn’t necessarily expect kids to think like that, or the elderly or people with mobility problems. Not to mention that expecting the pedestrians to mitigate for poor driving is entirely backwards, it’s better to address the driving so that it *is* safe enough to cross there, its the cars imposing the danger, not the choice to cross, It is a perfectly safe place to cross there when traffic is travelling at appropriate speed.

You have the same problems as a cyclist and motorist pulling out of junctions that are placed like that too, bends/poor visibility in both directions, fine when people doing sensible speed but if they are not they can be round the corner and T-boning you in seconds. Suggesting I try and find an alternative junction to pull out of isn’t really a viable solution!

But now we’re into discussing the minutiae of specific roads, which isn’t really productive as this is a general discussion.

Absolutely.

that one is directly below a streetlamp and seems (not a great pic) to have hiviz/reflector on the very top, could maybe be a bit more obvious but not a great example, I’d have thought.

I get what you are saying about teaching kids about being safe on and around roads but I don’t think the majority of those supporting 20 limits are against that, or advocating washing their hands of all responsibility for their kids on residential roads. The reclaim the street party vids from GrahamS’ links are occasional fun days and promotional material, I doubt they are really expecting (or promoting) families to be having picnics in the middle of the road day to day.

I’d appreciate a lot more bollards in the middle of residential streets too, allowing what should be quiet narrow residential streets to become rat runs is a pretty bad failing of councils road departments. There’s a “quiet” back road on my commute, the main A road has recently been reduced to 20 but the back road is still 30 so some drivers (not many have cottoned on so far thankfully) tear arse up and down that instead, daft planning.