Why not just enforce the 30mph limit?
The 30mph limit on roads in built up areas was introduced in 1934 when there were less than two million vehicles on the road. Today there are more than 35 million and collisions on the road are the most common cause of death between the ages of 5-35.
People make mistakes – a child can run out after a ball, or an elderly pedestrian can step out, or a vehicle could pull out of a side turning without noticing an oncoming vehicle. If this happens to you when you are driving then the results will vary dramatically according to what speed you are doing.
Assuming they are three car lengths in front of you (or about 40 feet) and you can react and brake within two thirds of a second:
- At 20mph you will just stop in time to avoid a collision
- At 30mph you would hit that child / pedestrian / vehicle still doing 27mph probably causing serious injury and possibly death (80% of pedestrian fatalities are as a result of an impact speed of 30mph or below).
- At 40mph you would hit them still doing 40mph – you wouldn’t even have started to slow down. As a result you would quite likely kill someone.
People don’t deserve the death sentence for their mistakes. 20mph is a reasonable speed at which vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists can co-exist. It is a speed at which humans can interact through eye contact and it is a speed at which if someone is hit they have a 99% chance of surviving.