Default 20mph for Wales

Pete Owens
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Pete Owens »

No - It just needs to be physically possible for the a large vehicle to manage to get round the corner (using the whole width of the carriageway if necessary); that is very different for the junction to be designed FOR the largest vehicles.

Residential streets should be designed FOR pedestrians - which means tight corners with short direct crossings.
Bmblbzzz
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Bmblbzzz »

A radiused corner like the one on the Streetview above allows cars to take the corner with only minimal slowing. It's effectively a bend not a corner. This encourages higher speeds and discourages walking and cycling (let alone kids emulating Gareth Bale).
pwa
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by pwa »

Again, I have to point out that if you design corners solely with the intention of slowing cars down (a good idea in itself) you lose sight of the fact that you and I rely on goods and services that come in larger vehicles, and we need to facilitate the movement of those larger vehicles, whether they be buses, removal vans, Tesco deliveries, fire engines or ambulances. Making corners awkward for those vehicles slows them down and may end up with them bumping over poorly designed corners. There won't be any use of the whole carriageway if the other side of the carriageway is already occupied with a queue of vehicles waitng to get out at peak times. I suppose one way of achieving both aims might be careful use of cobbles, to give larger vehicles an extra bit of width to use, that is very rumbly to pass over and therefore not going to be used by car drivers as a way of not slowing down.

This estate at Broadlands, Bridgend makes extensive use of rumbly setts on corners, presumably to aid school buses, and I never see cars going over them.https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.50249 ... 312!8i6656 Perhaps they could also be integrated into a design for a T junction. Chicanes and a lack of straight sections are the main tools for slowing traffic at Broadlands, and traffic does move slowly there. Slower than at a nearby estate that lacks those features on some of its roads.https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.50952 ... 312!8i6656 I expect that both these estates will see extensive use of the 20mph limit, where it isn't already used, but the newer estate with its twisty roads and frequent chicanes will see better compliance simply because 20mph is already about the highest speed you will achieve on much of it due to the physical restraints.
Bmblbzzz
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Bmblbzzz »

pwa wrote: 1 Dec 2022, 4:33am Again, I have to point out that if you design corners solely with the intention of slowing cars down (a good idea in itself) you lose sight of the fact that you and I rely on goods and services that come in larger vehicles, and we need to facilitate the movement of those larger vehicles, whether they be buses, removal vans, Tesco deliveries, fire engines or ambulances.
I disagree. We do not need to facilitate the movement of pantechnicons (it's not often I get a chance to use that word, so I take all the few opportunities I get :D ) in streets they might visit occasionally. We probably need to ensure it does not become impossible but making it easy is unnecessary and can backfire. As for fire engines and ambulances, the greatest delays to these in residential streets come from badly (but usually legally) parked cars.
pwa
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by pwa »

Bmblbzzz wrote: 1 Dec 2022, 9:10am
pwa wrote: 1 Dec 2022, 4:33am Again, I have to point out that if you design corners solely with the intention of slowing cars down (a good idea in itself) you lose sight of the fact that you and I rely on goods and services that come in larger vehicles, and we need to facilitate the movement of those larger vehicles, whether they be buses, removal vans, Tesco deliveries, fire engines or ambulances.
I disagree. We do not need to facilitate the movement of pantechnicons (it's not often I get a chance to use that word, so I take all the few opportunities I get :D ) in streets they might visit occasionally. We probably need to ensure it does not become impossible but making it easy is unnecessary and can backfire. As for fire engines and ambulances, the greatest delays to these in residential streets come from badly (but usually legally) parked cars.
I congratulate you on your big word :lol:

Infrastructure design is a complex matter, and if we are just talking about tweaking one particularly wide turning to discourage excessive cornering speed, that won't adversely affect anyone too much. But I remain convinced that as long as we require bigger vehicles (buses, ambulances, fire engines, delivery vans) to access streets, we have to design with those properly considered. Or say they are banned from certain streets.
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mjr
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by mjr »

pwa wrote: 1 Dec 2022, 4:33am There won't be any use of the whole carriageway if the other side of the carriageway is already occupied with a queue of vehicles waitng to get out at peak times.
Then they must wait, similar to how abnormal loads must at many main road junctions, or the sender sends smaller vehicles into some towns. Letting max legal HGV turning circles dictate residential street corners inevitably means enabling 40+mph cornering by hot hatches. The consequential damage and injury (is a child's life still valued at £14m?) will far exceed the cost of the delays to occasional large vehicles. So choose: cheaper deliveries or healthier children?
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Mike Sales
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Mike Sales »

When a wide radius corner is converted into one which dictates a slower speed, the road foundation need not be removed. The surface should be replaced with cobbles, and/or the kerb with a higher one. This would discourage corner cutting unless it is necesary for a large vehicle which would be moving slowly.
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Pete Owens
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Pete Owens »

Unfortunately the auto-supremacist philosophy articulated articulated by pwa has dominated our town planning for so long that features
as huge flared turn to junctions have become normalised. It is not a matter of the odd flared turn that is a problem, but reversing the planning guidelines that require their introduction. We need to move away from, designing streets purely as conduits for motor traffic - placing the convenience of motorists above all other concerns.

Yes of course large vehicles need to be able to physically access street, But that very much do not mean that those streets should be designed to make that very easy at the expense of making the streets work for people on foot. The common motorist trope of equating the slightest inconvenience to a complete ban might work in a letter to the local paper, but as an argument to a cycle forum it just makes you appear ridiculous.

I live in an area of Victorian terraces; a conventional grid of streets with tight (2m - the width of a pavement) turn radii. No off street parking and so on. Current auto-centric planning rules would not allow it to be built - yet the bin lorries manage to collect our bins (even from the narrow back alleys), ambulances, fire engines delivery vans, builder lorries and so on all manage to reach us. When people move house large removal vans can get in. Now it is not necessarily easy for these large vehicles, but it is possible (they are vey much not banned) - and any problems are caused by inconsiderate parking rather than the street layout. But it does work very well for pedestrians - the straight streets and high density of housing means that a lot of us are within walking distance of the high street.
Pete Owens
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Pete Owens »

And as an example - this is the junction to the A56 at my local chip shop:
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.3690743 ... 384!8i8192
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Bmblbzzz »

We need to move away from, designing streets purely as conduits for motor traffic - placing the convenience of motorists above all other concerns.
Very much so. In fact I'd go a bit further and say we need to move away from thinking of streets purely as conduits for traffic of any sort – they have so many other functions in addition.
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Bmblbzzz »

Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2022, 11:17am And as an example - this is the junction to the A56 at my local chip shop:
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.3690743 ... 384!8i8192
I'm wondering if they do a nice pea fritter like our local does.
https://goo.gl/maps/CH75iNf6SvaEnuQ67

And back on topic here's the next street down, this junction with the A38 is used by buses – of a certain sort (they're the size of a large minibus but don't make any intermediate stops... a little exploration will make it clear!)
https://goo.gl/maps/azYpk5jrwYHfawvt7
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Cugel
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Cugel »

Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2022, 11:06am We need to move away from, designing streets purely as conduits for motor traffic - placing the convenience of motorists above all other concerns.

Yes of course large vehicles need to be able to physically access street, But that very much do not mean that those streets should be designed to make that very easy at the expense of making the streets work for people on foot. The common motorist trope of equating the slightest inconvenience to a complete ban might work in a letter to the local paper, but as an argument to a cycle forum it j[fails].
Agreed. If anything needs to change it's the unfettered access of any and all gas-guzzlers to urban streets used by lots of people and other vulnerable biological entities

The "need to deliver" thing is already being improved in some such areas by the use of cargo bikes and similar for "the last mile". Such delivery methods have many advantages besides replacing speeding lorries with slow and small carriers and so reducing the danger to pedestrians, cyclists, cats, dogs, grannies, children and others who have a claim on such streets. Reduction in pollution. They also allow the more differentiated deliveries of all sorts of different stuffs to all sorts of urban locations in parallel rather than in series. The "drivers" will see improved health, mental & physical.

Kar Kulture has been stuffed into our brains for decades. Many don't seem to realise that they've had a brainwashing by the kar-krazy svengalis. Perhaps they need to, er, wake up. :-)

Cugel
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pwa
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by pwa »

Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2022, 11:06am Unfortunately the auto-supremacist philosophy articulated articulated by pwa has dominated our town planning for so long that features
as huge flared turn to junctions have become normalised. It is not a matter of the odd flared turn that is a problem, but reversing the planning guidelines that require their introduction. We need to move away from, designing streets purely as conduits for motor traffic - placing the convenience of motorists above all other concerns.

Yes of course large vehicles need to be able to physically access street, But that very much do not mean that those streets should be designed to make that very easy at the expense of making the streets work for people on foot. The common motorist trope of equating the slightest inconvenience to a complete ban might work in a letter to the local paper, but as an argument to a cycle forum it just makes you appear ridiculous.

I live in an area of Victorian terraces; a conventional grid of streets with tight (2m - the width of a pavement) turn radii. No off street parking and so on. Current auto-centric planning rules would not allow it to be built - yet the bin lorries manage to collect our bins (even from the narrow back alleys), ambulances, fire engines delivery vans, builder lorries and so on all manage to reach us. When people move house large removal vans can get in. Now it is not necessarily easy for these large vehicles, but it is possible (they are vey much not banned) - and any problems are caused by inconsiderate parking rather than the street layout. But it does work very well for pedestrians - the straight streets and high density of housing means that a lot of us are within walking distance of the high street.
The bit highlighted is a point of agreement. In fact to a degree I concur with thrust of what you are saying here. We have to allow in vehicles of types that we feel are necessary (you mention the bin wagon and I mentioned the possibility of a school bus) but we don't want to create the temptation, in some, to drive too fast and aggressively. How, exactly we do that is something that interests me, so don't interpret my questioning as direct opposition. It is exploration of how we achieve vital objectives that seem to pull us in opposite directions sometimes.

The pic that triggered this little digression is the entrance to an estate
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.65699 ... 384!8i8192
that doesn't see a lot of fast driving. Adhering to the forthcoming 20 limit isn't going to force most people to slow down, as that is about the prevailing natural limit anyway. On the occasions I have ventured into that estate I haven't had the impression that the local driving culture is fast. But if the council had money for it, yes, that corner is a bit generous and could be trimmed. Personally, I'd save the money and spend it on estates where grossly inappropriate speeds are common.
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by pwa »

Cugel wrote: 2 Dec 2022, 12:20pm
Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2022, 11:06am We need to move away from, designing streets purely as conduits for motor traffic - placing the convenience of motorists above all other concerns.

Yes of course large vehicles need to be able to physically access street, But that very much do not mean that those streets should be designed to make that very easy at the expense of making the streets work for people on foot. The common motorist trope of equating the slightest inconvenience to a complete ban might work in a letter to the local paper, but as an argument to a cycle forum it j[fails].
Agreed. If anything needs to change it's the unfettered access of any and all gas-guzzlers to urban streets used by lots of people and other vulnerable biological entities

The "need to deliver" thing is already being improved in some such areas by the use of cargo bikes and similar for "the last mile". Such delivery methods have many advantages besides replacing speeding lorries with slow and small carriers and so reducing the danger to pedestrians, cyclists, cats, dogs, grannies, children and others who have a claim on such streets. Reduction in pollution. They also allow the more differentiated deliveries of all sorts of different stuffs to all sorts of urban locations in parallel rather than in series. The "drivers" will see improved health, mental & physical.

Kar Kulture has been stuffed into our brains for decades. Many don't seem to realise that they've had a brainwashing by the kar-krazy svengalis. Perhaps they need to, er, wake up. :-)

Cugel
Like me, you live in Wales. So you must know how inappropriate a heavy cargo bike laden with a heavy load would be in many places. Okay, I can think of a few flatter areas in coastal towns, notably Cardiff, but most Welsh towns have a flat bit that rapidly gives way to a very much not flat bit. Assuming one could get someone to cycle up to one's home on the hill with the Sainsbury's order, by the time they have got to you, unloaded and got back to base to recover, their motorised equivalent in a Sainsbury van may have delivered to half a dozen homes and be working on the next half dozen. The cargo bike idea might work for a local butcher delivering to a small community, but not for a big supermarket delivering to a wide catchment.

Just up from the junction I highlighted before, this is the hill up to Cimla, a suburb of Neath:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.65669 ... 384!8i8192
It climbs, sometimes steeply, for another mile. There is a lot of housing at the top. Even with electircal assistance. Imagine some poor blighter slogging up there, over fifteen minutes or whatever, to deliver ten or fifteen bags of shopping from the town centre supermarket to just one address. If the round trip takes just half an hour, that means at least £5 delivery charge to cover the wage of the delivery person alone, to which you must add the wage of the person who picked the shopping, plus other staff in admin,etc, plus the cost of equipment and insurance. That is going to be a very slow and costly way of getting shopping.

Anyone know of a cargo bike delivery service operating successfully in a hilly town?
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Cugel
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Re: Default 20mph for Wales

Post by Cugel »

pwa wrote: 3 Dec 2022, 7:10am
Cugel wrote: 2 Dec 2022, 12:20pm
Pete Owens wrote: 2 Dec 2022, 11:06am We need to move away from, designing streets purely as conduits for motor traffic - placing the convenience of motorists above all other concerns.

Yes of course large vehicles need to be able to physically access street, But that very much do not mean that those streets should be designed to make that very easy at the expense of making the streets work for people on foot. The common motorist trope of equating the slightest inconvenience to a complete ban might work in a letter to the local paper, but as an argument to a cycle forum it j[fails].
Agreed. If anything needs to change it's the unfettered access of any and all gas-guzzlers to urban streets used by lots of people and other vulnerable biological entities

The "need to deliver" thing is already being improved in some such areas by the use of cargo bikes and similar for "the last mile". Such delivery methods have many advantages besides replacing speeding lorries with slow and small carriers and so reducing the danger to pedestrians, cyclists, cats, dogs, grannies, children and others who have a claim on such streets. Reduction in pollution. They also allow the more differentiated deliveries of all sorts of different stuffs to all sorts of urban locations in parallel rather than in series. The "drivers" will see improved health, mental & physical.

Kar Kulture has been stuffed into our brains for decades. Many don't seem to realise that they've had a brainwashing by the kar-krazy svengalis. Perhaps they need to, er, wake up. :-)

Cugel
Like me, you live in Wales. So you must know how inappropriate a heavy cargo bike laden with a heavy load would be in many places. Okay, I can think of a few flatter areas in coastal towns, notably Cardiff, but most Welsh towns have a flat bit that rapidly gives way to a very much not flat bit. Assuming one could get someone to cycle up to one's home on the hill with the Sainsbury's order, by the time they have got to you, unloaded and got back to base to recover, their motorised equivalent in a Sainsbury van may have delivered to half a dozen homes and be working on the next half dozen. The cargo bike idea might work for a local butcher delivering to a small community, but not for a big supermarket delivering to a wide catchment.

Just up from the junction I highlighted before, this is the hill up to Cimla, a suburb of Neath:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.65669 ... 384!8i8192
It climbs, sometimes steeply, for another mile. There is a lot of housing at the top. Even with electircal assistance. Imagine some poor blighter slogging up there, over fifteen minutes or whatever, to deliver ten or fifteen bags of shopping from the town centre supermarket to just one address. If the round trip takes just half an hour, that means at least £5 delivery charge to cover the wage of the delivery person alone, to which you must add the wage of the person who picked the shopping, plus other staff in admin,etc, plus the cost of equipment and insurance. That is going to be a very slow and costly way of getting shopping.

Anyone know of a cargo bike delivery service operating successfully in a hilly town?
There are certainly different circumstances in various kinds of places. In highly urban places, there's plenty of scope for cargo bike delivery over the last mile from distribution centres out of town. Supermarkets, for example, are very much out of town. Another advantage of cargo bike delivery is that it would employ many more "drivers" than does use of a big van.

This will be seen as a disadvantage by the accountant of the supermarket or logistics firm but it does provide the advantage of many more useful and healthy jobs for the wider community. Perhaps prices will go up a bit as a consequence? Perhaps that's a good thing in many cases. On the other hand, perhaps the increased prices ought to go to the producers (farmers and manufacturers) rather than to the middlemen (supermarkets and logistic firms)?

***********
The "scattered & hilly" community variety you describe with the Welsh example .... it does show a different case-type. However .....

You may be underestimating the effectiveness of an electric cargo bike at handling hills. And I can easily imagine a service such as our local Len the Fish with an e-cargo bike covering the same area he now does in his van, typically a selection of places each day within a radius of 12-15 miles from his base. He might need a big cargo bike - perhaps something more like a milk float - slower but not by that much in practice. Safer, low pollution, quiet and probably cheaper to run.

As to the large lorries seen sculling about the narrow roads of West Wales - well, there are some but the overall traffic is still very low. I've not been in a traffic jam out here since the tea time exodus in Aberystwyth 9 years ago! All that's needed there is an enforcement of size limits on lorries to rid us of the vast things that are too wide for their side of the narrow roads, even the main roads with a white line down the middle. And more speed limits with speed bumps to enforce them. (They already have them in most of the villages between Lampeter and Carmarthen on the A-road).

**********
In short, there's no pressing reason to allow speeding pantechnicons and similar immense things through places where people live and walk about. There's no reason to have 40mph limits through Welsh villages rather than 20mph with speed bumps. (It lengthens a typical A to B West Wales journey time by about 2 minutes over 20 miles through half a dozen speed-bumped villages). Smaller vehicles going less fast is not hard to achieve, even if some accountant at MadriverRus thinks otherwise.

In even shorter, only the inertia of old bad transport habits prevents something far better, cleaner and safer. And a lack of imagination. And vested interests of a tiny few.

Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
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