448
Wales lowers speed limit to 20 mph to cut car use and save lives
(www.euronews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
448 points (95.3% liked)
Fuck Cars
9677 readers
61 users here now
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
-
Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
-
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
-
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
-
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
-
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
-
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
-
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Not in the slightest, which is part of my point. It's going to slow down cars and frustrate people, while not having the intended benefit.
From the Welsh government's FAQ again: "The evidence from around the world is very clear – reducing speed limits reduces collisions and saves lives." The intended benefit is to reduc the risk of collisions and to reduce injuries in the case of collisions. Lowering the speed limit will result in both of those things, and so we will be seeing the intended benefit.
A road with a large number of accidents over the last few years is one that campaigners have been begging the Welsh government to fix, but it's been ignored, and is one of only five roads in the area to stay at 30mph. It's also a road that the local government has been using as a showpiece to say that they're working on transportation problems.
This whole exercise feels more like they're trying to show that they're doing something, rather than actually doing something useful.
So you agree they aren't going far enough lol
No, I don't. I think they're going about it all wrong.
An almost blanket conversion of 30mph roads to 20mph does little to help. A better idea would have been to change the speed limits on roads where people live or regularly walk, and leave the others. Once the public transport has been updated, and people are used to the lower speed limits, then look at making them universal.
Give drivers a viable alternative, as opposed to the current system where buses are unreliable, trains are worse, and neither go where you want them to.
Once people start using public transport, then push for it more.
At the moment, public transport is still worse than driving at 20mph here, so all that's going to happen is that drivers get frustrated, and spend even longer on the road than they usually would. When the next election comes around, they're going to vote for whoever they feel isn't 'attacking motorists' again.
You think maybe all the other people without disabilities might see some other options here which in turn would free up more road for you, a person actually needing to drive a car, for it?
Here's a reply I made to someone who asked a similar question:
'Our cities are quite small, and have decent cycling infrastructure as far as I can remember, but it's been a while since I've been to a city centre.
A large portion of South Wales is small towns and villages built on hills and mountains, so it's difficult to cycle from place to place for most people. Mid Wales tends to be very spread out and hilly, so again, difficult to cycle around unless it's for pleasure. If you cycled to work, you'd probably be very sweaty by the time you got there.
Have a look at Google Street View to see how steep some of our hills are. They're great for a challenge, but you definitely wouldn't want to tackle them on a cold, wet, Welsh morning on the way to work.'
Because of the obstacles I described in that reply, it's hard to walk particularly far too. There's physically not enough room for anything bigger than buses, like trains, even if the budget was there. There are some areas where trains used to run for the coal mines, but they've been converted to joint footpaths and cycle paths, which would have to be ripped up to convert back.
A decent rail system running through and around Wales is a desperately needed start, but, again, our geography is a massive obstacle. Even the main road going north to south through the country is a single lane in each direction for the majority of it. It's only near the capital that it becomes a dual carriageway.
E-bikes have been invented for a while now
This is just bog standard "It wouldn't work here" stuff. It gets cold and wet elsewhere and it doesn't stop people from cycling
That's a policy choice not an inherent condition of geography. Switzerlands full of mountains and they have good trains.
The Taff trail forms a convenient path from Pontypridd to Cardiff that doesn't require travelling over steep hills. Further into the South Wales valleys past Ponty, each valley has their own cycle trail that links to the Taff Trail. Commuting around the valleys and to Cardiff is only tough going if you follow the motorways instead of pre-existing cycling infrastructure.
The main problem is travelling between valleys since you're either going over hills or circling 'round to Ponty but this is also a problem with public transit infrastructure which uses Ponty as hub so if you're going say Merthyr to Maerdy you have to catch a bus or train to Ponty and then a bus to Maerdy.