A blanket 20 mph speed limit across the whole city of Bath. Is that the way to improve road safety and save lives?
Well, according to Guy Hodgson, who is a former Chair of Walk Ride Bath it’s a question of speed or safety.
In a blog on the organisation’s website – https://walkridebath.org.uk/2025/11/10/speed-or-safety-time-for-bath-to-decide/ – he says: ‘I have started a petition for the adoption of 20mph on all of Bath’s roads. This has been prompted by a tragic event: on October 11th, there was a collision between a pedestrian and a motorcyclist in Widcombe. Sadly, the pedestrian later died in hospital.
I am not seeking to apportion any blame, but I do want to see a road system that makes collisions as unlikely as possible and reduces the severity of them when they do.
This is about the SYSTEM, not the individual. Two years ago, BANES councillors unanimously adopted Vision Zero, that being to aim to have no death or serious injuries on the roads of the county. We currently face a big test of that aim.
The people of Bath, be they residents, councillors, council employees or all of the above, need to decide what we are going to prioritise:
Speed or safety?
My view is clear. We still have dangerous 30mph limits through areas with homes on each side of the road, with schools on the road or within a stone’s throw of it, and on roads where the pavements are often busy with pedestrians. Examples include:
- Newbridge Primary School- hemmed in on both sides by 30mph roads
- Widcombe Junior School, St Martin’s Garden, Three Ways, Ralph Allen and Oldfield School- 30mph directly outside
- Bear Flat High Street- a 30mph right through the middle of the community
- Lower Bristol Road around Windsor Bridge- 30mph through an area where pavements are often busy with students and others owing to the number of halls.
It is time to choose safety over speed.
My call to the council is to deliver on Vision Zero and implement 20mph on all roads now. No more talking, no more consultation. The experience of Wales has given us the data we need. 100s of people spared from death or serious injury. And we are talking about around 10miles of road (see this map)- this is a change that could be rolled out in a week if the will was there.
If you agree with me, please sign my petition here. Let’s get this to the top of the council’s agenda. Even better, sign and then write to your councillor. Let them know you won’t be voting for those who favour speed over safety.
Enough is enough.”
Guy’s campaign is also being echoed by local green councillors who have issued the following release:
Green councillors in Bath & North East Somerset (BANES) are urging the Council to take a more proactive approach to road safety by accelerating the rollout of 20mph speed limits before more lives are lost.
“Waiting for a death or serious injury before enforcing a 20mph speed limit is reactive and not proactive” said Cllr Sam Ross for Clutton & Farmborough Ward. “We’re happy that more speed limit schemes are to be delivered within next year’s budget, but I have requested several speed limit reductions across my ward during the past two years, which have all been ignored up to now.”
The Council have stated their commitment to deliver 20 mph speed limits for roads in B&NES villages, towns and within the city of Bath, where they are supported by councillors and are suitable. However, Green councillors argue the current process is flawed and overly reliant on individual ward councillors to initiate action, resulting in inconsistent and delayed implementation.
Cllr Ross urges “Rural lanes with no pedestrian footways are in urgent need of 20 mph limits. Two such roads are Lower Bristol Road near King Lane and Flatts Lane/Clutton Hill, which serve small clusters of housing just outside the village of Clutton. These lanes lack pavements, meaning pedestrians share the road with vehicles that may be travelling at the national speed limit (60mph), a serious safety risk that also discourages parents from walking their children to school.”
Cllr Saskia Heijltjes for Lambridge Ward added, “A 20mph speed limit is not a silver bullet, but has been proven to reduce speeds significantly. Every reduction in speed is helpful and directly correlates to a reduction in serious injuries and deaths in the case of a collision.”
One example of the Council’s unproactive stance on road safety is their refusal to consider a 20mph limit on Newbridge Road, even though it runs alongside the Lyme Road and Charmouth Road Liveable Neighbourhood, which includes a potential School Street for Newbridge Primary School. Despite the clear opportunity to create a safer environment for children walking and cycling to school, the Council has not included this key stretch in the current consultation for the A4 Bath to Bristol Strategic Corridor, highlighting a missed chance to align road safety with community-led planning.
When the Green councillors raised their concerns with the Council, they were assured that ensuring children can travel to school safely is a priority, but any road changes would require strong public support to move forward.
Green councillors say the evidence is clear: lower speeds save lives and enable more people to walk and cycle. Fear of injury remains a major barrier to active travel, especially for children, older residents, and those with disabilities.
“That’s why Vision Zero — the goal of zero avoidable deaths on BANES roads by 2030 — is so important,” said Green Group Leader and Cllr for Lambridge, Joanna Wright. “Road safety targets are already embedded in the West of England Combined Authority’s Joint Local Transport Plan 4 (JLTP4), and the Council’s own Journey to Net Zero strategy highlights the need for safe, accessible infrastructure to support sustainable transport choices. We need to ensure this is progressed”.
Green councillors are calling for a consistent, area-wide approach to speed limit reductions — one that prioritises prevention over reaction.
“We need to move beyond knee-jerk responses,” said Cllr Sam Ross. “A proactive, strategic rollout of 20mph zones will save lives. We must not wait for tragedy before taking action.”
An excellent idea – there’s no need to go any faster in any built up area – BUT how to tackle the delivery mopeds, the scooters and the cyclists who are IMHO the worst culprits? Cyclists are unmarked and I see them ignoring one-way streets and speed limits more than any other road users ?
I completely agree with the above comment regarding scooters and cyclists and is there anyway of keeping them off the pavements too ? As a pedestrian they absolutely terrify me.
20 mph is ignored daily on Bathwick Hill since it was introduced.
I fully support the introduction of 20mph speed limits across Bath, and especially on the A367 (Wellsway) through the Bear Flat Local Centre. There is ample evidence that lower speed limits reduce road accident rates, and make our roads more attractive to pedestrians and cyclists.
Is there any evidence of the speed the motorcyclist was travelling? 20mph reduces
doesn’t remove injuries and fatalities.
The main problem here, is that this is a particularly poorly designed junction for pedestrians. There is no safe way to cross and people end up trying to nip across in the gap between the changes in the traffic lights.
I have no idea why the junction wasn’t designed with a pedestrian crossing.
In spite of the investment that’s been made to prevent cars driving up Gay Street, apparently to make it safer for pedestrians, there is still no way to safely cross George Street into Gay Street.
Equally no way to safely cross at the top of Walcot Street.
Government figures show that the majority of new 20 mph zones only reduce the average speed by 1 yes 1 mph whilst criminalising the vast majority of law abiding and good drivers.
Driving skill and concentration are so much more important than a blanket speed which
Lulls people into a false sense of security.
By definition they are not criminalising law-abiding drivers. And the benefits are many: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST-PB-0065/POST-PB-0065.pdf
In Wales the 20mph limit is being changed back to 30mph.The 20mph limit us just too slow apart from in really busy areas /schools etc.& drivers are looking down checking their speed limit instead of watching the road ahead.Far better to teach pedestrians includ.school children to take more care to keep to pavements as happened in the 50s &60s. Where 3 children are walking 3 abreast on a pavement one of them is nearly always pushed off into oncoming traffic.Terrifying.
My vote is for a 20mph limit
Michael Noakes writes: ‘Further to your Bath Newseum on the subject Speed or Safety, I thought you might like to see the attached Press Release I received today from The Alliance of British Drivers. I am not a fan of blanket speed limits and I think my view is supported in this Press Release.
Mr Hodgson doesn’t state the cause of the sad collision between a motorcyclist and a pedestrian. Who says it was due to excessive speed? It would seem to be an unsubstantiated assumption. ‘
PRESS RELEASE> From the Alliance of British Drivers.
For decades, we have been bombarded with the mantra “speed kills”.
Despite a forest of speed cameras and over £100 million a year extracted in speeding fines, killed or seriously injured (KSI) accidents have plateaued, with no statistically significant reduction since 2009, according to Department for Transport statistics (Dft).
Dft’s own statistics show exceeding the posted speed limit accounts for barely 5% of KSI accidents.
‘Failed to look properly’, ‘Looked but failed to see’, and ‘Failed to judge the path or speed of an approaching vehicle’, continue to account for the vast majority of KSI accidents.
No record is kept of KSI accidents involving speed in excess of the posted speed limit, which involve drink/drug driving, criminal activity, or anti-social behaviour.
We need to get back to sensible speed limits that drivers will respect, and are set by qualified police and road safety professionals – not the whims of local councillors.
Traditionally, speed limits were set at the level at which 85% of vehicles didn’t exceed, but now it appears to be at the level of ‘those who shout loudest’.
Rising levels of speeding fines, coupled with static road accident casualties, prove that speed cameras are simply cash generators for all manner of purposes, and not apparently, highway and byway infrastructure.
There is no substitute for uniformed police officers in a high-visibility police car to force an instant improvement in road user behaviour.
Additionally, we need to set up a fully independent road equivalent of the Air Accident Investigation Board to investigate the cause(s) of every KSI accident, and publish the results weekly in the national press so that the general public can learn from them.
With Road Safety Week commencing on 16 November, isn’t it time that education, rather than fines/enforcement, surely becomes the route to safer roads for all?
I believe 20mph is a realistic speed for built up areas where cars share the space not just with cyclists/scooters but also people (children and those less sprightly) who constantly need to enter that space (crossing roads) to move about the city.
While the Alliance of British Drivers are entitled to their opinion, they are at the most extreme end of the spectrum. A lobby group operated by the private limited company, Pro-Motor. They are climate change sceptics whose aim is to promote driving over alternative forms of travel and campaign for faster speed limits and eliminate road pricing for vehicles.
Compare this to The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), a charity whose aim is to save lives and prevent life-changing injuries which occur as a result of accidents.
Their September 2023 report, “A Guide to 20mph zones and limits” makes it clear:-
“The underpinning idea behind the 20mph schemes is that the speed limit – if adhered to – reduces the risk of crashes occurring and presents a strong chance of avoiding fatal or serious injuries if one does occur. In built up
residential areas, RoSPA believes that 20mph represents the best compromise between mobility and risk.
20mph limits are not just a road safety measure. Therefore, when assessing their value and effectiveness, it is important to consider increases in walking and cycling and improvements in quality of life indicators, such as health
improvements, community cohesion and better air quality, as well as reductions in vehicle speeds and road crashes and casualties.”
The key factor often overlooked is that the consequences of an accident depend on the IMPACT speed, not the speed the driver was travelling at before the accident. Also the publicity is all pointing at accidents being less serious at 20mph than at 30mph. That is true if that is the impact speed, but in real life there is driver reaction time and the scope for reducing speed in the distance to the point of collision. That is where the psychology of driving comes in. Years ago an accident meant that a driver would go through the windscreen or be impaled on the steering column so although the cars then were nowhere near the standard of modern cars, the driver’s concentration was much higher. Also the prosecutions were based on driving at an inappropriate speed for the conditions. Nowadays with pre-tensioning seat belts, air bags, crumple zones and so on the main risk the driver is aware of is points on the licence for exceeding an arbitrary speed limit. This has bred a generation of drivers who assume that the speed limit is a safe speed, and that results in drivers observing the speed limit leaving the road when they run over ice. Also a DfT study revealed that the hype that 20mph is safer than 30mph has resulted in pedestrians taking far less care in 20mph locations. The 20mph limit does produce a reduction in total accidents, but it also produces more injuries in the Killed or Seriously Injured (KSI) category. That is there the psychology comes in. There are some interesting observations from psychologists on the internet.
It takes a measurable amount of time to move the eyes from the road ahead to the speedometer, then refocus the eyes from the far distance to the closeness of the speedometer, then to register the reading on the speedometer and decide whether to react, then to move the eyes back to the road ahead, refocus onto the far distance, assess the scene which has changed in the time the eyes were moved away, and then to decide whether the assessed scene needs any action other than the default already in hand. Physically, the time between the viewing of the road ahead and the restoration of the view of the road ahead is approximately a second, though if after looking at the speedometer it is decided that a speed adjustment is necessary, this could take longer. In that minimum of one second, a pedestrian deciding to cross the road in front of the car will be totally invisible to the driver.
How often that period of invisibility occurs is therefore important If a driver believes that there is a very low risk of having a vehicle’s speed monitored, then the speedometer will be checked occasionally, and in locations where there is little on the road ahead that is likely to demand attention. Assume that this interval between checks is normally no more frequent than once a minute, and no less frequent than once in two minutes, an average of once in 90 seconds. If the driver believes that there is likely to be speed monitoring, and therefore the risk of being caught speeding is higher, then the driver will check the speedometer often, particularly in locations that demand attention because those locations can conceal a speed trap, so typically once each 15 seconds. A pedestrian crossing the road is then six times more likely to emerge into the driver’s period of invisibility and have the driver react too late to avoid an accident, just because somebody decided that a lower speed limit should be enforced. A modern car is designed to have a gear where just a tiny amount of throttle maintains a 30mph speed, and 25mph is normally possible in that gear too. To drive at 20mph requires a lower gear and a different engine speed, so the driver can no longer accurately judge the road speed from the engine note. That is why a driver at 30mph will be watching the road ahead for proportionally much longer than a driver observing 20mph, afraid of being caught exceeding it. The 30mph limit therefore shortens the braking distance by more than a driver observing a 20mph limit, and the impact speed is therefore statistically lower in a 30mph location than in a 20mph location. Also, pedestrians take more care in 30mph locations so are in harms way less frequently.
I believe that there is a role for 20mph speed limits but they should be location specific and not a blanket limit covering a wider area. Thus, a 20mph limit outside schools, and at other locations where extra care is needed such as outside hospitals, nurseries and nursing homes, serves to alert road users to the fact that there is a particular risk of accidents and above-average levels of concentration are needed. Where a whole zone is given the lower limit where for most of it there is no observable reason why it is in place, those locations where special care is necessary are masked by the surrounding apparently unnecessary 20mph zone and become more dangerous because of it.