20 PLENTY UPDATE FOR SHEFFIELD ON THE MOVE FORUM 12.01.2012.
Good evening, my name is Richard Attwood, a member of the Sheffield 20 plenty campaign Group. I’m a Sheffield resident who travels around by cycle, on foot, on public transport and also on occasions in my car. Basically I’m happy to use whichever mode of transport suits my needs at the time, but I value having the choice.
Sheffield is also an improving place to travel judging by the outstanding increase in people walking and cycling, as reported in the Telegraph recently Preliminary analysis indicates that in the 2001 – 2011 period, cycling is now up by 91% and walking is up by 46%. (I’m just waiting for the Council to flatten a few hills now!)
There is of course room for improvement, enabling and encouraging residents and visitors to have a greater choice of options as to the means by which they get themselves about here in the City.
Whichever mode we choose, there is an increasing body of people and organizations who subscribe to the view that a 20mph limit on streets where people live will encourage those people to make wider and potentially healthier choices about how they get from A-B in Sheffield, and that the quality of life for all of us will be improved as a result of these choices.
The national 20 plenty website has masses of information detailing the many reasons why a 20 mph limit is a good idea, and I felt that rather than reiterate those, I thought it might be useful to look at what some of our significant National Organizations – Govt and Non-govt, have been thinking and saying around this topic lately.
Dept for Transport.
In its White paper (A safer way – 2009) the Dft notes that statistically here in the UK we are losing more of our pedestrians to traffic collisions than comparable countries, and the majority of this is taking place on smaller roads and urban routes.
Accordingly it then identified key road safety challenges ahead as reducing pedestrian and cycle casualties in towns and cities, and in particular focussing such efforts on the most at risk, which are children and young people.
Part of its response was to produce a Speed Limit circular in Dec 09 seeking to encourage all authorities to introduce 20 mph speed limits into streets which are primarily residential in nature.
This has the dual aim of reducing collision casualties, and also of increasing people’s confidence to adopt non-vehicular transport options. In Hilden, Germany, for example, the percentage of in-town trips made by bicycle increased to 23% since the introduction of an 18.6 mph speed limit in all residential roads.
The Association of Directors of public health et Al.
(Et al being over a hundred voluntary organizations and health bodies.)
These organizations collective ‘take Action on active Travel’ campaign proposes that ‘Perhaps the single biggest step in making the streets safer (and making them feel safer) is to reduce speeds’, seeing benefits such as increased Sociability as children and older people who will be enabled to get out and about in our public spaces, rather than being imprisoned in cars and houses by fear of risks associated with being near or crossing roads, and also an increase in Cycling and Walking.
In other countries, low traffic speeds on residential and urban roads are the foundation of their walking and cycling strategies.
With lower speeds almost every road becomes more cycle and pedestrian friendly.
Cycling and walking are the preferred way in which children say they would like to travel to school, but frightened parents and teachers say no. Increasing numbers of children walking and cycling will reduce obesity levels. Streets that are busy with walkers and cyclists also become safer streets.
Providing a safe road network for children to walk or cycle to school also reduces those parents driving their children to school. This “virtuous circle” then reduces traffic so making those same streets even more attractive for cycling and walking.
The Director’s report emphasises how roads play an enormous part in dictating the health of citizens - both in direct casualties and in deterring people away from active travel through the fear of collisions.
The North West Regional Directors of Public Health have published research entitled “Road traffic collisions and casualties in the North West”. 140 killed or seriously injured child casualties could have been prevented per year between 2004 – 2008 if residential 20 mph speed zones had been introduced across the region. It strongly recommends that wide-area 20 mph limits for residential streets (without traffic calming) be included in all Highway Authority’s Local Transport Plans
PCT’s.
Liverpool Primary Care Trust have just announced that they are to work collaboratively with the City council to finance the implementation of 20mph signed limits going forward, and importantly to use public health resources to fund engagement and promotion initiatives with local communities around the shift to slower road speeds and alternative and healthier modes of getting about.
The European Union.
In Sept 2011 the full EU parliament adopted the EU Transport Committee report on Road Safety for the next decade. One of the primary “calls” is for 30km/h speed limits for all residential and urban roads.
National Institute for clinical Excellence (NICE)
In its report ‘Preventing Unintentional Injuries amongst under 15’s’ NICE recommends 20 mph limits where children and young people are likely to be, and it specifically calls for 20 mph speed limits for residential roads or where pedestrian and cyclist movements are high, and backs up Department for Transport guidelines for wide-area 20 mph limits.(Rather than zones)
Professor Danny Dorling.
Our very own Professor of human geography and expert in how people die says that statistically of all causes the road is now the most likely potential killer of your child, and a 20 limit and Education as to its value goes a long way to reducing this terrible reality, and, because people would feel more enabled to get out, social cohesion would improve.
He goes on to make a clear case for us now needing to regard road deaths as the greatest avoidable public health epidemic, now that we have made such progress with open sewers and tobacco!
This lethality is most apparent with the children of the poor, who are most often the victims of collisions, however the children of more well off people tend to be kept very close by or ferried back and forth in vehicles, often by parents who are hurrying along our roads!
And finally – UK Local Authorities
Up to press 10 Local Authorities have committed to 20mph as the default speed limit for residential streets, and another 20 are actively considering this.
The drop towards 20mph has turned out to be even more significant as recent research by vision scientists at the University of London indicates that children cannot, for developmental reasons, make accurate judgements about speed/distance where vehicles are moving above 20mph.
Why a wide area 20 limit is better than Zones
20mph Zones can be good at what they set out to do – stop people driving at lethal speeds for a very short period, but simply don’t address the problem effectively. Why?
- Their implementation invariably causes a lot of strife (It tends to be irrational/flawed, the web is full of recipients complaining that they weren’t consulted/their bit was missed or shouldn’t have been included/they hate the physical calming installations etc etc). This is repeated at each phase.
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- They are very poor value for the little money we have. (In the Central CA the ’20 zoning’ of just one residential street has swallowed almost half the CA’s total annual budget!)
- They ultimately miss the point that the problem we need to tackle is us moving around in heavy steel boxes, at speeds that are lethal on contact, in those public spaces where people are going at ‘normal’ non motorised speeds. As Professor Dorling points out, we simply haven’t evolved to the point where we can mix such speed differentials/modes of transport competently yet, and the people not in the steel boxes at the moment of contact will always lose.
For any given expenditure 20mph area-wide limits are 7.2 times more effective than physically calmed zones.
For the same expense as engineering a 20 mph zone for 250 houses and 500 people then over 25,000 could benefit from a 20 mph speed limit in their road for the same cost.
So in summary then the increasing body of research and recommendations of so many bodies who we commission to look after our health, and my own experience on Sheffields roads, has convinced me that we should up the pace of ‘Consultation’ with a view to using the fantastic forthcoming Pfi opportunity to make all non arterial roads 20mph, and so to let our health and our society blossom.
Richard Attwood. 12.01.2012.
