Monthly Archives: October 2009

Riding through Darlington town centre this morning, I saw…

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… a council van and trailer, parked in the contraflow bike lane on Northgate while power washing the pedestrian ‘tunnel’ to Union Street;

… a motorbike and a scooter parked in the bike racks outside Barratt’s shoe shop, which must have both illegally ridden down Northgate to get there;

… a Citroen Piccasso waiting to get into the gated alleyway by Evans, which must have illegally driven down Northgate to get there;

… a Veolia bin wagon driving through the No Entry signs on Bondgate and then the wrong way down the one way street.

Update: and yesterday, Ralph’s daughter saw his stolen bike

20mph limits cut speed, crashes and casualties in Portsmouth

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The first city in the UK to introduce 20mph limits on almost all residential streets has seen very encouraging results published in an interim report (Surveyor 1/10/09).

In March 2008, Portsmouth completed a nine-month programme to implement signed-only 20mph speed limits on 410 of its 438km road network.

A report commissioned by the DfT has revealed that on roads where the average speed before the scheme was above 24mph, a reduction of seven mph has been achieved. This change was described in the Atkins report as ‘statistically significant’.

The report also found collisions dropped by 13% and the number of casualties by 15%.

Duncan Price, branch head of road safety at the DfT, said there was ‘general support’ for a ‘substantial expansion of 20mph areas’.

Simon Moon, Portsmouth’s head of transport and street managements, said: “This interim report is limited in what it can say about the 20mph scheme – we’ll have to wait until it has been running for three years before we get the full picture.

“But there are some encouraging signs, especially on roads where speeds were significantly higher than 20mph when we imposed the new limit.”

Darlington Cycling Campaign has been calling for a similar scheme to be introduced in the town at our AGM in February 2007.