First of all, there is nothing at all scientific about this post, only a personal view with the aid of my daughter in law. She is an extremely focused caring individual, who as well as having four of my lovely grandchildren and a couple of foster kids, chairs the local school’s PTA. So she cares about child safety hugely.
Today I went out with her in her 9 seater Mercedes Vito on both the morning school run and then a sixty mile round trip to deliver stuff she had collected for a trust that supports less fortunate children.
As an exercise I asked her to ignore the motorway and drive through the centre of Worcester and the suburbs to our destination. The only stipulation was that in 30 mph areas she drive at 20 mph.
She was amazed at just how difficult and distracting this was. We annoyed many other drivers by doing this but I asked her to ignore the following traffic and just concentrate on our experiment.
Half an hour later when we arrived at our destinati0n we were both stressed and knackered. My caring daughter in law said “who the **** came up with this crazy idea”? Politicians I replied.
We both agreed that in the vicinity of a school or a hospital a 20mph limit was an excellent and desirable idea, but as a blanket idea was totally useless and and potentially dangerous.
We returned on the motorway at an average of 60mph and were relaxed, comfortable and safe when we returned to Malvern having more than halved our journey time.
Do politicians ever test drive their own wildly impractical ideas, or is it really just another money making enterprise?