Newcastle City Council is pressing ahead with plans for a pilot 20mph zone on six residential streets, despite the fact the limits will not be legally enforceable.
The Liberal Democrat-controlled council had been looking at creating a blanket 20mph speed limit for every residential street, with speeding motorists facing the standard penalties if they were caught.
Because of the time and costs involved, a meeting of the city council’s executive backed option two, which will see the creation of ‘advisory’ 20mph speed limits.
Officers believe that the alternative of creating traffic orders for the 200 residential streets would take up to nine months for each road and cost a total of £5M.
The council is now looking at the use of green-coloured signs stating messages such as ‘Twenty’s plenty’ and ‘Go slow’ which are now in widespread use around the country. An increasing number of authorities are considering making 20mph the norm where people live, with Camden, for instance, progressively introducing area-wide, self-enforcing 20mph zones, and planning 12 more up to 2011 at a cost of £2.4M. Meanwhile, Portsmouth is set on introducing 20mph zones – enforced by signs – on all non-principal roads by 2008.
A spokeswoman for Newcastle City Council said: ‘Option two is expected to be more cost efficient and quicker, because the statutory legal process of making orders is not needed. There are no plans to change it to an enforceable limit in future. We hope that would not be necessary.’
The overall cost of implementing the advisory speed limit will be £1.8M in total – less than half the £5M estimated for the enforceable scheme.
The pilot schemes will be selected from committed traffic management schemes outlined in the forward programme, and would be delivered this summer, at a cost of £140,000. A consultation into the pilots will take place in the next few weeks, and before-and-after monitoring will also be carried out on the impact of the new limits.