The Government’s revised speed limit guidance is failing in its aim to provide greater consistency in messages to motorists across England, according to road safety campaigners.
An investigation by Surveyor has borne out the Slower Speed Initiative’s fears that the revised guidance on setting local speed limits would fail to provide the ‘national framework for determining limits that were consistent and readily understood,’ as the document promised.
While some county councils are introducing new, lower limits across their A and B roads in rural areas, others are planning to implement few or no changes (Surveyor, 6 March).
Paige Mitchell, Slower Speeds Initiative co-ordinator, told Surveyor: ‘Instead of having the greater consistency that the DfT said it wanted, we’ve got an ad hoc approach which will lead to greater confusion for motorists as they drive across England.
‘But what else could you expect, given the absence of a strong and clear lead from the centre on the objectives of the national review of speed limits?’
The guidance, in circular 1/06, was sufficiently ambiguous that it allowed some county councils to interpret it as backing the need for widespread changes, while others were ‘using the same document to argue against reducing limits,’ she said.
Warwickshire, on one hand, was systematically considering the case for new rural limits, while Norfolk, on the other, had said that engineering measures needed to be tried first.
Mitchell predicted that evaluation of the results of the systematic rural speed limit reviews ‘by county councils with gumption,’ compared to the ‘controls of the do-minimum authorities’ would demonstrate the benefits of lower limits. But this depended on ‘the counties collecting good data on the speeds that motorists are travelling at before and after changes’.
Jo Edwards, senior road safety engineer at Warwickshire, which has proposed reducing the national limit of 60mph on 78 sections of A and B road, said local districts had supported ‘99% of our recommendations’, and also pressed for more 50mph limits.
Rob Salmon, of the
County Surveyors’ Society traffic and safety committee, said: ‘There are several responses to the DfT guidance. ‘Some authorities had already carried out quite a lot of local speed limit reviews.’ The CSS would carry out a survey of responses over the new few months to get a full picture.
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