New 20 MPH speed limit to also apply to bikes in Southwark

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  • It's one thing to drive a bit over (24-25mph ish) but you have to be a complete dickhead to 2nd gear redline your BMW/Delivery van to overtake someone on a narrow residential street

    It's incredible, isn't it? I wonder what they do with all the seconds they save before they get to the next red light.

  • all to common sadly, especially company vans!

    my favourite is when they bust a gut to get ahead of you, then slam the brakes on as if you now don't exist, your view of the road and potential hazards now obscured

  • I wonder what they do with all the seconds they save before they get to the next red light.

    Use their phone.

  • We have a one way street parallel to our road, it has a railway bridge and a chicane shortly afterwards. The boy racers view it as their own personal race-track and often come down the road at 40mph (it's a 20mph) and write their cars off on the chicane bit.
    It's been going on for years and is very depressing but Barnet council are trying to do something about it and have had a public consultation.

  • Ooh. Very close.

    Your username is suspiciously local....will I see your bike at ASC?

  • As I think I've said before in various places, 20mph limits aren't very significant achievements. I mean, I support them, but they became an 'easy to achieve' policy somewhere along the line. In London, the significant step came simply because councils went ahead with them despite the police saying they wouldn't enforce them. Prior to that, the lack of police enforcement had always been the argument that killed any campaign for them, and councils continued to go ahead with 'self-enforcing' schemes such as vertical or horizontal deflection. These worked quite well for a time, and certainly contributed to casualty reduction, but essentially had had their day when car suspension started to become much better and there started to be so many 4x4s.

    I still see 20mph as a good kind of policy, but it needs the other two key policies to go along with it to work--modal filtering and on-street car parking control/reduction. Filtering should be done in such a way that the end result is a coarse-grained network (coarse-grained permeability) for motor traffic and fine-grained permeability for walking and cycling. This means filtering not at the edge of traffic cells (bounded by main streets) but as close to the centre as possible, which usually requires some kind of arrangement for public service vehicles like dustcarts, e.g. keys to gates. The deterrent effect to drivers is achieved by lots of effective cul-de-sacs for drivers, few continuous alignments, and same way in-same way out arrangements.

    In a lot of places, engineers will attempt to filter at the edges of cells, which is a mistake. All it usually does is to remove one or two rat-running alignments while diverting rat-runners onto others. Well, those, too, may be filtered in the same way in due course, but the end result is a cell which is effectively still permeable for drivers, e.g. in loops, and that doesn't help much with local driver behaviour, e.g. speeding. Also, filtering at the edges increases motor vehicle capacity on main streets, as it removes more junctions from the main streets. It's important to have as many side street junctions maintained as normal, functional junctions, to act as natural checks on driver behaviour there, even if volumes from such side streets are low because of the internal filtering.

    Anyway, tl;dr--20mph isn't effective without companion policies and has become an 'easy to win' policy because councils don't care any more that enforcement isn't built into its implementation.

  • sometimes on a Thursday, I usually leave pick up until the last possible moment!

  • The Bowman or the blue single speed?

  • Perhaps ban cars in side the M25. Actually it not the cars fault that people drove them so ban people inside the m25. There you go every human problem solved at a stroke.

    The only downside I can see is no more lfgss.

  • I hadn't realised the police refused to enforce them. I live opposite a school on a busy rat run, 20mph obviously, and cars turn into the junction at the end of the road, metres from the school, so fast sometimes they can't keep left and go round the other side of the traffic island - i.e, they enter on the wrong side of the road. Next to a school. A teenager was hit there a couple of months ago by a woman going too fast (though on the right side of the road I think), badly injured, and the cops stationed a car further up the road for the rest of the day, presumably to look for anyone speeding. I haven't seen them since. What a shower of shit.

  • Strictly speaking, they asked for extra funding to enforce it at first, but I think that was rather a lot, and they didn't get anything, so that they adopted the policy of not taking on the burden of enforcement. I should also have mentioned that there were a few short-lived enforcement actions when 20mph was brought in in Islington and Hackney (with some Council funding, I think), but nothing since.

  • How many children do cyclists kills every year?

  • Our road was recently invited to help with a study by the local traffic team on Gipsy Hill. Gipsy Hill has 20mph limit we spent an hour on the corner of our road and Gipsy hill with a speed gun and within 10 minutes we were regularly clocking drivers hitting 28/30 mph and a few hitting 40 mph think he highest was 48mph. When asked what the next steps are it's either attend a speed awareness course or pts. Someone doing over 40mph should get automatic pts.

  • The other day I had a guy tailgating me down Croxted Road in a 20 zone, obviously annoyed at me adhering to the limit. Unsurprisingly he went to do a high acceleration overtake in a short gap between central reservations.

    Somewhat petulantly, I also accelerated to prevent him from being able to complete the manoeuvre.

    At the next lights I had the joy of him verbally berating me for both a) "driving like a pussy" and b) driving dangerously with my son in the car.

    I enjoyed the irony of his internal paradox.

  • Is that meant to be a risk assessment or something else? I'm not sure what you are trying to communicate.

  • I'm trying to communicate that your assessment of a person's vehicle choice as unimportant is inherently flawed.

  • Hate that Rd with a passion, are they still resurfacing it?

  • @Oliver Schick
    How would you design modal filtering to eliminate or significantly reduce the facilitatation of moped crime. Currently anything that allows cycles through also allows mopeds through, thus making them obvious and attractive getaway routes.

  • They make you carry your bike over some foot high obstacle in the filtering bit.

    At least, that's probably how sustrans would design it.

    (they actually do this in the Afan valley to prevent motorcross riders from using the cycling facilities - probably has nothing to do with Sustrans but I wouldn't put it past them)

    The less facetious answer is you probably can't. But then the problem statement assumes a chase vehicle is a car? Isn't the obvious answer police on motorbikes or mopeds? And assuming the police aren't chasing on bikes, they have so little hope of making a catch as is that a bit of filtering is going to make naff all difference.

  • An answer to the moped muggers that doesn’t include the possibility of them dying in an accident I though precluded pursuit of them anyway?

  • Recently changed the guidance on this. Whilst you were in Gran Canaria I think.

  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44204844

    "New proposals aim to smash the "myth" that officers cannot pursue riders who are not wearing helmets."

  • Ban mopeds.

    Win.

  • It depends on what measure you are using. But I take your point.

    My point was

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New 20 MPH speed limit to also apply to bikes in Southwark

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