Casualties in 20mph zones UP by 24%

Having spent several years researching the cause of road casualties this doesn't surprise me at all.

20mph limits were pushed by road safety pressure groups like BRAKE who have no idea what really goes on our roads. The harsh reality is that this whole 'speed kills' argument has been simplified to the point where it has become nonsense.

If you get hit by a medium-sized modern car at 20mph and are in good basic health, and reasonably fit your injuries should not be life-threatening. In fact the most serious health risks from the incident probably occur while you are in the hospital that patches you up.

But if you are not fit and healthy or get hit at 20mph by an HGV, a bus, coach or a vehicle fitted with something like bullbars the picture changes completely and your chances of survival drop dramatically simply because it's not the speed of vehicle but it's size, configuration and who it hits that determines survivability. I've witnessed an incident where someone was killed by an HGV going at walking pace because at that speed rather than being knocked out of the way they fell under the wheels and were crushed.

Simply putting a 20mph speed limit in place (and we have plenty of them where I live now) is a waste of time unless you enforce it, restrict access along the road to private vehicles only, install lateral traffic calming measures (not speed bumps) to force traffic to slow down and if possible put in barriers to restrict pedestrian access to the road. What most local authorities seem to do, because it's cheapest, it just put up a few signs and some crude speed bumps then hope for the best.

As a cyclist who cycles down a few 20mph streets in west London on my commute, I can say with reasonable confidence that there are quite a few motorists who ignore the limit, plain and simple. When other road users are expecting motorists to be doing 20 but instead are faced with white van man caning it over the speed bumps with barely a flicker of brake lights, or a young muppet belting along in his sooped up nova, of course there are going to be accidents. They need to take the speed cameras off the motorways and A roads and put them on the roads near schools etc.