this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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While it sounds good on paper, in practice, they've screwed it up. They're putting the new speed limits in place on every 30mph road in Wales before they've put the public transport alternatives in place.
There's currently no reason for someone to switch to public transport, especially if the buses are going to be stuck at the same speed as the cars, but stopping regularly too. Our roads are too narrow to install bus lanes, and barely have enough room for single file traffic through lots of the towns and villages. The trains are being upgraded, but that's not scheduled to finish until at least next year, and at the moment they're slow and very unreliable. It feels like every week the trains are cancelled and an inadequate replacement bus service is put on.
I'm disabled, and have to travel from my town, Aberdare, to the main hospital in Cardiff, UHW, on a regular basis. If I had to leave now, it would take 42 minutes by car, or 2 hours and 6 minutes by public transport. The shortest journey is tomorrow morning and would take 1 hour and 31 minutes, more than double the time of the car journey. The closest inpatient hospital is 22 minutes by car, or over an hour by public transport. The difference the new speed limits are going to make is negligible compared to how slow public transport is here.
All this is going to do is annoy and upset people, and turn them off the idea of using public transport, and push a lot of people towards voting for the parties who were against this. Out of the main parties, that mainly seems to be the Conservatives, so that's going to be bad for all of us.
I'm not from Wales, so I don't know how good the cycling infrastructure is there. But for me this change would make me feel much safer cycling on busy city streets. So this might encourage a few people to take their bike instead of their car.
The person you replied to is disabled - or so he claims, even if we assume he is lying about that, there are other people in his town who actually are disabled (I don't even have to look, disability is common enough around the world). While bikes are great for "normal people", they are not an answer for the disabled who may not be able to ride them at all. As such while cities should encourage more biking, they should not make bikes the backbone of how people are expected to get around.
...what reason would we have to assume this, and why even bring it up if there isn't reason to?
Because on the internet people lye about things all the time.
I'm aware that the person is disabled, but they explicitly stated in their comment that "there’s currently no reason for someone to switch to public transport" and that "all this is going to do is annoy and upset people". That to me implied that they didn't think of cycling as an alternative to driving a car at all, which is understandable given that they probably can't cycle. So all I did was offer the perspective of someone that does cycle and has to ride on busy streets because there are no bike lanes in hope that they'd appreciate that perspective just as much as I'd appreciate someone giving me their perspective when I'm missing something due to my personal circumstances.
I agree that there need to be alternatives to cycling in place for those that can't or don't want to cycle. Its all about capacity planning, though. If you assume that 20% of your population will use bikes for short to medium distances you'll have to plan with much more frequent and larger busses or even consider building subway or train infrastructure to get all these people to their destination than if you assume that 70%-80% will use their bikes. So as a transportation planner you'll need to make a judgement call on how you want the future of transportation to look like in the area you're responsible for, but I don't think the choice to make biking the backbone of transportation is necessarily to the detriment of everyone else. To the contrary, the public transport might be less crowded if most people use their bikes, so that for example folks in wheelchairs or those with trouble walking have it easier to get on and off.
Our cities are quite small, and have decent cycling infrastructure as far as I can remember, but it's been a while since I've been to a city centre.
A large portion of South Wales is small towns and villages built on hills and mountains, so it's difficult to cycle from place to place for most people. Mid Wales tends to be very spread out and hilly, so again, difficult to cycle around unless it's for pleasure. If you cycled to work, you'd probably be very sweaty by the time you got there.
Have a look at Google Street View to see how steep some of our hills are. They're great for a challenge, but you definitely wouldn't want to tackle them on a cold, wet, Welsh morning on the way to work.
Given the state of public transport in Wales and other rural areas (hello from Cornwall!), it seems the only benefit from the reduced speed limit will be making it safer to walk or cycle short distances. Speaking purely from my own personal experience, I'll feel much safer crossing the road to get to the village shop if cars are going 20mph rather than 30mph. That said, it'd help more if 30mph speed limits were actually enforced. Plenty of people bomb through my village at 40+mph, and seem no more likely to obey a 20mph speed limit than the existing 30mph speed limit.
This is another part of the problem. We've already got 20mph limits outside schools, and it's rare that people pay attention to them now. I really can't see the new limits being very effective at anything other than increasing road rage.