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About the 20mph speed limit in Wales built up areas? Which goes live tonight..

Nicely put:

To drive at 20mph I need to keep my eyes focussed on the speedo and that’s not safe​

If you’re unable to maintain a particular speed without your eyes glued to the speedo, driving’s not for you. One of the things learner drivers master early on is the ability to keep to a particular speed while occasionally glancing at the speedometer to check their speed hasn’t crept up. It’s a basic skill that’s assessed by examiners as part of the driving test. After all, driving steadily at 20mph is no different from maintaining 30, 40 or 70mph.

20mph speed limits force me to drive in a lower gear​

This might be the case if you’re driving a high-revving classic sports car, but if you’re behind the wheel of a modern car you’ll be able to comfortably maintain 20mph in third or even fourth gear. If you don’t believe us, then watch our our video. We drove a little city car with a one-litre engine on 20mph-limited streets to see how it performed.

 
Driving at 20 in fourth like that is bad practice. It's bad to labour the engine, both for the engine and for fuel economy. It also means you have less control. On the other hand there's no problem at all driving in 2nd, so the answer "20mph speed limits force me to drive in a lower gear" should be "Yes, lower speeds generally require lower gears, what's the problem?".
 
Driving at 20 in fourth like that is bad practice. It's bad to labour the engine, both for the engine and for fuel economy. It also means you have less control. On the other hand there's no problem at all driving in 2nd, so the answer "20mph speed limits force me to drive in a lower gear" should be "Yes, lower speeds generally require lower gears, what's the problem?".

That's not an answer, that's a question.
To which the answer would likely be "reduced fuel economy due to frictional losses".

But then this wouldn't apply to electric cars, which all cars will be in no time at all, yessirree.
 
Driving at 20 in fourth like that is bad practice. It's bad to labour the engine, both for the engine and for fuel economy. It also means you have less control. On the other hand there's no problem at all driving in 2nd, so the answer "20mph speed limits force me to drive in a lower gear" should be "Yes, lower speeds generally require lower gears, what's the problem?".
How much 'control' do you envision needing when pootling along at 20mph or under?
 
It's true enough that a car is more efficient at 30mph than 20mph. At 30mph it's actually close to its maximum efficiency - just short of 'A' on the graph below.

This graph is from a 2014 study. I don't know if modern cars have a different profile.

Screenshot 2023-09-20 at 17.18.09.png

It's also true that a car is more efficient the closer it stays to a constant speed, so you also have to factor in more braking when going faster.

But then this measure isn't about car efficiency. It's about road safety and general town liveability.
 
this is pretty incredible, i wasnt aware of this - sounds like it will be physically impossible to drive over the speed limit in a 2024 new car (and cars built after that)

???

It's been around for a while. Trouble is, drivers can turn it off, just like other assist features.
 
To be fair, you should be checking your speed regularly. But car manufacturers had the sense to put the speedo RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU so you can still keep your eyes on the road even while checking it.

People used to moan about this on the 50 speed limit average checkers on motorways. But apparently, when the speed limit actually is 50, they somehow don't need to be constantly checking it.
 
You're probably driving at 20.1 mph and that's OU you see glaring at you.
There’s a small smiley frowny man on a hill I cruise down who tells me if I’m going too fast, so I’ve managed to work out how fast 20 miles an hours is to avoid the frown.
 
There’s a small smiley frowny man on a hill I cruise down who tells me if I’m going too fast, so I’ve managed to work out how fast 20 miles an hours is to avoid the frown.

Have you spoken to him about recruiting a smiley-frowny army?
 
Good use of maths except to explain where the magic 33 million came from. Also pretty sure those numbers don’t include employer NI and Pension costs so it’s far fewer nurses anyway.

If inventing stats is allowed then I’d like to put forward the person hit by a car at 20mph who survives (when they didn’t at 30mph) to become a billionaire and bequeaths half their fortune to the NHS, and the rest towards creating more cycle lanes and low traffic neighbourhoods.
 
The funny thing about this - is that even taking this at face value - 1000 extra staff, the nhs has 1.27m full time equivalent staff.

instead of the LTNs we could have added 0.08% more staff to the NHS, that’ll fix it

LTNs sound like great value !
It will reduce the number of hospital treatments/admissions and ambulance call outs due to respiratory related diseases not to mention injuries
by accidents
 
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