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Roads safe as they are
• COUNCILLOR Katie Dawson is, of course, wrong in demanding the imposition of a blanket 20mph speed limit on all residential roads without consulting residents. One has to breathe a sigh of relief that the council has rejected out of hand her even more extreme and rather silly idea of having this speed limit on every road in the borough, including main arterial routes.
She argues that the consultation process is too long-winded, and that the 20mph scheme in Highbury Fields was only introduced after five years of campaigning. As a resident of Highbury Fields I was certainly not aware of this five-year campaign, neither I suspect was any other resident.
This scheme was suddenly put forward in the summer of this year by the council, liaising with a small group of residents, after Transport for London (TfL) undertook to finance it to the tune of £250,000. Consultation took place a couple of months later, and its implementation has been fast-tracked under the threat of losing TfL’s money.
Even so, the Highbury Fields scheme is unnecessary and a waste of public money spent on a network of roads quite safe as they are. There have been only a handful of minor accidents around the Fields in the last few years, and most were in roads that already have speed humps, so they could not have been caused by cars going at excessive speeds.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents has admitted that only five per cent of road accidents are caused by excessive speed. If Jeremy Clarkson is to be believed, we will be hitting more children at such a slow speed, but, don’t worry, the good news is that fewer of them will be killed. What a strange and dangerous kind of logic.
The truth is, the Highbury Fields case has little to do with road safety, more to do with some residents seeing the speed humps now being installed as a way of discouraging drivers from using the Fields as a cut-through, which they resent. I for one have no problem with this, and although two-thirds of responding residents voted in favour of this scheme, this was only a small minority of the total number of residents canvassed in the consultation.
DANNY MICHELSON
Highbury Crescent, N5
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