Ministers study options to extend 20mph zones

30 May 2008

The Government is considering ways of extending the introduction of 20mph zones, in order to meet a target of eliminating road deaths.

Road safety minister, Jim Fitzpatrick, told MPs he was considering ‘adopting the Swedish strategy of having zero tolerance, and saying that we do not want a single road death’ in a new 10-year road safety strategy. A key part of this, Fitzpatrick told the transport select committee, was promoting 20mph zones, as in Sweden, in order to dramatically reduce pedestrian and cyclist casualties.

The parliamentary advisory committee on transport safety highlighted how 92% of pedestrian deaths and serious injuries, and 85% of cyclist KSIs, were on urban roads with limits of less than 40mph. But Fitzpatrick questioned whether the PACTS’ recommended policy of making 20mph the default speed limit in all built-up areas was the correct one. Instead, he wanted to ‘delegate responsibility’ for this to the local highway authorities, stressing that Sweden’s central government did not introduce ‘centralised diktats to local authorities in respect of 20mph zones’.

He pledged, however, to share the results of ‘what works where’, following a three-year study into best practice in the implementation of 20mph zones. A spokeswoman for the DfT said the aim was to ‘find what 20mph zones are out there, and what the result has been’. Local traffic authorities do not have to inform the DfT when they introduce 20mph limits, so there is no national data.

However, PACTS said the Government could make the introduction of self-enforcing the 20mph zones easier for local authorities. The Government could do this both by highlighting best practice on achieving this through street design, as with the mixed-priority routes project, and by approving time-over-distance cameras, said Robert Gifford, PACTS executive director. Time-over-distance cameras were the most ‘tried-and-tested method’, but the Home Office had spent ‘years’ considering whether to give them approval.

Rob Salmon, of the County Surveyors’ Society, said that, given the Government’s demand for 20mph zones to be self-enforcing, they were likely to remain relatively rare, ‘without a significant increase in funding for local highway authorities’. The high cost of traffic calming or enforcement technology needed to be weighed against the fact that ‘blanket limits over wide areas will have little effect on casualty rates’, given the dispersed and infrequent nature of accidents, said Salmon.

Gifford said the tight road geometry of Portsmouth meant that speeds were already low before it introduced blanket 20mph limits. The challenge was ‘to bring speeds down without politically-unpopular physical measures’.

Paige Mitchell, of the Slower Speeds Initiative, said that the ‘out-of-date’ regulations requiring traditional traffic calming measures every 100m in 20mph zones prevented this.

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Ministers study options to extend 20mph zones

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