Wales’s blanket 20mph speed limits will be dropped by September, the nation’s new Labour Transport Secretary has said. The Telegraph has more.
Local councils can start raising limits in six months’ time, Ken Skates told the devolved Senedd parliament on Tuesday.
“We all agree 20mph works really well where it matters most. Outside schools, hospitals, heavily built-up areas, where children are coming into contact with motorised vehicles,” he said.
“On certain routes it hasn’t been appropriate. We will move swiftly at the least cost to correct that.”
Public consultations will start imminently, Mr. Skates said, with councils handed powers to formally raise speed limits back to 30mph from the summer.
Natasha Asghar, a Welsh Conservative member of the Senedd, told the debating chamber: “I appreciate you’re speeding up the review.
“Nothing is changing as of today.”
Last September, Wales became the first country in the U.K. to reduce the default speed limit from 30mph to 20mph in built-up areas.
Lowering the limit cost £34 million, according to the House of Commons’ library, with lower default speed restrictions applying to about a third of all roads in Wales.
The new limit was introduced by Lee Waters, the Welsh Transport Minister at the time, on Sept 17th.
Mr. Waters narrowly survived a no-confidence motion tabled by the Welsh Conservatives that month but announced he was stepping down in March.
Posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, at the time of his departure, he said: “I now get a pile of malign comments for even the most innocuous posts.”
He also conceded there were a number of roads across Wales that should have remained at 30mph instead of being subject to his blanket speed limit. …
A Government source said: “Labour’s blanket 20mph limits Wales have been a fiasco, but their ideological ban on road building and plans for road charging still remain in place.”
Turns out, 20 isn’t plenty.
Worth reading in full.
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Ken Skates said “We all agree 20mph works really well where it matters most. Outside schools, hospitals, heavily built-up areas, where children are coming into contact with motorised vehicles,” he said.
coming into contact with motorised vehicles!!
Thank goodness they’re not coming into contact with fast moving pony and traps or two horse brewery drays! They don’t even have brakes!
What fecking century does he think it is?
And these idiots make the laws!
Why dropped only in September? My conspiracy calendar says April. Large economic cost, no benefits – who is punished? No one. Will they next mandate the end of cars and the use of battery powered scooters only in ‘built up areas’ which includes 1 house per mile density (it could save the children’s future you know….).
A couple of weeks ago I tried a little 20mph experiment. I felt like I was in Stepford Wives driving along at a snails pace in the Liberal Progressive fantasy world, where they all sit at their computers planning every minute detail of our lives. —-After 5 minutes of my little experiment I could stand no more of it. —–Life is short and we need to get on with it before moss starts to grow on our jacket.
And you car was no doubt still doing the same revs (It’s called gears), but for 50% more time, so the ‘cleaner air’ argument goes out of the window.
I think it is more of the “if it saves one child” argument
“Public consultations will start imminently”
You didn’t consult ordinary people in the first place, you just went around businesses that would favour this Globalist project.
It was in their manifesto and the people voted for them. Maybe it will be a valuable lesson and the people will read up on what they’re voting for…
Oh look! A flock of pigs just flew past.
Well, here is an analysis of that charade in North Wales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh-3IkwOVMg
The people have way more power than they realise. There is a strong connection between this article and all the articles we see by the likes of Chris Morrison questioning the climate change dogma. Once we see more people starting to realise that climate change is politicised and that what they are being told about the climate is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for political purposes with very little in the way of empirical evidence then they may start to be less easily manipulated and might see fit to rise up against the lowering of their living standards under false pretences.
I’m coming round to thinking all speed limits should be advisory/guidance, and if you have an accident and it’s your fault and you are breaking the advised limit by a lot, they come down on you hard.
IMHO, safe driving is majority governed by OARC – Observation, Anticipation, Reaction, Control, a continuous process, i.e. good driving, and not governed by speed. 90mph on a clear dual-carriageway/motorway in daylight/good visibility/dry conditions is not inherently unsafe, whereas 40mph on the same road, at night and/or in thick fog and/or in freezing ice/snow conditions can be idiotically dangerous, yet the same ‘limit’ applies in both circumstances.
Indeed
All part of the inexorable process of removing personal responsibility
I remember Dr Sean Gabb from Libertarian Alliance saying how drink-driving and mobile phone use should just be advisory, that any accident they would come under existing law. Due care and attention. People driving pissed is pushing it even for me LOL.
I was surprised how little he made of the 2020 psyop considering his well known libertarian credentials.
They have this fantasy about bringing back to a human level, the speed of a horse and cart. Of course a big part of this fantasy is that there won’t be many people left alive and those who are suffered to live will become butt slaves of the elite. Itis essentially the endpoint of the Anglo-American central bank warfare model. Why do you think they are engaging in all of these conflicts at once all over the worl? Because they have rightfully concluded that with every passing year their relative power diminishes and so hence no time like the present because they are weaker every day. Not a good situation for those living inside these infested countries I do admit. It asks of us to understand it and then comprehend it and then hopefully remedy it.
Presumably it takes a long time to return to 30mph speed limits because the Welsh Government will have to reinstate the nationwide teams they previously had in place, tasked with removing the piles of dead bodies from the 30mph roads. Since the 20 limit was put in place, these teams were made redundant and their vital skills lost.
It will have cost them a fortune to impose all those 20 mph restrictions. Now it’s going to cost them a fortune to change them back.
Except it’ll be English taxpayers funding the madness.
A mad-Mark legacy!?
Once again, bad decision making in the UK. 20mph speed limits for cars, 15 minute cities, ULEZ, banning wood burning heaters, attempts to ban gas boilers, millions given to ukraine while drugs for common diseases rationed or banned. Oh I could go on and on, but it is too depressing.
“where children are coming into contact with motorised vehicles”?? If we’re not teaching children road safety, but allowing them to ‘come into contact with motorised [and also unpowered] vehicles’ even at 20mph, what sort of society are we? What planet is Skates on?
[I know, I know, ‘in contact with’ is referring to ‘in the vicinity of’, but the point is that when pedestrians, including children, cross the road, it is THEIR responsibility to do it safely. Similarly, when a vehicle has to cross a pavement, it is the driver’s responsibility to do it safely.]
Why the six months delay?? Surely the default should be 30 immediately, with 20 limits only set up in those few sensible areas where there’s very solid evidence of a problem with 30 *and* there being no alternative safety improvements possible, something they should have done in the first place. One judgement on the blanket 20mph rule must be that it was just sheer laziness.