CycleBanter.com - View Single Post - Reducing speed to 20mph â€˜created more deaths than injuriesâ€™ but council canâ€™t afford to scrap them

**[email protected]** · December 22nd 17, 10:39 AM posted to uk.rec.driving,uk.rec.cycling,uk.legal

On Thu, 21 Dec 2017 19:42:28 +0000
Ian Jackson wrote:
In message , Nightjar
writes
On 21-Dec-17 11:09 AM, wrote:
...
I doubt anyone expects cars to stick to 20 anyway. I imagine the thinking
behind it is that at 30 cars do anything up to 40 so put 20 signs up and
they'll do 25-30 which is acceptable.

The aim really is to reduce speeds to 20mph, or not much above it. This
is based upon the 1979 findings that pedestrians struck by a car doing
30mph have a 20% risk of dying, as compared to 2.5% at 20mph. More
recently, this has been revised down to 8% and 1.5%, which may be due
to improvements in vehicle design since the first report. However, it
is the most ignored limit of all, with 84% of cars exceeding 20mph, as
compared to 46% exceeding 70mph on motorways.

One problem is that if there is an accident because of 'speeding', there
is often an immediate call to lower the speed limit - with little
reference to how fast the offending vehicle was actually going. I recall
near here there was fatal accident on a 50mph limit main road. Some
people wanted a 40 limit - despite the vehicle's estimated speed being
at least 80mph. The obvious answer might be simply be to enforce the
existing limits.

Unfortunately a lot of councils do that with speed humps which limit your
speed to far lower than the posted limit (which is probably deliberate) unless
you want to pay for expensive suspension repairs. If you even did 20 over
some speedhumps you'd **** one or more struts, never mind 30. I find I have
to crawl over some at not much more than 10 or my car risks bumping its stops.