A blanket reduction of speed limits to 20mph across England is under consideration following a meeting of experts who urged the new government of Prime Minister Andy Burnham to adopt the change. The proposal would bring England in line with Wales, which has already implemented a default 20mph limit.
Transport Committee Meeting
On July 15, shortly before Mr. Burnham’s first week as Prime Minister, the Transport Committee convened with an expert panel to discuss lowering speed limits as part of its Road Safety Strategy. The panel included Transport for London’s chief safety officer and the former chair of the Welsh government’s 20mph task force.
The experts strongly advocated for cutting England’s speed limits to 20mph, leaving Mr. Burnham’s government to consider the future of road safety. Adrian Berendt, a campaigner for 20’s Plenty For Us, told the meeting: “Since around 50% of KSIs occur on 30 mph roads, without reducing that speed limit to 20 mph, you simply cannot achieve the target of 65% [reduction in people killed or seriously injured on roads].”
Berendt added: “It is interesting. We have modelled it, and I think you heard it from an earlier witness that the contribution of 20 mph to the Government’s target is far and away the biggest single measure that could help.”
Additional Benefits
He continued: “But it goes further, because 20 mph not only brings down casualties but enables other measures to come in much more cheaply. I have seen that in projects that I have been involved in. Once you have the lower speed limit it enables you, for example, to do an informal crossing, rather than a formal one. It makes all the other measures much easier to implement.”
Berendt also noted a change in road user relationships: “It also changes the relationship between road users—between the driver and the cyclist, or the cyclist and the pedestrian—so that they look out for each other more. Your field of vision widens when you are doing a lower speed.”
Moral Obligation
Dr. Rob Torok, an emergency medicine doctor from Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance, described the speed limit cut as a “moral obligation” to protect children. He told the meeting: “Can I add in the moral duty part of achieving the 20 mph limit? Urban areas and villages, and roads with vulnerable, innocent, unprotected pedestrians—children, the frail, cyclists and non-motorised vehicles, horses and horse-drawn vehicles—are disproportionately within the areas where we would consider 20 mph limits. There is a moral obligation and duty to protect the unprotected, to rebalance things away from a focus on motorised vehicles and to save our children and the unprotected.”
Current Rules and Recommendations
Currently, there is no national rule in England mandating a 20mph default, the meeting was told. However, experts urged that local councils be directed to adopt 20mph as the standard in road planning. Lilli Matson from TFL said: “Nationally, it should set out that the evidence would suggest that the expectation is that it is 20 mph, and therefore if you are not implementing that you have to justify why that is acceptable in safety terms.”
She added: “If I was using the analogy of the railway, which I also look after, you have to reduce risk as low as reasonably practical. If you are not doing that through one measure, you have to have other mitigations. They need to demonstrate why that road is safe even though the speed limit was not the safest one we know it is.”
Matson concluded: “It creates a dialogue that does not exist at the moment because people can abdicate from making decisions on it because the default currently is 30 mph.”
