| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Lower Richmond Road | |
| Posted by: | Richard Carter | |
| Date/Time: | 15/12/09 21:45:00 |
| Actually, Simon, it's not as simple as that: children around in school time, no one out of term time - because there are always people around in the day time in residential areas and often at night as well - and a good driver may be able to judge conditions (but may also make mistakes), but unfortunately not every driver is a good one. That's why we have speed limits: because it's not safe to leave it to people's judgement how fast to drive because you just can't trust everyone. 30 mph limits are good, but 20 mph ones are even better: and if you doubt their effectiveness, try reading the paper just published in the British Medical Journal: the study examined all the 20mph zones introduced in London and covered the period 1986-2006. This is what they found: "The introduction of 20 mph zones was associated with a 41.9% (95% confidence interval 36.0% to 47.8%) reduction in road casualties, after adjustment for underlying time trends. The percentage reduction was greatest in younger children and greater for the category of killed or seriously injured casualties than for minor injuries. There was no evidence of casualty migration to areas adjacent to 20 mph zones, where casualties also fell slightly by an average of 8.0% (4.4% to 11.5%)." This study (the full paper can be read at http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/dec10_3/b4469) is very powerful evidence for 20 mph limits - remember, the injuries received by pedestrians when hit by a vehicle are very sensitive to the vehicle's speed. And there's a more fundamental point here: quite apart from the dangers it poses for other road users (not excluding drivers, of course) what is the point of going faster? If you travel along the LRR from the junction opposite Putney Hospital (as was) to the junction with Putney High Street at a steady 30 mph, compared with someone doing a steady 20 mph (as if, with the traffic as it is, either one of those was possible), you'll get there a little over half a minute quicker. What use is this piddling amount of time, especially set against the dangers it creates? We really need to rethink our values on this, and it relates to so many other things that are wrong in our society: the crazy consumerism, the pressure to do things quicker (for what?), the waste of resources in driving what Thatcher, in one of even her most useless statements, called "the great car economy." - and this at a time when even the world leaders are dimly becoming aware that we can't go on like this, not that it will produce anything worthwhile in Copenhagen though in a rational world it ought to. |