pokemonsuper9
Established Member
I know of some that still work like that.
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20 mph Zones - Extend or Eliminate?
- Thread starter DerekC
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RailUK Forums
Are you inferring that the Conservatives have always been kinder to motorists,
or that pelican crossings stop the traffic as soon as the button is pressed? There is of course the countdown lights in London where pedestrians are shown how many seconds before the impatient motorists will just drive through you.
RailWonderer
Established Member
See post #228. I drive to the conditions but not necessarily other cars. Sometimes lower speed limits won't remedy that. There's always a risk.
bramling
Veteran Member
I was thinking about this today, whilst out cycling, and at times walking.
I don’t find 20 mph helps me cross roads, in fact the opposite - it just means I wait longer. In fact just walking round the town where I am now, traffic speeds were well *lower* than 20, and it didn’t help.
What is beneficial is having gaps in traffic, I’d rather have a gap large enough that we don’t need to be having to make a judgement about speed / stopping distances at all.
A reduction in traffic volumes is the answer to all this. Introducing measures which seem to be aimed primarily at pissing people off isn’t really the solution.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Well, it is. 20mph might make people think twice about driving if it means cycling might be quicker, for instance.
bramling
Veteran Member
Doesn’t really follow. As it happens I will be cycling 80 miles today, but you’re never going to get most of the population doing that. And it’s one thing doing it on a day when all the cards line up (especially weather), quite another when they don’t.
What I feel round here has made the biggest detrimental impact on road safety is population growth, especially significant housing development in villages, resulting in a massive amount of extra traffic going to and from the adjacent towns. I find cycling rather more of a liability than 25 years ago as a consequence of this, and that’s hardly going to encourage people to cycle.
But, as ever, this is firmly in the “too difficult” box. Far easier to stick up a few 20 signs and pretend everything’s wonderful. Hence why everyone’s had a skinful of the current crop of politicians.
Only because of junctions and other factors which reduce the average speed the actual difference would be a little smaller.
The majority of trips are less than 5 miles, which is a distance that busy people could cycle.
There's a number of factors which alter driving habits, obviously population growth is part of it, however other factors come to play. Less dense home occupation is another (2.91 people per home in 1971 falling to 2.36 recently, meaning for a given population, say 50 million, you need more homes - 4 million in that example), cuts to local government budgets (reducing bus services) is another.
Road design and policy has had a significant avoid l shift away from car is king, it's just taking the population at large some time to catch up with that thinking. Although that does mean that some will clash with policies when they feel that it will harm their way of life.
I think you are being wildly optimistic. A lot of people drive absolutely everywhere. I can think of several people that live closer to work than me but they all drive. None of them have been converted to cycling as a result of the lower speed limit.
Have you reported these shrubs to the council?
Perhaps the requirement for Belisha beacons should be dropped where zebra stripes are painted at the entrance to side roads - it is the requirement for lighting that prevents small improvements to crossings because it's a choice between doing nothing and going the whole hog. More continuous footpaths would help too. Having to ramp up will remind drivers that they are crossing the footpath, the pedestrians are not crossing the road.
Safer, more importantly. The single biggest obstacle to getting more individuals to cycle to work is not the weather, nor is it hills. It's unsafe roads.
58% of car journeys are less than five miles. Imagine how freely traffic would flow if a decent chunk of those short journeys were done by bike instead. Just look at how much impact the school run has on traffic, the difference in the holidays is incredible.
bramling
Veteran Member
Just taking locally to me, the village I’m thinking of which has had loads of new houses built in the last couple of years, despite the only “service” in the village being a tiny village shop which is barely bigger than my living room. As it happens, it’s about 5 miles from the nearest town, which itself isn’t wonderful in terms of services. You’re just not going to get people cycling that in anything more than token numbers - issues likely to arise:
* it’s very hilly, many people wouldn’t have the fitness to do it, especially on anything other than a decent road bike
* inability to carry more than basic loads
* road surface is not great
* and - yes - part of the journey is along a quite hazardous section of road, and the only way you’re going to properly solve that is increasing the width
Whilst I’d quite like to see the latter happen, I think I can probably bet my pension that it won’t happen in my lifetime.
Meanwhile, having cycled nearly 80 miles today, my backside is still sore from part of my return ride earlier which involved several sections littered with speed humps. And it does the bike no good either. Absolutely not an incentive to cycle.
The notion of “let’s punish everyone rather than deal with the relatively small number of problem people” is what the bad teachers at my school used to to, and what bad managers in workplaces do. But who cares if cyclists are collateral damage as long as we manage to piss off a load of motorists, eh?
Hills aren't really an issue. Particularly not with electric assistance. On the hills I encounter (with a conventional bike), it's not the 1-in-5 (or worse) ones on quiet country roads that I find hard work. No, it's the less steep one on a busy A road with no refuges to pull into to allow traffic to overtake.
It's not the hill itself, it's the half-dozen vehicles queuing up behind you, who might feel tempted to try a dangerous overtake. On the 1-in-5 hill (one locally is as bad as 1-in-3) I just change into the lowest gear and plod along at slow speed with no pressure from traffic because the road is quiet.
There are some trials to this effect. I don't know what their legal status is as Zebra crossings.
Are you suggesting that this is what 20 mph limits do?
I'd also be interested in your evidence that this is what's actually driving the introduction of 20 mph limits, particularly given that almost if not all the decision makers behind them will themselves also be drivers.
RailWonderer
Established Member
I have now.
If by unsafe you mean potholed or uneven surfacing with a lack of cycle dedicated lanes then yes.
I think he means speed bumps that don't leave a flat space in the corner of the road for cyclists.
bramling
Veteran Member
So, as I say, to solve this issue requires a massive amount of road widening - which quite simply isn’t going to happen. Meanwhile, in the village concerned, more and more housing is likely to be built, exacerbating things further.
That’s even worse, as this forces cyclists into adopting a sub-optimal and illogical road positioning, so is potentially extremely dangerous.
Whilst I was out yesterday, there’s a section with some rumble strips across the road. Riding across these is extremely uncomfortable, and not great for the bike either. There is, just about, space to go round the edge (albeit awful road positioning), but do this and you’re putting yourself in the position of having a potential near-miss with a very nasty pothole. Thanks politicians!
Most speed tables (those such go all the way across the road or nearly all the way across) are of a gradient that I don't really notice them, the speed cushions (those which cars straddle) are the ones which are uncomfortable to go over the top of, however I tend to cycle as if I'm about to go over the top and then tuck into the side for the sort distance and then pop back out again, as generally car will slow down at them whilst I'm still going at the same speed so it's unlikely they'll try an overtake.
However speed humps (the overarching name for all types) are generally a sign off poor road design and are limited in their use on newer roads.
Other than in the entrance to new minor roads where they are likely to be very common going forwards due to the change in design standards which recommend a ramp up so that cars have to slow down and remove the drivers that they should giveway to pedestrians crossing the road. Pedestrians crossing also don't have to ramp down and back up again, as often those ramps were quite steep and right next to the road, which isn't great design.
Week that's what "should" happen, however there's still council engineers who won't allow that new design as "no where else in the village has them" - err somewhere has to be the first place to have them otherwise you'll never install any.
The latter, mostly. Combined with the behaviour of the motorists on them.
Or dedicated paths on new alignments paralleling trunk roads.
bramling
Veteran Member
Round here we’re not really talking about trunk roads. I’m more thinking B roads, less significant A roads, and fairly busy unclassified roads. That’s going to be a massive amount of new alignment.
Unfortunately it’s not going to happen, and I’m not sure getting cyclists off roads is the best idea anyway - segregated routes may be okay for the Jones family going out for a family cycle on a Sunday, but they don’t really work for people actually needing to get from A to B.
There are different types of cyclist, and one route won't be the best for all of them. The downside with a segregated route next to a road is that you still have conflicts at the junctions, you get the noise from the traffic, and when its wet, the cyclists still get coated in the spray from the road. It can be nicer, and not much slower to cycle on a longer route on lanes go around a hill, rather than going in a straight line up and down the hill.
It depends on whether the new alignment provides a reasonably direct route from A to B, doesn't it?
Sometimes you don't need a long stretch of new lane. Sometimes you're just filling in the gaps between paths in the existing national cycle network. Something as simple as remodelling a junction or sorting out a crossing can be the difference between a disjointed path that goes nowhere and a continuous path that goes somewhere.
bramling
Veteran Member
In the case I’m thinking of, it’s either 5 miles of road widened or provided with a segregated path alongside, which in itself would involve considerable earthworks. And bear in mind round here, contrary to the myth that everything in the south-east is plated with gold, we can’t even get existing pavements trimmed of vegetation, let alone new infrastructure built.
The alternative might be upgrading an existing footpath across fields, which would bring the mileage down to 3 miles, albeit still with a gap of over a mile along a main (albeit 30 mph) road.
This is pretty typical for round here. And there is essential no NCN stuff round here. I can’t even think of one path locally to me which is of any value. It’s either cycle on the roads, or a few sections of disjointed pavement that have had blue signs erected permitting cycling. No other infrastructure whatsoever.
So essentially if you want to get anywhere by cycle, you’re essentially on the road. So get the backside massage ready, as you will need it as a result of the speed bumps and generally awful road surface here. Or just do what most people do and go by car, and accept that’s how things are, and not try to make life difficult for people who have little realistic alternative thanks to successive local government policies.
One of the positives of having new housing developments is that there is section 106 money to fund infrastructure like this.
It needs to be managed properly, so the money is spent where it really improves cycling safety, rather than having a quarter mile of a cycling motorway near a new housing estate that dumps you back on busy roads.
There's the Genesis of a plan in there.
bramling
Veteran Member
I’ll lay a bet of just my pension and life savings that it doesn’t happen in my lifetime.
I'm increasingly of the view that abolition of 20 and 30 miles per hour limits, and their replacement with a 25mph limit is the answer.
Talking to friends and acquaintances, 20mph is quite a hard speed to maintain in most petrol and diesel cars, and inevitably involves 3rd gear and thus higher emissions. 25mph can usually be maintained in 4th gear and thus has lower emissions.
I'd therefore advocate a regime which has 25mph limits in built up residential areas and areas with reasonable numbers of pedestrians, 50mph in industrial areas, unclassified roads and selected B roads, with 60mph only permitted on some B roads, and A roads which don't fall into any other category (thus any modern engineered road would remain at 60mph).
Talking to friends and acquaintances, 20mph is quite a hard speed to maintain in most petrol and diesel cars, and inevitably involves 3rd gear and thus higher emissions. 25mph can usually be maintained in 4th gear and thus has lower emissions.
I'd therefore advocate a regime which has 25mph limits in built up residential areas and areas with reasonable numbers of pedestrians, 50mph in industrial areas, unclassified roads and selected B roads, with 60mph only permitted on some B roads, and A roads which don't fall into any other category (thus any modern engineered road would remain at 60mph).
But:
a) the average speed in 25mph areas would be 30mph, therefore little additional protection for vulnerable road users
b) just because a certain speed might be difficult for some drivers to maintain, (claiming an inadequacy of their vehicle to use their preferred gear), when there's little impact on total consumption in 3rd gear compared with 4th.
c) quite soon, the number of vehicles with gears will decline to almost zero, making any low speed equally easy to drive.
d) 50mph is by no means 'safe' where frequent intrusions into the through road space would create hazardous conditions, - especially for HGVs. Indeed some of the 'industrial' roads I know have poor surfaces, frequent large amounts of refuse and unexpected objects littering them, and many entries and exits with no pavements.
InkyScrolls
Member
A bad workman blames his tools! There is no reason why any car should not be perfectly easy to maintain at 20 mph, barring supercars with extremely high horsepower, and anyone that suggests otherwise is talking hogwash.
In any case it's somewhat circular reasoning.
If cars are currently built on the assumption that 30 mph is the lowest normal speed limit, that isn't a good argument for keeping it forever.
Depends on the car surely? Just went out in my wife's Corsa, that claims to be getting around 50 mpg in third at 20mph, which is about the same as you get in 5th at 65
It's the changing gears that mostly causes high emissions in urban driving. Stopping at lights, then changing up to 4th, then back down to 2nd for the next junction, etc. If you just stay in a lower gear and that means changing up fewer times, it's going to reduce emissions.
You can't have speed limits that end in a five. British speedos are only required to be graduated in 10s. Perhaps it's time to switch to kph. No need to change speed signs then, the former 30mph limit becomes 30kph.