20mph speed limits

Strathblane has been dire to drive through for a good while now, though I wasn't aware there or Killearn had gone down the 20mh route. I dare say the whole area will go that way, sooner rather than later, and I expect tourism will suffer big time. 

I live and work on the Welsh border, so am very used to these by now. Not such am issue in the tipper, which is low geared, but can be a proper dick when towing a small digger.

This is where I am. 20mph on the arterial roads in London is ridiculous. The times pedestrians and cyclists are about you’ll struggle to get to 30mph or there is an utter dearth of risk. All it does is piss drivers off.

A lot of it seems to be driven by the Greens who believe it will reduce emissions when in reality for a lot of cars, they will be spinning at higher revs in a lower gear thereby generating more emissions. I understand the safety angle but timed 20mph limits outside schools and other buildings where you have vulnerable people is all that is needed.

Not just the emissions but I reckon that trying to stick to 20 is much harder than doing 30 so you spend more time watching the speedo and less looking at the road!

You need the Tech Plus Pack.

Mine has Innodrive and as well as all the semi-autonomous driving stuff, you can set it as low as 20mph and below 37mph it’s in queue assist mode so steers to keep you in lane and does all the work in stop/start traffic.  You can switch the queue (lane) assist part off plus it’s independent of lane keep assist, so you can leave that off all the time and still have it do all the work when you’re queuing. 

Far too much common sense there for any Politician or Councillor to even recognise it as sensible!

I have just been watching Clarkson's Farm again and it is amazing how much petty minded nastiness the Council tries to use against Clarkson to stop him doing things to make his farm more financially sustainable. They are like petulant and vindictive children who are not acting for the benefit of the whole area: it has become personal which is effectively an abuse of power in public office. As Jeremy pointed out, the Cotswolds owe much of their natural beauty to the work the farmers put in to maintaining the land. If the Council make it financially unviable then who is going to keep it as an area of natural beauty.

I was in the Golf today and discovered it has been fitted with the ‘Welsh Pack’, as the voodoo cruise can be set at 20mph.

The first car I used cruise in much was the M5 and I was always amused by how hard it accelerated from, say, 50 to 70 when you hit 'resume'.

I was disappointed though when I tried it at 50 in 2nd gear and then slowed to 20 and hit resume, it doesn't do that.

Vocal minorities do appear to have their views imposed on the majority far too easily. I'm not saying they don't have a point sometimes but what annoys me is that instead of trying to address some of their concerns, they are given full control to impose their will on the majority. 

Reminds me of an incident many years back.... where I worked a mature member of staff and his wife went on holiday to Wales. They were in one corner shop looking around and buying some essentials for their stay when two of the locals started talking in Welsh about how English tourist were overrunning the area and ruining it for the locals. What they didn't know was that said colleague's wife was Welsh and understood, and spoke, Welsh perfectly even though her husband didn't. She apparently spouted forth in Welsh noting how the tourists brought their money into the area and kept many local businesses going, as a consequence. This left the two "natives" speechless and in a state of mild shock

Not a 20 limit but in the save vein as John's post a few years ago our local council put a 1 mile length of foot/cyclepath alongside a dual carriageway section of the A92 and as is the way of these things it stopped randomly at a bit of verge near a roundabout.

Last summer they sorted this by adding sections of foot/cyclepath to take the original up to the roundabout and then across 2 sections of verge bordering it to link up with another path heading down one of the exit roads.

I reckon they added about 50-100 yards of tarmac and had to dig out the various bits of verge.

This process took at least 3 months.

In all the time the original mile of footpath has been there I have seen ZERO people using it

Even as a keen cyclist/runner/walker I feel a lot of the paths around here are a waste of money, and done with no real thought, and that's before I know what they cost (which I suspect is substantial). Near me there are plenty of half-arsed markings where they have made half the normal width pavement a "cycle path" but pedestrians never view it as such, I'd never cycle on them (i'd be in the road enraging you lot) as its dangerous, all they do is make people think cycling on all pavements is OK - its not.


Then there are some historic wider pavements half marked as a cycle path, wide enough to use but they go from nowhere to nowhere, around a school for deaf children further out of Newbury than us. The main issue is that the three places that path terminates are a bridge in the Newbury direction (then long section with no verge/pavement on a NSL road), a major dual carriageway (that part understandably looks totally disused, I ran down in just to see where it ended, on a road you can't cycle on is the answer) and the M4/A34 services. Some like this around Thatcham are more useable but they still don't mark off the cycle part better, or make it red, people just walk across of them even when 3m wide. 

Then there are some new massive wide ones they have presumably spent a fortune on, but mostly they are out of Newbury in the villages the other side of the A34 for example. To get there from here on a bike you have to cross a series of NSL roundabouts where I've nearly beem knocked off, and have been beeped at, when I was exactly where I'm supposed to be going right on a roundabout by bike. So these feel like a vanity project for tiny villages that serve a handful of people only. And - British people being dickheads - the one piece of the new stuff I use regularly STILL sees people walking and pushing buggies down the cycle part, even when its a newly reclaimed part of the road, and there is still a really wide pavement separated from the cycle part by a high kerb. This isn't when its busy (its never that busy) - often when I drive past I see one person walking down the middle of the new cycle path, next to the pavement. Arseholes!

I do think UK infrastructure is VERY hard to buyild this stuff on top of.... 

Why do people spend so much time and energy being difficult to others, especially when the "others" bring money and wealth to their area.