I was the Cambridge City Council planning and transport portfolio holder and lead of our large-scale 20mph project in 2013–14. It came about when I observed the endless trickle of little local campaigns to get 20mph limits for a street here, a couple of streets there. People saw that their neighbours had got it and wanted it for themselves.
It seemed obvious to me that this was a very inefficient way of going about things. If we were eventually going to end up covering much of the city in this way, it would surely be much cheaper – both in terms of legal paperwork for the TROs (traffic regulation orders) and in lines-and-signs – to do the whole city in one go? In the event, officers advised that we divide the city into four separate projects, for practical project management and timescale reasons.
Cross-party support
To get the project up and running we needed political support and a budget. So it was arranged that some of my colleagues put a motion to full council instructing me to start work on it. I don’t recall whether the vote was actually unanimous across all parties but, if it wasn’t, it was very nearly so.
A little further down the line, when we had some ballpark numbers for the cost, the full council motion was the political authority to get the money voted through. At that time, at least, our council didn’t find it too hard to find funding for modest one-off capital projects with cross-party support.
During the research phase of the project, we went and had a look at Portsmouth, an early adopter and poster child for city-wide 20mph schemes. We found that, although most of the road network was at 20mph, any particular journey by car could be made mostly at or above 30mph, with 20mph limits applying only for maybe a couple of hundred yards at each end.
From this and other research, we decided to apply 20mph limits to residential and shopping streets, omitting areas like industrial estates. For technical legal reasons, had we tried to apply the new limit to any A or B class roads, the whole scheme might have been scuppered by either the county council or the bus company. So we left those out even where the public campaigned to have them included.
Consultation
Various consultation phases were held. We originally decided to consult separately on whether unclassified roads and C class roads, as a whole, should be included. However, at one of the early public meetings where the scheme was discussed, the public made it clear they wanted different outcomes for different C class roads. So we consulted on each one separately. Decisions about which roads to include then went, almost always, with the results of the public consultation.
Many people have never heard of C class roads, as they aren’t numbered on maps or signposts. In a city these are typically the roads you’d expect to be regarded as main routes from one part of the city to another that aren’t A or B roads.
As the scheme was being developed and as the portfolio holder driving the project I received, as you would expect, a number of representations from members of the public. These were mostly along the lines of “We do or don’t want such-and-such a C class road included. What are you going to do about it?” To which my reply was straightforward: “We will consult on that road separately, and we will do what people want, so this one is up to you.”
The particular road I received most representations about remains at 30mph. The result of consultations showed clear support for the overall scheme, but with differing views on different C class roads.
So, the scheme as implemented included:
- all unclassified residential and shopping streets.
- the individual C class residential and shopping streets the public said they wanted.
- no A or B class roads.
20mph limits implementation
Subsequently, there were public campaigns for some stretches of A and B roads to have 20mph limits applied, and those – there weren’t very many – have been delivered as separate projects. I personally had nothing against including A and B roads where appropriate. But I kept them out of the main project simply because they risked having the whole scheme collapse if challenged legally.
Complaints about the scheme after implementation have mostly been about:
- lack of enforcement. (We were eventually able to persuade police to adopt the public position that they would enforce 20mph limits to the same standard as they enforced 30mph … but that’s not actually very much).
- wanting the scheme extended to some of the A and B roads, as described above.
- how the introduction of 20mph limits by itself doesn’t solve all the city’s transport problems for sustainable modes – further cycling and walking infrastructure is still badly needed.
Cambridgeshire County Council has now “created an annual 20mph funding programme to install either 20mph zones or limits countywide”. The benefits include improved road safety with fewer casualties and deaths, increased sustainable travel uptake and traffic flow, and decreased air pollution and fuel consumption. Plans have been approved for Huntingdon following consultation with residents, and also in Ely.
Here in Cambridge, ten years on, one of the 20mph roundels is still painted on the road outside my house. I’ve never asked why. Did contractors choose that location as part of their normal design processes? Or did council officers – and our officers did have a sense of humour – ask them to add it as a personal souvenir of the project for me?
