City Speed Limit

The title for this installment is shamelessly blagged from the first chapter of one of the Mr Tompkins books, in which the innocent and ordinary 1930s bank clerk of that name finds himself accidentally immersed in human-scale equivalents of the various things which Physics says are happening all around us (Electromagnetic waves, Relativity, Quantum effects...) but which nobody ever seems to quite understand.

The books were written by Giorgii ("George") Gamow, a Russian cosmologist whose sense of humour appeals to Lunchista. One of Gamow's first PhD students was Ralph Alpher, and between them they made the first attempt to describe how the Big Bang and ensuing cosmic action would give rise to the chemical elements (Hydrogen, Helium etc) appearing in the proportions in which we find them today. When the time came to publish their first results Gamow got in touch with his mate Hans Bethe, who happily pitched in with the work so that the three names on the paper really did sound like The Beginning.

Anyway, back to the book. In the chapter in question, Mr Tompkins wakes up in a city in which the legal speed limit and the speed of light are the same: both are 30 miles per hour. You would, in other words, need an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed limit, and as you tried and tried to do this you would just get heavier, rather than faster. This meant that passing bikes and cars appeared squashed in their direction of travel, buildings got thinner if you ran past them, your watch ended up slow when you got to where you were going and a well-travelled granddad could outlive his stay-at-home granddaughter.

Lunchista was reminded of all this fun and games while sitting in the Council Chambers yesterday. A campaign is afoot to give our city two speed limits: 30 for the main roads and 20 for the small residential ones. Similar set-ups have been up and running in Portsmouth, Newcastle, Hull and Oxford. Hull has been the first to announce results: deaths on the slow roads are down by 90%, although you could put some of this down to the city's slight fall in population.

You may ask, why bother? To answer that, we have to go right the way back to the stone age.

Before the invention of the wheel, Stone Age Man from time to time fell out of trees, got into fights or fell spectacularly on uneven ground chasing animals through the forests or across the plains while thinking too much about lunch. Stone Age Woman did all this in addition to occasionally having to fend off Stone Age Man. Dangerous though all this activity may have been, hardly any of it involved collisions at more than about 20 miles an hour. We are therefore naturally built to withstand this kind of encounter, and no more. To this day a very low fraction of people hit at 20 mph are killed, whereas nearly half of all people hit at our common city speed limit of 30 mph will come away from the encounter lifeless. Our brains have adapted to this too, causing us to want to remove ourselves from anywhere near the faster-moving objects, thus clearing the streets of pedestrians, cyclists and those all-too-rare people who like to just sit and watch the world go by, and whose very presence lowers crime rates.

Like any other location in the UK, our city has screeds of pages of Strategies whose declared intention is to make it a better place to live, work in and visit. There are Health Strategies (city and Primary-Care-Trust level), Transport Strategies (city and county level), Use-of-Space Strategies (ditto), Climate Change Strategies (ditto, plus national level), you name it, some committee somewhere has, with the best of intentions, put it into a Strategy (and possibly even a Vision). If they couldn't spare the time to do it themselves, chances are they have shelled out for consultants to do it for them.

At our Council meeting, a list of all the Strategies whose aims would be helped by a lower speed limit was read out. I lost count, but it was at least five.

Somebody else then reeled out a riposte, whose logic appeared tight but whose initial assumptions were as follows:

1. Cars are the priority, and people are subservient to them
2. Cars will go where and how they jolly well please, so there's little point in subjecting them to the rule of law (note the seat of consciousness has moved from people to cars)
3. Cars mean Growth, which must (and indeed can) go on forever

And he wasn't even Jeremy Clakson.

The head of the Council was totally impartial, listening to neither side's arguments before announcing the decision to not go ahead with the city-wide lower limit on small roads, but instead to carry on what is being done now: lower limits would be considered street-by-street. For some reason urban guerrilla warfare sprang to mind.

Whatever your personal opinion on the merits or otherwise of lower urban speed limits, you might wonder what exactly is the point of having civil servants and consultants write all those Strategies if a straightforward measure like this, which is obviously helpful to every single one of them, is nevertheless thrown out on account of the cost of a few road signs and a couple of keen polis.

I suppose it keeps them off the streets.