Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Living Streets calls for 20mph for ALL residential roads
Living streets has called for all residential roads in London (those will be ones with houses on, Brian) to become 20mph zones
More here
More here
Tags for Forum Posts: 20 mph, road safety
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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From the BBC article
"We have effectively designed ourselves out of our own communities through urban planning that has failed to prioritise people."
Indeed.
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Permalink Reply by WightmanPaul on
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In it's conclusion, a recent study -
http://www.autoliv.com/wps/wcm/connect/cca723004e01fd2f8d278f5246ea...
- on the relationship between pedestrian road accident speed and fatality rates states:
a strong dependence on impact speed is present, with the risk at 50 km/h *[30mph is 48km/h] being more than twice as high as the risk at 40 km/h and more than five times higher than the risk at 30 km/h*[20mph is 32 km/h]. This shows the importance of keeping impact speeds as low as possible within city areas where most pedestrian accidents occur.
* my additions.
This study focusses on fatality rather than injury, or the likelihood of collision on different road types as a function of vehicle speed. Ofcourse, for those people for whom 'beating the traffic' is the over-riding priority, any price in terms of pedestrian risk, will be worth paying - or they could get out of their cars and get onto a bike!
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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So 14% of children play on their street compared with (the rose-tinted memories of) 44% of their aged parents (30-40 bracket). I'm afraid I have no memories of 44% of our neighbours' kids playing five times a week on Umfreville Road between 1976 and 1980.
Presumably for anyone over 40 the concepts of childhood and play had not been invented pre-1975? Fortunately for some of us 1940's kids the concept of street meant the open patch in front of the ancestral cabin in the middle of the fields where the only wheeled danger was the occasional passing cart or wheelbarrow at something below 3mph.
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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I think you have a point OAE that as well as calmer roads with less cars, there was more undeveloped green spaces around 40 odd years ago.
Where I grew up in Ipswich, much of the land that was fields on my Nana's estate is now covered in housing and many of the patches of waste ground where I grew up have now been dubbed brownfield and built on. Warren Heath, once the home of rare butterflies and kids making dens across the road from their houses is now a Sainsbury's HyperMegaTat store. Neither butterfly survival or kids playing rights could melt the heart of the Inspectorate who granted them retrospective planning permission after they had torn up the heath.
Nevertheless, for residential roads including dear old Wightman, 20s plenty, although I doubt that will bring back the kids in go karts speeding down the hill or the nightly footie match at the top of Warham. Any such activity would have to be DSCF funded, run by trained play leaders, and only held on Sunday after every single neighbour had signed a consultation document agreeing to it and provided Arsenal don't have a home match.
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Alas, Liz, myself and the missus spent a gloriously sunny Saturday afternoon last September ambling along four or five miles of a country road through those same green fields of South Armagh I was nostalgising about above, picking the odd blackberry and skimming the odd nostalgic stone onto the little lake. We passed about 150 houses where once there might have been a score or two farmhouses scattered through the fields. Big hacienda-style monstrosities now, mainly unsympathetic to their surroundings, many of them with their 4x4's which have never been off-road in their lives. But not a child to be seen. No wee girls skipping rope, not even a surly teenager kicking a ball against a gable wall, not to mention an absence of young ruffians robbing someone's orchard. Just an invisibility of children, or even of parents. It's not that they don't exist. They're just inside, staring at screens probably, maybe playing by proxy, or watching ManU or Arsenal, or facebooking, beboing, twittering, flickering . . . wha'ever.
It ain't just cities! And yes, on that winding country road, once you leave Crossmaglen, anything from 40 to 80mph is fine.
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That's a great idea. However, we've got humps in our area (Noel Park estate) for that purpose and you still have some of the young hot rods gunning their engines speeding between humps. I think the question is how to educate / enforce it against these people.
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Permalink Reply by Sapphireblue on
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Well as you cant do more than 20 mph in most of the ladder roads due to awful bumps - we don't need it round here. Furthermore - aren't there enough interfering busybody regulations around already..... and I'd like to see anyone trying to do more than 20 mph in Green Lanes with the volume of traffic we already have - more like most drivers are lucky to be doing 10-15 mph locally!
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Cough, cough.... I regularly see cars, north of St Ann's Rd, managing to accelerate to well above the 30mph limit.
Many vehicles with good/heavy chassis are not bothered by the speedhumps and depending on the passengers desire for comfort can do much more than 20mph over them.
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I'm always impressed by the 'boy' racers who accelarate from the speed hump just before the Harringay Passage crossing on my road: 0-KILLAKID in 10 seconds flat.
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Permalink Reply by Malcolm on
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Umm exactly. A speed limit has little discernable effect on the speed of cars - people largely drive at a speed that feels "safe" given the current road conditions etc. The only way to reduce people's speed is therefore either to make the environment feel less "safe" (so people slow down), or massive enforcement.
I for one don't want a comprehensive enforcement system for speed limits as it would necessarily involve tracking your every movement, all the time.
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I can't help but agree. Making all roads with houses on 20mph would pretty much mean the whole of London, except for various bypasses. For example, it would mean a long stretch of the A1 being 20mph...
Yes, streets should be reasonably safe for pedestrians and other road users, but to imagine we can go back to some halcyon past of kids playing with hoops and sticks in the streets is naive and foolish. Car ownership is much, much higher these days and unsurprisingly there's more traffic. Even if the cars are going at 20mph, it's not going to be much fun to play in the street when a car comes through every minute.
The existing speedbumps on the Ladder roads are horrible - they result in more noise (from cars speeding up, lorries banging over them etc), and house-destroying ground shaking. It's possible to slow/calm traffic without using ruddy big bumps in the road, but it takes an imagination sadly lacking inour traffic planners.
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