Slowing down in North Yorkshire ?

For those unfamiliar with the structure of local government in the UK in some places there are two tier local authorities. In our case this means that some functions are carried out by the local Borough Council whereas others, most in fact, are dealt with by a County Council which covers a much larger area. One of our little local difficulties is that when someone wants to blame "the council" for something they end up directing their attention at the Borough Council whether or not it's actually their responsibility. To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain "Northallerton (a small market town that just happens to be the site of the County Council's offices; and therefore a little bit like Bonn in the Bundesrepublik, a place chosen as a seat of government to stop more significant places thinking it's all about them) is a far away place of which we know little".

I won't bore you with the details, but as things stand the County Council has responsibility for Highways. This means that when the Borough recently re-established a Cycle Forum, to champion the needs of cyclists in the Borough, it was important to get the County involved. Since the officers concerned would argue that they've already been given too much to do they found it difficult to attend our meetings. So, last time out we decided to go to them rather than have them come to us and scheduled the meeting in their local office.

An interesting time was had by all as we pored over maps and thought about how we could develop plans. Of course, all of this was done in the knowledge that in a situation where public services are obliged through common sense financial management to pay the costs of a banking crisis, lest the bankers lose faith in their own system and all choose to go off and plunder somewhere else, so we were all well aware that wouldn't be much money about.

Towards the end of the session I made a simple, very low cost, suggestion (one that's been shown to be very effective in lowering the perceived danger of traffic and encouraging more people to dare to venture out onto two wheels) of bringing in more 20 mph ( 32 km/h) speed limits. It's not that these don't already exist, just that they often seem to start and end in bizarre ways.

Start of a 20 mph limit on Glenn Bridge/North Leas Avenue

About half a mile down the road from where this picture is taken there are two primary schools. The streets to the left are narrow residential streets and there's no other route out from them except back onto this road.

First street off Northstead Manor Drive to the left

As you can see, the 20 mph limit doesn't include these streets and so, strangely some of us feel, going from a big road to a little road means the speed limit increases. Suppose that these streets were also given a 20 mph speed limit the you wouldn't need the signs or the road markings and you wouldn't need to pay to get them maintained merely the one off cost of taking them down.

This is not the only place in town where such strange things happen, so I asked the Highways officer if they might consider, in the interests of making cyclists and other vulnerable road users feel safer, rationalising the existing 20 mph limits into broader 20 mph zones. The response was short, I paraphrase, "It's County's policy to only have 20 mph limits next to schools" That was it, since he didn't set policy there wasn't anything more to discuss.

So who does set policy ? The obvious answer is politicians. Can policy be changed ? Well it's not like the laws of physics,  so yes it can.

My own barely radical suggestion would be to do what's been done in a number of towns and cities across the UK (including Oxford) and have a default 20mph limit in urban areas covering everything but the major roads into or our of town. in Scarborough's case this would mean 30 mph limits on the 2 major roads in from the South, the 2 major roads in from the North and the one major road from the West.