Am I the only idiot that sticks to the 20 MPH limit?

The 20 signs in circles on rectangular signs are not the law.

As anyone who drives should know. What with having to know the Highway code and all ...

I like the 20 mph - it saves lives. End of story. Some tossers always decide to ignore and either speed past or tailgate. I wish the police would prosecute more drivers for speeding

I don't stick to 20mph unless outside a school or another legitimate reason. Utterly ridiculous. I don't really believe we should have speed limits at all

I am going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you won't say that in court.

Actually if it was as simple as 'it's all the people doing 30 in a 20 killing people' they would say that. But it's more complicated. It could be drivers not paying as much attention, people feeling safer and therefore behaving in more risky ways, more people allowing dogs, children etc. out with less supervision, people driving closer.

SUVs are more likely to be at fault in an RTA because of a false sense of safety. ABS braking systems make people drive closer because of the same.

Don't base law on what you wish people would do it what you think they ought to do. base it on what they actually do.

Want to reduce car use? More pedestrianised areas and better public transport. Incentivise lack of car use. What to reduce speed in dangerous areas? Keep it to those areas and do actual traffic calming and time the speeds around schools etc. Variable speed limits work really well on motorways because people see the point. Around schools would be the same.

I think it is more dangerous in some ways to constantly have to keep looking at the speedometer.

Probably better to learn to drive then.

It’s 20mph round here. I was edging out of a side road at about 5mph as there was a transit van parked on the corner obstructing my view.

Car came down the road doing way more than 20 and slammed into me as I pulled out taking my car around the corner and bounced off my door and went into two parked cars.

Accident was my fault even though she was clearly speeding and possibly had her mobile in her hand and she didn’t even brake.

Still see her speeding around and it really infuriates me as it’s cost me so much time and money and she has learnt nothing (and went for personal injury).

The council are supposed to engineer the road so that 20 doesn't seem slow by narrowing, adding bends, humps etc. The police generally don't enforce. Councils are pretty negligent to put in 20 limits without the engineering - it just ends up with dangerous overtaking.
Of course if people could just obey the law we wouldn't have to put up with irritating traffic calming measures!

5 people everyday are killed in the uk and speed is a factor in a very high percentage of these deaths

To those of you that believe it’s fine to break the law and speed - if you kill a human due to your speeding will you be able to look their relatives in the eye and tell them your speeding wasn’t a contributing factor in their relatives death?

it's much easier to maintain 30 than 20 without having to keep looking at your speedo due to the way car engines were designed.

Most used gadget on my car is the limiter. In fact my only grumble is that it needs to be explicitly set every journey, and I have yet to be given a valid explanation for such behaviour.

I drove a hire car last year that had an auto limiter that read road signs and used GPS to set the limit.

"woodhill

I think it is more dangerous in some ways to constantly have to keep looking at the speedometer."
Can't you judge your speed?

The 20 signs in circles on rectangular signs are not the law.
They're often in a "when lights flash" place and I do stick to them but they're never clear where it ends! I usually assume it's ended once I turn onto another road without 20 signs.

Our street is 20 mph not 200mph

I don't stick to 20mph unless outside a school or another legitimate reason. Utterly ridiculous. I don't really believe we should have speed limits at all - people are usually sensible and understand roads so obviously where there is a greater risk of small children being around, drive very slowly, when it's 2am and the roads are empty it's okay to drive a bit faster - common sense.

Annoys the turd out of me.
My street is a 200mph the whole area has been for a good 15+ years but there's always some muff hole who likes to fly over the speed bumps at 40mph
I have drilled into my children road safety so why aren't drivers having road safety drilled into them.
I agree with pp who said instant ban for driving offences. Your in charge of a killing machine so 1 strike your out should be the rule imo.

I once read an article about a woman who had inadvertently killed a child. She was driving at the speed limit of 30mph, a child ran out between 2 cars and that was that. She was devastated. The parents didn't blame her, they blamed themselves for not keeping a closer eye on their child. It was a harrowing read, brought tears to my eyes & that doesn't happen very often.
The speed limits are there for a reason & I stick to them. I also drive according to the road conditions. Sadly a lot of drivers don't seem to do either.

I think it is more dangerous in some ways to constantly have to keep looking at the speedometer.

It’s easy to stick to 20mph & a sat nav can be set with an alarm bell to ring if you break the speed limit - better t that than kill a child

it's much easier to maintain 30 than 20 without having to keep looking at your speedo due to the way car engines were designed.

To accurately maintain 20 means driving in 2nd for me and even then I'm having to constantly check my speedo visually. My emissions have certainly gone up since this was imposed in the Bristol/Bath area.

Bath council, whilst admitting the 20 mph limits have made things worse claim they can't afford to reverse their policy.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/17/20mph-limit-dangerous-costly-reverse-council-admits/

It's interesting how many posters freely admit to breaking the 20 speed limit for what ever excuse they deem reasonable and yet a cyclist breaking any road rule at all is jumped upon immediately.

the procedure was to make everything 20mph unless someone had come up with a reason why it should be 30.)

sounds totally sensible to me tbh

I have just googled my local authority, and I can confirm that there was a wholesale decision to convert virtually all 30mph roads to 20mph, there was no road-by-road analysis by experts to decide which should be converted. (In fact it seems to be the other way around, a handful of roads were approved to be exceptions to the wholesale conversion. i.e the procedure was to make everything 20mph unless someone had come up with a reason why it should be 30.)

Are you a highways or planning engineer? Are the people in the "my road doesn't need to be 20mph" Gang? No? Ok, so someone with relevant experience and qualifications has looked at the road in question, and the ones surrounding it and decided the limit can be lowered

I wish that it were true that science, engineering and data were driving this, but I really believe it isn't. I have in the past looked up up my LA authority reasons for the new limits and the bit someone posted up-thread rings a bell: they are deliberately trying to make driving so unattractive that fewer people do it. It's about prioritising people who live in the vicinity of a road over people using it to get from A to B.

Many years ago I read a rant by a blogger who claimed that the ideal speed limit for a road was (according to road safety experts like those you imagine are being consulted) something like the speed 90% of motorist would do less than if there were no limit. He said that it was proven that if you set the speed limit significantly below that, it would be utterly ignored by most drivers.

I think he may have been right about the last point, as that is what seems to have happened on the roads near me. Where main through-routes have limits lowered to 20mph, fewer than 1 in 10 cars obey the limits, most still drive (as another poster also said) as though the limit were still 30.

If you think that someone doing 30 in a 20 is a maniac, you need to accept 90% of drivers are maniacs and perhaps campaign for the end of the right to drive on public roads for non-professional drivers. (Actually I think the self-driving car will bring this in out lifetime anyway.)

Why do people insist it's safer when the actual DATA show it's not?
Post-truth?

No - fake news! The sensationalist news stories omit a number of facts to make it appear that 20 mph zones are less safe. It is a fact that a person hit by a vehicle travelling at 20 mph is less likely to be killed. That's got to be a good thing. IF, and it's a big if, the vehicle is travelling at 20mph. The problem is that the majority of them aren't! Because most people are in a rush to be somewhere other than where they are, and they are safe drivers, they know what they are doing (or don't care), so it isn't as though they are going to kill someone by going over the speed limit, are they? Just like it's actually ok to travel at 90mph down the motorway, because most accidents involve vehicles travelling at or below the speed limit. Fake statistics - if most people are obeying the law, then the majority of accidents will involve people obeying the law by the law of averages; it doesn't mean that driving at 90mph is safe or ok.

In fact, the problem with most 20mph zones is that they are introduced on the cheap. The ACTUAL evidence says that when they are properly introduced with traffic calming measures to force traffic to slow down, then accidents are massively reduced. That's the considered view of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, based on a wide number of evaluations and unbiased deliberation. Simply telling people to drive more slowly doesn't work, and anyone driving through such areas (we have a lot of them where I live) knows that. The fact that people ignore them isn't an argument to abolish them. It's an argument to make them more rigorous in order to save lives.

Yes but a seafront makes sense - it's going to be a high pedestrian traffic area even if at certain times of the year. The roads where it makes absolutely no sense are the ones where you have a very straight, wide road with no obstruction to vision, no shops, schools etc and low pedestrian traffic. I'd expect these to be 30.

Unless there are cameras people will always do it especially if the road is clear