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So many of us have been fined that we’ve been reduced to a state of docile compliance. I travel round London on the back of my husband’s Vespa, and I can tell you all the fun has gone out of it. At 20mph, we’re constantly being overtaken by cyclists.
It was in the manifestos, but how many of us noticed this or remember a well-informed, cross-examined public debate about it? That’s our fault, but I do have a sense that this new world of enforced slowness has been foisted on us in an overwhelming, blanket way by zealots and activists. Non-activists – the passive majority, probably – just woke up one morning and found themselves living in it.
The new rule will probably never be reversed, because no one wants to be seen to row back on health and safety. Councillors have jumped on to the ‘safety’ bandwagon, reluctant to protest for fear of being branded a pedestrian murderer. The Welsh government has issued a particularly infantilising animated video justifying the 20mph rollout across Wales. ‘Vision Zero’ is London mayor Sadiq Khan’s slogan for his 20mph law across all of central London: the aim being the elimination of road deaths. It’s one more for the deaf-to-all-argument ‘zero’ collection, along with ‘net zero’ and ‘zero Covid’.
Of course, none of us wants pedestrians to die. But, as with all spin, the spin of ‘elimination of deaths’ allows ‘zero’ space for the other side of the argument, in this case the argument that there just might be a few disadvantages to adding two extra travelling hours per week on to millions of people’s daily commutes or school runs, which now take 45 minutes rather than the previous 30. That’s millions more wasted hours per year, stifling the nation’s efficiency. Motorists and motorcyclists are seen as a legitimate target, like smokers, their behaviour to be nudged, via frustration and expense, into a hoped-for eventual total-giving-up of the habit.
The 20mph rule is affecting our daily lives more than Brexit. I asked a group of Deliveroo drivers outside our local pizza restaurant what they think of it. They hate it. They’re paid by the order, not by the hour, and the reduction from 30mph to 20 means that every order is now taking almost half as long again to deliver. ‘If you start a campaign to go back to 30 on main roads,’ one of them said to me, ‘I’ll support it.’ Off he toddled, pitifully slowly, pizzas cooling in his topbox, hungry people a few miles away chafing at the delay.
Because you read about cars
Also by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
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