Road safety or farce?

Think! That's been the main theme of the British government's road safety campaigns in recent years. At the same time out roads are being littered with speed cameras which seem to be located more as a money making exercise rather than in locations that require them (have you ever seen a speed camera outside a school?) and councils across the country are well into projects where they're reducing speed limits en-masse along with making changes to our roads, all in the name of road safety.

Just drive through any town and you'll see bus stops and pedestrian crossings being built-out into the road reducing the space available for cars; you'll see bus lanes which take up, in some cases, over 1/3 of the road but are barely used; you'll see roads that until recently were NSL (National Speed Limit) reduced to 50, 40 and sometimes even 30 mph with no other justification than "road safety", but what is it achieving?

In my area the local press has been making a lot of noise recently since a Conservative councilor spent some of his budget on a hand-held speed camera and handed it to local villages and PCSO's so they could do their own speeding checks. Regardless of my complaints that this sort of policing should be left to the experts it continues and the latest story even showed a schoolchild on traffic duty with a Community Support Officer and this, to me, is just obscene!

Lets look at what is really happening here. Yes, motorists are speeding through villages and housing estates and something needs to be done. Pedestrians - not just children - are put in danger by this practice but putting up 20 mph speed limit signs with pre-school drawings on them is not the answer. In many cases, certainly in the area I live, it's the combination of new road design and the management of existing roads which is really the problem. If people are slowed down by congestion or seemingly wrong speed limits on main roads they will look for alternatives; many villages that fought hard for bypasses in recent decades now find drivers doing 35 through their quiet patch of the countryside because the local council thought it would be a good idea to post a 40 mph speed limit on the bypass making it take twice as long as going through the village even at legal speeds!

Let me say here, I'm not advocating breaking the law or driving in an unsafe manner... I have children and spend a lot of time on the roads myself so I do appreciate the need for proper road safety. But...

Several dual carriageways near me have in recent years been downgraded from NSL to 50 and 40 mph. Both are rural roads with little joining them, one is even long and straight. I can only guess at the reason for downgrading the speed limit. One of these roads does have a nasty bend under an old railway bridge and so some improvement was clearly necessary, but now quite a long stretch has a 50 mph limit, reductions in both directions to 1 lane and on one side a speed camera. However quite why somebody didn't take the opportunity to modify the bus stop just past the railway bridge so that it wasn't in the main-line of traffic I can't understand and why there is no sign warning of the concealed farm entrance just a few hundred metres later is just beyond me. The fact that somebody has removed all of the cats eyes along the entire stretch of road beggars belief too, perhaps they're intentionally making it unsafe in order to justify more speed limit decreases?

As to the other dual carriage way reduced from NSL to 40 mph... the only obstacles along the entire length are two rarely used junctions, one for the local steelworks and another for a sewage facility. I believe that the justification for dropping the speed limit was a number of accidents caused by travelers who used to park on the wide grass verge, ironically just before the original (and sensible) 40 mph speed limit started!

The third road that changed more recently is a stretch of single-carriageway road. Probably about 3 km /2 miles long, this road was NSL (60 mph). It has no residential frontages and no footpaths, the only thing on the entire road is a pub. I can only guess that several accidents happened when vehicles pulled out of the pub car park. The road seems to have been designed originally so it could be upgraded to dual carriageway and has to entrances to the pub itself, one at each end. The logical answer? Restrict the entrances so that they are one-way and prohibit right turns across the carriageway. But no, dropping the speed limit was the obvious answer!

This brings me on to my local housing estate which is not too far from any of these roads. It's a new estate and there was plenty of free space, so what did they do? Build narrow residential streets with insufficient parking even for residents let alone visitors. The few main through roads are a little wider but with pedestrian refuges every hundred metres or so and, again, insufficient parking. The result of this? Traffic looks to be travelling too fast, and often it does in an attempt to pass a string of badly parked cars on a blind bend before something else comes the other way! I regularly see vehicles passing the refuges on the wrong side because it's easier than getting back between the parked cars and the keep left bollard. Is somebody going to be injured? I have no doubt they will... then there will be calls for more traffic calming.

There were one or two good ideas here... the local school currently under construction was to have a layby built to allow parents to drop of and pick up, but somebody pointed out at a public meeting that this would require cutting down a protected hedgerow so instead it's likely that local residential streets will become no-go areas for several hours a day. At the same time somebody had the forethought to put pedestrian refuges on junctions at the few roundabouts in the estate - except for one at the local pub. The one road where drivers are less likely to be taking notice is the one where pedestrians are expected to cross the whole road in one go!

While on the subject of the pub... it seems strange to me that the local shopping centre has a poorly designed car park with narrow spaces and aisles and tight turns that make it difficult to park and manoeuvre where the pub right next door has a lovely, straight and wide car park where there is plenty of room to move. Where's the logic in that? Perhaps they realised that drunks generally need more room to get their cars out without damaging anybody elses!

I've described just a few square kilometres of the UK here but it seems to be the same story throughout the country. Is it any wonder more people than ever are ignoring our speed limits?

The final thought... Britain used to have one of the best road safety records in the world, this is no longer the case but I'm sure our income through speeding tickets is probably one of the best!