Time to slow down on our roads

June 4, 2007 Its one of the great contradictions of modern transport - automobiles keep getting faster while statistics that prove we need to slow down in the interests of community safety keep rolling in. Governments across the globe are moving to curb speed, particularly where pedestrians at are greater risk, but these moves and the way in which they are policed are sometimes criticized as revenue raising exercises that do little to address the core issues. The City of Portsmouth in the UK has just announced that it will become the first city in Britain to introduce a blanket 20mph speed limit across a large part of the city. This seems quite severe in an age where travel times are a major headache for city dwellers - indeed it's reminiscent of the original ruling that cars had to be preceded by a man with a flag when they replaced the horse drawn carriage as the main form of urban transport early last century - but when considered in light of statistics that show the major benefits to safety the inconvenience of longer travel times seems insignificant. We believe that the ramifications for transport users in cities around the world is significant enough for us to consider the arguments.

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