cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/7658487
For more detailed information: https://www.gov.wales/introducing-20mph-speed-limits-frequently-asked-questions
I’m in favor of lower speed limits, but this will result in a temporary uptick in speeding tickets, followed by loss of interest by local police, which yields no net change. Lowering the speed limit is a band aid fix. It’s quick. It’s cheap. But it can, by no means, be seen as a permanent solution. If you want people to slow down, you need to make a road that will make people want to slow down. So yeah, I like lower speed limits, but they cannot and do not work alone. It’s a step in the right direction, but more should be done.
They’re not just lowering the speed limit. From the FAQ:
Will the roll out involve money being spent on speed bumps?
There is no plan to include traffic calming (including speed bumps) as part of the change to speed limits. There are other ‘softer’ measures that might be introduced, such as using buffer speed limits, removing the centre line, narrowing the carriageway visually, using planting etc.
These ‘softer’ measures (which definitely are traffic calming) will be essential to make this plan a success. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada is going through a similar process of lowering speed limits in residential areas. The planning staff said they needed the speed lowered so they could implement these traffic calming measures, otherwise the speed limit would be higher than the street design can accommodate.
yeah there are places where you can add a hard separated a bike lane and rejig parking - not so much for the bikes, but to narrow the carriage way and reduce the ‘natural’ speed of the road.
i can understand not strictly calling paint traffic calming, but planters? what galaxy brain definition of traffic calming are they using where placing a box on the road isn’t traffic calming?
My guess is the phrase “traffic calming” has negative connotations with the local general public due to poor implementation.
I’ve driven down streets that are 50km/h and I think most people would gladly do ≤60km/h. If that’s too fast, there’s many ways to ‘softly’ calm the speed like narrowing the road, chicanes, paving stones, etc. Instead, they have speed bumps ever couple kms so drivers slow to a crawl for the bump, then accelerate hard to >70km/h, then brake hard to go over the next bump.
I wish my neighborhood would do this. 25mph feels really fast on my street. I usually hover around 15-20 when I’m not paying attention to my speed.
Edit: I am surprised that this was my third most controversial comment since I’ve joined
It’s been surprising to see just how many pro-car users seem to lurk on these anti-car/pro-alternative transport communities.
They’re probably imagining me as that Prius or something slowing them down in traffic. My neighborhood is basically one lane when people are parked, and there are a lot of kids, so if they drove the road they’d understand.
for all it’s worth carbrained people all hate each other, too, but boy are they good at rallying around a common enemy
This community regularly makes it to the front page of Everything. It’s really not that isolated from the rest of Lemmy
I guess that’s the difference in scale between here and Reddit. r/fuckcars was tiny compared to the whole of reddit, but I guess this is large enough to be prominent in Everything.
I dunno, I didn’t subscribe to /r/fuckcars on reddit, but I got their posts all the time on /r/all back in the day. I think a lot of people just don’t like having to rely on cars 😅
I live in a super rural area and would have an almost impossible time working, buying groceries or getting medical care without a car and even I think the vast majority of the arguments against this are dumb as fuck and the epitome of car brained.
Fuck cars is regularly in my “everything” feed. And most of these measures aim to reduce traffic, which ultimately benefits the remaining car drivers.
Also lowering it from 30 to 20 realistically means people will now drive 30 instead of 40.
While it sounds good on paper, in practice, they’ve screwed it up. They’re putting the new speed limits in place on every 30mph road in Wales before they’ve put the public transport alternatives in place.
There’s currently no reason for someone to switch to public transport, especially if the buses are going to be stuck at the same speed as the cars, but stopping regularly too. Our roads are too narrow to install bus lanes, and barely have enough room for single file traffic through lots of the towns and villages. The trains are being upgraded, but that’s not scheduled to finish until at least next year, and at the moment they’re slow and very unreliable. It feels like every week the trains are cancelled and an inadequate replacement bus service is put on.
I’m disabled, and have to travel from my town, Aberdare, to the main hospital in Cardiff, UHW, on a regular basis. If I had to leave now, it would take 42 minutes by car, or 2 hours and 6 minutes by public transport. The shortest journey is tomorrow morning and would take 1 hour and 31 minutes, more than double the time of the car journey. The closest inpatient hospital is 22 minutes by car, or over an hour by public transport. The difference the new speed limits are going to make is negligible compared to how slow public transport is here.
All this is going to do is annoy and upset people, and turn them off the idea of using public transport, and push a lot of people towards voting for the parties who were against this. Out of the main parties, that mainly seems to be the Conservatives, so that’s going to be bad for all of us.
The FAQ in OP’s link tells you that it is not all 30mph roads, but rather all restricted roads, with a link to a map of all 30mph roads that are staying 30mph as well as the option to see which restricted roads will change to 20mph. “Restricted Roads” is a classification of roads in law that is defined by the lamppost density, so this change won’t affect larger and more rural roads where lampposts are more sparse.
Then they’ve screwed up the marketing. Everything they’ve been pushing out makes it appear that it’s all roads. Not that there’s much of a difference. There’s a grand total of two roads in my area, and five in the Aberdare area that will apparently stay as 30mph.
Marketing lol
I couldn’t think of a better word 🙈
Then they’ve screwed up the marketing.
c’mon
What’s wrong with that? Liberal governments are terrible at spreading the word about their few good policies, marketing may not be exactly the right word but we know what they meant by it
It’s just the type of comment to be proven wrong, even admitting it, and then still not changing the position towards the policy. Things can be both marketed badly and also good
The Tories originally supported the proposal which is quite hilarious seeing how much stink they are throwing currently.
I do agree public transport needs more funding but they are in a pretty tricky situation where the Gov has very little money to improve the service (partly due to Wales transport funds being spent on HS2) and at the same time bus usage is down and not recovered after lockdowns. I hope the 20mph limits will encourage more onto busses, but I am not confident.
The Tories are bullshitting to gain support? That’s not like them 🤔🤥
At this point it sounds like me on my E-bike would be the fastest thing on the road. It does 25mph/40kph
Which would mean that you would also be speeding, since e-bikes in the UK are required by law to be capped at 15.5mph (technically 25kph).
I’m in the US, but fair point
Ah, that makes sense. For what it’s worth I think you guys are on the right track with e-bikes; allow more powerful motors but give them a different classification.
What are things like on that side of the pond? The “20’s plenty” campaign is well underway over here, do you have similar movements in the US?
We are basically ignoring that they exist. There’s a law being floated in CA that would prevent teens under the age of 16(?) from driving them, but I suspect that will die in the State Assembly.
and i think the 20mph limit would also apply too - so even if the cap were lifted, you can’t go breaking the speed limit just because it’s a bike.
Will this prevent you from using your car though?
Not in the slightest, which is part of my point. It’s going to slow down cars and frustrate people, while not having the intended benefit.
From the Welsh government’s FAQ again: “The evidence from around the world is very clear – reducing speed limits reduces collisions and saves lives.” The intended benefit is to reduc the risk of collisions and to reduce injuries in the case of collisions. Lowering the speed limit will result in both of those things, and so we will be seeing the intended benefit.
A road with a large number of accidents over the last few years is one that campaigners have been begging the Welsh government to fix, but it’s been ignored, and is one of only five roads in the area to stay at 30mph. It’s also a road that the local government has been using as a showpiece to say that they’re working on transportation problems.
This whole exercise feels more like they’re trying to show that they’re doing something, rather than actually doing something useful.
So you agree they aren’t going far enough lol
No, I don’t. I think they’re going about it all wrong.
An almost blanket conversion of 30mph roads to 20mph does little to help. A better idea would have been to change the speed limits on roads where people live or regularly walk, and leave the others. Once the public transport has been updated, and people are used to the lower speed limits, then look at making them universal.
Give drivers a viable alternative, as opposed to the current system where buses are unreliable, trains are worse, and neither go where you want them to.
Once people start using public transport, then push for it more.
At the moment, public transport is still worse than driving at 20mph here, so all that’s going to happen is that drivers get frustrated, and spend even longer on the road than they usually would. When the next election comes around, they’re going to vote for whoever they feel isn’t ‘attacking motorists’ again.
You think maybe all the other people without disabilities might see some other options here which in turn would free up more road for you, a person actually needing to drive a car, for it?
Here’s a reply I made to someone who asked a similar question:
'Our cities are quite small, and have decent cycling infrastructure as far as I can remember, but it’s been a while since I’ve been to a city centre.
A large portion of South Wales is small towns and villages built on hills and mountains, so it’s difficult to cycle from place to place for most people. Mid Wales tends to be very spread out and hilly, so again, difficult to cycle around unless it’s for pleasure. If you cycled to work, you’d probably be very sweaty by the time you got there.
Have a look at Google Street View to see how steep some of our hills are. They’re great for a challenge, but you definitely wouldn’t want to tackle them on a cold, wet, Welsh morning on the way to work.’
Because of the obstacles I described in that reply, it’s hard to walk particularly far too. There’s physically not enough room for anything bigger than buses, like trains, even if the budget was there. There are some areas where trains used to run for the coal mines, but they’ve been converted to joint footpaths and cycle paths, which would have to be ripped up to convert back.
A decent rail system running through and around Wales is a desperately needed start, but, again, our geography is a massive obstacle. Even the main road going north to south through the country is a single lane in each direction for the majority of it. It’s only near the capital that it becomes a dual carriageway.
A large portion of South Wales is small towns and villages built on hills and mountains, so it’s difficult to cycle from place to place for most people.
The Taff trail forms a convenient path from Pontypridd to Cardiff that doesn’t require travelling over steep hills. Further into the South Wales valleys past Ponty, each valley has their own cycle trail that links to the Taff Trail. Commuting around the valleys and to Cardiff is only tough going if you follow the motorways instead of pre-existing cycling infrastructure.
The main problem is travelling between valleys since you’re either going over hills or circling 'round to Ponty but this is also a problem with public transit infrastructure which uses Ponty as hub so if you’re going say Merthyr to Maerdy you have to catch a bus or train to Ponty and then a bus to Maerdy.
A large portion of South Wales is small towns and villages built on hills and mountains, so it’s difficult to cycle from place to place for most people. Mid Wales tends to be very spread out and hilly, so again, difficult to cycle around unless it’s for pleasure. If you cycled to work, you’d probably be very sweaty by the time you got there.
E-bikes have been invented for a while now
Have a look at Google Street View to see how steep some of our hills are. They’re great for a challenge, but you definitely wouldn’t want to tackle them on a cold, wet, Welsh morning on the way to work.’
This is just bog standard “It wouldn’t work here” stuff. It gets cold and wet elsewhere and it doesn’t stop people from cycling
Even the main road going north to south through the country is a single lane in each direction for the majority of it.
That’s a policy choice not an inherent condition of geography. Switzerlands full of mountains and they have good trains.
All this is going to do is annoy and upset people, and turn them off the idea of using public transport, and push a lot of people towards voting for the parties who were against this.
Bingo. But they don’t care who they hurt in the process. “Fuck cars = fuck lives”
lmao
Get fucked car lover lmfao
Completely deranged
oh fuck off you hysterical dipshit
“Fuck cars = fuck lives”
are cars sentient where you live
Shidding and farding over a 1 minute increase on my commute through a residential area
It’s a regressive tax on people to generate revenue disguised as a public safety measure
Surely it only generates revenue if people decide to break the law?
That’s… how speeding tickets work, yes.
Thus, it is a tax on commuters, who tend to be people who can’t work from home, and also tend to be poorer, making it regressive… Which is why Tories came up with it.
- This change came from the Welsh Labour government, it is not a tory policy (though they apparently initially supported it)
- Again, it’s an entirely avoidable cost by simply obeying the law. If you’re poor and can’t afford to pay speeding fines, don’t speed.
My point being that they won’t generate any revenue if people actually follow the rules of the road. Revenue only when people break the law is not how taxes work.
Might wanna dig into what classes of people pay the overwhelming amount of traffic citations to see why certain groups prefer this method of revenue-raising over just normal taxation.
Might wanna dig into what forms of transportation the very poor use! Hint: it’s not driving.
Traffic safety laws protect the most vulnerable members of society: the very poor, very young, very old, and very disabled (all populations that can’t drive and are more likely to become trapped in their own homes when streets are unsafe for those outside motor vehicles).
so it could be describes a tax on commuters who choose to drive over the speed limit - fuck them hower poor they are. poor people are capable of committing crimes just like non-poor.
poor people can also drive slower, or take the bus, train, (and many can ) bike, walk . . .
personally i find bike/bus/train way cheaper than car.recycle the revenue into bus service and its probably neither progressive or regressive,but sways people out of cars, and reduces the danger to people not in cars.(however poor they are)
Amazing news, can imagine how much quieter Wales will become as a result of this
I mean. Before this all you could hear was crazy “oooooooo” “oooooooooooo” sounds under the water. Wasn’t that bad.
Ah shit man I thought cthulu agreed to be chill for a bit longer
naah, all those bloody gangs of orcas, bombing aroung the neighbourhood at 30+mph, right by schools too , about time someone put a stop to it.
https://a-z-animals.com/blog/how-fast-do-whales-swim/
That’s cool. One of the advantages of lower speed limits is that while they slightly improve safety, they massively improve the perception of safety. When people feel safe walking and cycling, they’re more likely to do it. So, lower speed limits decrease the subjective desire to drive, and thereby reduce car dependency.
Do you have numbers on this?
I saw a study a long time ago, but I’m afraid I can’t find it now! I think it was UK-based, possibly by TfL or the DfT.
Try that shit in Burgerland and watch government buildings burn for the sake of the vroom vroom treats.
It happened with even the mildest covid restrictions. It would definitely happen with such strict speed limits.
You joke (probably not), but I was once complaining to my group chat about getting stopped by my job in a “sting” type thing, saying I was on my phone (i wasnt and the thing was dropped). Anyway, my chud friend was so close, complaining how these traffic laws are just ways to suck money from.working people a lot of the time. However, his solution was something along the lines of remove traffic laws, make it harder to get licenses, this will separate the wheat from the chaffe, and the rest can get “bus passes with all the other knuckle draggers.”
I was in complete awe at his stupidity and yeah, called him out on that dog whistle.
What I’m saying is, you’re right… we’d never accept this lol
his solution was something along the lines of remove traffic laws, make it harder to get licenses, this will separate the wheat from the chaffe, and the rest can get “bus passes with all the other knuckle draggers.”
This fits squarely into the the common brainworms of the car is the best transportation there is if all the other schmucks couldn’t drive one. Car drivers all hate each other, too
100% what’s the Carlin quote, everyone behind you is a moron everyone ahead of you is an asshole.
This deadly combo of feeling invincible and being in a competition.
Fuck cars
Finally some good news!
I thought this said whales for a second, and I was very intrigued how whales were causing the speed limit to be lowered. Maybe a whale carcass nearby at risk of exploding? Maybe a bridge that whales like to spout on?
This will hopefully ensure less people get hit by cars when the fights inevitably break out on the roads near pubs after Wales lose to Fiji and Australia and exit in the group stage of the Rugby World Cup this month
Ouch!
I do not get the 20mph speed limit here. E-Bicycles get to do 15.5mph in Wales, apparently. On a perfect, no traffic, no obstruction 1 mile stretch of road the speed difference here would save you, what, 30 seconds at most?
Exactly, so it’s incentive to get rid of your car and get a bike
not going far enough there is my point
I also agree they should just ban cars
I do like the idea of not banning cars but instead make them horribly embarrassing to use through regulation and legislation, its just really funny to me
Cars are allowed but you have to get the horn replaced with a clip of somebody sarcastically saying “ohhh look at me I think I’m so much more important than everybody else”
Limit cars to 10 mph by mandating every person pulls into the dmv so a clown with a big comedy screwdriver can turn the screw that turns off turbo mode :'(
I like your idea of incorporating clown technology. Maybe we can invest in giant turnkey technology so you have to get out and rewind your car every couple minutes.
And you have to have at least 14 passengers in it.
Ride Scaring
It was funny watching this get passed, because the main opposition to it in the Senedd has been Andrew RT Davis, a Tory MS who campaigned for it in a few years back in Penarth and is transparently against it because it’s a Welsh Labour policy.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Welsh parliament has passed a law bringing down the speed limit on all residential roads and busy streets to 20 mph (30 km/h).
Wales will introduce a default speed limit of 20 mph (30 km/h) in built-up areas from next year, in a bid to lower road collisions and noise pollution, as well as encourage people to walk or cycle.
The Welsh parliament voted on Tuesday to back the plan, which will bring down the speed limit currently set at 30 mph (50 km/h) on most busy streets and residential roads.
Both Labour and Plaid Cymru, who have a cooperation agreement and hold almost three-quarters of the 60 Senedd seats, backed the plan, but it has been met with criticism too.
Reasons for opposing the scheme ranged from concerns it could “annoy” drivers to an increase in journey time and congestion.
“They are quite rightly very concerned as they believe that pollution is increasing because cars have to drive in a lower gear and wait longer at traffic lights, there have also been more accidents,” he said.
The original article contains 609 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It could “annoy drivers”? Believe me, so many things do.
Also, it’s very likely that due to lower speeds, less congestion will happen and so, travel time will actually be shorter.When I drive nothing annoys me more than other drivers.
Also way to make money from the shitload of speeding tickets lol
Another tally on the list of why Wales should be the real England
WTF are you even talking about? Wales is its own proud nation. Why would Wales need to be ‘the real England’? What a complete insult to the Welsh.
For what it’s worth, I’m English!
Anglo-Saxons are all Germans in denial, and all the land they hold should belong to Wales.
ah but the welsh are all romans in denial and the land they hold should belong to the Irish. And the Irish are all Celts and the land they hold should belong to the doggerlanders
I can get behind doggerlanders coming back and replacing England with farming communes
Saes have stank up the whole of England, it’s gonna take centuries to remove the cringe from it. I don’t think it’s worth it.
Don’t feed the trolls
