NO says Mike Natt, former North Yorkshire Police accident investigator and now a collision investigation consultant who regularly gives expert testimony in court

THE introduction of 20mph limits on streets across York is a ‘waste of space’, says Mike, who lives in Woodthorpe.

There is just no need for the speed-limit reduction, because there are so few accidents on York’s roads.

In his part of Woodthorpe there have been no recorded accidents for some time, he says.

“So where is the accident rate they are supposed to be reducing? The figures say there are no accidents, so they are not curing anything.”

Mike concedes that there is research which indicates that you are more likely to survive if you are hit by a car doing 20mph or less than you are if you are hit by a car doing 30mph. But even then the evidence isn’t that clear, he stresses.

A review of 205 accidents in which pedestrians received head injuries carried out by the University of Birmingham’s accident research unit in 1979 showed that being hit by a car was the main cause of serious accidents – and that the severity of the injury did depend on speed.

But the same study revealed that of the 205 accidents reviewed, in 110 cases (ie more than half), the injury occurred not as a result of being hit by a car, but of someone then falling and hitting their head on the road. “Injuries resulting from contact with the ground appear to be virtually independent of impact speed,” the report concluded. “So it is not clear,” Mike says.

The key point, however, is whether motorists will obey the new 20mph speed limits. Mike has seen no evidence of that since the limits were introduced in his part of west York. “People are ignoring it: they are not taking any notice of it,” he says.

“It is supposed to be self-enforcing: but it isn’t. If people see a need for it and want it, then it will work. but they don’t.” The new advisory speed limit certainly won’t stop the drivers most likely to cause accidents, he says – “the young idiot who is doing 40 or 50mph”.

The only way to stop them would be by proper enforcement, he says.


YES says Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and a 20’s Plenty advocate 

I spent all my childhood in a city a little like York. It has a mediaeval wall that is still partly intact, a lot of old buildings and a road system designed for horses and carts. I left that city – Oxford – at 18. Almost three decades later I returned and found that something had changed beyond recognition.

Not much changes in old cities. Many of the buildings have preservation orders on them. The road layout cannot be greatly altered. Flooding tends to prevent too many people building too near the rivers. But in Oxford something fundamental had altered: much of the city now has 20mph residential speed limits - almost all the residential streets, and near shops and schools. In fact only the main arteries appear to be at 30mph nowadays.

There are also many more people living in Oxford than during the 1970s and 1980s. But somehow all the people appear to get along better when going slower. It is not just the cars, buses, lorries and vans which don’t travel over 20mph.

It is also the cycles. Perhaps it is because Oxford is not a very large city that people do not cycle at speed across it as they do in much of London, but I think that motor vehicles travelling at no more than 20mph encourages people to cycle a little more slowly too. And it also encourages more to cycle.

For the last ten years I have been living in Sheffield, and before that in Leeds. Sheffield is largely a mixture of 30mph and 40mph roads. Leeds has some 20mph zones on side streets, but they were rare.

The difference of living at slower speeds is palpable. It is hard to describe how much being a pedestrian is improved when it is so much easier to cross the road and how much of a shock it is when occasionally a car does travel at 30mph (almost always driven by a young man). You might ask how the speed limits are enforced, but – of course – most people obey the law and so for people in Oxford, 20mph is the fastest you would drive past your home and other peoples’ homes. Anything faster would be antisocial.

Last year I wrote a report for the British Academy bringing together the evidence that 20mph on local roads was better and safer.

I cited refereed papers published in the British Medical Journal, by the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, from the journal Injury Prevention, from the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineering, and the journal Psychological Science on how children cannot judge speed over 20mph.

I find it all convincing, but not as convincing as living in – and walking, driving and cycling around – a city that is now so much safer, more pleasant and convivial than the one I grew up in.