“This is the biggest step change in community safety for a generation. It will save lives, prevent injuries and encourage more people to walk and cycle.”
That was the assessment of Lee Waters, Wales’ deputy minister for climate change, speaking to the Senedd ahead of the country adopting a default 20mph speed limit on 17 September.
Under the change, most roads which currently have a 30mph speed limit are switching to 20mph.
It follows four years of work between the Welsh Government and local authorities, police and road safety experts to design a change in law, making Wales the first UK nation to reset the default speed limit for local roads.
While the move has evoked criticism, the Welsh Government has long maintained it is evidence led.
Mr Waters said: “The hardest hitting fact is that if a pedestrian is struck by a vehicle moving at 30mph, they are around five times more likely to be killed than if they are hit at 20mph. It’s simple: lower speeds save lives.
“By the time a car travelling at 20mph has come to a stop, a car travelling at 30mph will still be doing 24 mph.”
It also points to evidence from Spain, where the speed limit on the majority of roads was changed to 30km/h in 2019.
Since then, Spain has reported 20% fewer urban road deaths, with fatalities reduced by 34% for cyclists and 24% for pedestrians.
Wales “simply sticking up 20mph signs and hoping for the best”
The decision to implement the default 20mph speed limit has been met with mixed reviews. One criticism is the merit of implementing a blanket approach.
IAM RoadSmart has described the evidence as “not yet firmly established”, questioning whether it would be better to have 20mph limits on specific streets.
It believes this approach would improve compliance.
Nicholas Lyes, director of policy and standards at IAM RoadSmart, said: “Changing to a default 20mph speed limit in built up areas in Wales will provoke plenty of emotion, yet the road safety benefits of blanket 20mph areas are not yet firmly established.
“Local, individual schemes to reduce speed through communities are often popular with residents but poor compliance can often lead to pedestrians and cyclists having a false sense of security.
“As a road safety charity, we support efforts to reduce speeding through training and education.
“However, given the limited resources that roads authorities and police forces have, we believe it would be better to have 20mph limits on specific streets where there are schools, hospitals and where risks to vulnerable road users are at their highest, along with traffic calming measures and effective enforcement.
“ If this were the case, we suspect compliance would be far better than simply sticking up 20mph signs and hoping for the best.”
David
Maybe get out more. Speak to more people, especially the elderly or parents walking to school with children. Or speak to any of these orgs in our Open Letter https://www.20splenty.org/open_letter_supporting_20mph
Hugh
Results from the first week are good and in-line with 20mph implementations elsewhere. See https://www.20splenty.org/astounding_results_in_wales
Christina
Speed limits apply to “motor vehicles”. Bicycles are not “motor vehicles”. E-bikes only have assistance to 15.5mph. If above that they are classed as mopeds or motorbikes and the speed limit applies to them as well as other “motor” laws.
I trust that helps.
MR ROD KING, Lymm
+11
No one I’ve spoken too wants this 20mph limit, the safest way to save lives is ban anyone leaving their home or climbing a ladder
DAVID EDMUNDS, SWANSEA
--14
I think what is most important is whether the actual speeds of vehicles on the roads with the new limit will, in fact, reduce enough to have made the whole exercise worthwhile.
Hugh Jones, Cheshire west
0
Will this speed limit include bikes – especially electric bikes that zoom along (frequentkly on the pavements) faster than the cars?
Christina Young, Liverpool
--2
Though the Welsh Police seem to be very busy doing enforcement at the moment, I wonder how long that will last?
Keith Wheeler, MK
0
It’s no more a blanket than the old 30mph limit was a blanket (which covered 99% of urban roads of course). The power of local authorities to make exceptions (look up the guidance, that’s the right word) is completely unaffected.
WG and TfW have never had the power to control the setting of local speed limits. Only the national default has been changed along with the non-statutory guidance on setting local limits, as the previous version is now out of date.
Philip Jones, Birmingham
+13
I have some deep concerns about this article on “Wales adopts default 20mph limit”.
Firstly the image is wrong. It shows a sign for a 20mph zone. The change to the national limit does not mean that 20mph zones are going to be set. In fact most such signs within built-up boundaries will be removed as 20mph becomes the national limit for restricted roads.
The headline for the second part of the article is ‘Wales “simply sticking up 20mph signs and hoping for the best”’. Is that an RSGB view or that of IAM. In either case it is entirely disrespectful, dismissive and an insult to the hundreds of officials, politicians, road safety professionals, emergency services, local authority officers, NGOs, stakeholders, public health professionals and traffic and transport specialists who have worked for the last 4 years since setting up the Welsh 20mph Task Force in 2019 and then the Welsh 20mph Steering Group at the direction of Senedd in 2020 with cross-party support.
There has been a huge amount of planning, detailed research, discussion, collaboration and effort gone into how the change to a 20mph national limit could be accomplished in an effective and cost effective manner.
IAM call this a “blanket” limit, yet it is in fact a “default” with local authorities fully empowered to make exceptions where appropriate. Even so the evidence for the effectiveness of 20mph limits for urban/village roads is quite clear from Edinburgh, London, Warrington, Calderdale, Brighton, Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol, Cheshire West and Chester, and so many other places that 20mph limits reduce speeds and reduce casualties. There is equally evidence that isolated and targeted schemes where speeds were already low such as Belfast and those in the Atkins studies do not show statistically significant reductions in either. When it comes to 20mph limits then the wider the better.
I can respect that IAM may well support efforts to reduce speeding through training and education but others have a wider remit to reduce “speeds” through training and education of those responsible for setting speed limits. It is widely recognised globally that the maximum speed on roads where motors mix with pedestrians and cyclists should be 30km/h or 20mph unless evidence exists that a higher speed is safe. I am afraid that the IAM belief in “specific streets” is not compatible with such best practice. And isolated heavily engineered schemes simply endorse higher speeds outside the selected streets.
It is concerning that the views of such a driver-centric organisation as IAM have been used to provide an counter narrative to the huge development in road danger reduction and improvement in liveability that has been made in Wales with its adoption of a 20mph national limit. Its bold, progressive, evidenced and sensible.
MR ROD KING, Lymm, Cheshire
+15
Not misleading at all. Very balanced report in my view.
Of course the new 20mph is a blanket speed limit. The blanket just has a few holes in it. According to the BBC report https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-66774379
“About 3% of 30mph roads will not be reducing their speed limits, because local authorities can and have made exemptions.” 97% is definitely a blanket.
By the way, the 20mph exemptions/exceptions process is strictly controlled by Welsh Government and Transport for Wales. Lots of pressure on Welsh Local Authorities to comply with the “20mph guidance”.
Pat, Wales
--6
“we believe it would be better to have 20mph limits on specific streets where there are schools, hospitals and where risks to vulnerable road users are at their highest, along with traffic calming measures and effective enforcement.”
What, like what we’ve been doing for the last 25 years that’s lead to the grand total of 1% of the Welsh urban network being 20mph?
And where’s the blanket? It’s just the default, local authorities can set a different local speed limit on any road they choose, just as they’ve always been able to.
Wholly misleading comment.
Philip Jones, Birmingham
+13