Is your town a “30k town, 30k town”?
Sing that to the tune of Dirty Old Town and you’ll get the gist of the catchy Road Safety Authority (RSA) campaign aimed at saving lives in urban areas.
Reducing your speed to 30km/h when you drive through a town, village or housing estate is safer, better for the environment and better for local businesses too. But rushing to school, work and activities can leave us blinkered to that.
Zipping down main street as fast as you can get away with might feel like you’re winning, but that driving faster always gets you there faster is a bit of a myth. Dropping to 30km/h has a minimal effect on journey times, according to the RSA. Continually accelerating and decelerating won’t actually increase your average speed all that much.
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Traffic in your town or village moves more smoothly when everyone slows down.
Driving over 30km/h in an urban area actually increases road danger. Put simply, you reduce the risk of killing and injuring walkers and cyclists by slowing down.
Between 2018 and 2022, 27 per cent of road fatalities and 53 per cent of serious injuries in Ireland occurred on an urban road.
Over this time period, almost nine in 10 seriously injured pedestrians and eight in 10 seriously injured cyclists were injured on an urban road. If you speed in your own town, village or housing estate, you may well know the person you hit.
If hit at 60km/h, five out of 10 pedestrians will be killed. If hit at 50km/h, three out of 10 pedestrians will be killed.
If hit at 30km/h, nine out of 10 will survive, according to research from the University of Galway titled Vehicle Speed and Pedestrian Fatalities (2023).
A 30km/h town is just a nicer place to live too. If you live in a place where drivers accelerate before the traffic lights change, speed up to get through zebra crossings, or tackle speed bumps like they don’t exist, it can feel like a bad video game.
Where cars are driven at a safer speed, more people walk and cycle. Younger and older people are more likely to move about independently, says the RSA.
So instead of complaining about traffic calming measures in your town, slow down. More walkers and cyclists means fewer cars on the road. This can improve the journey times of those driving.
Enforce slower speeds, and housing estates can be transformed from car dominated through-roads to vibrant people-friendly spaces. Children can play outdoors.
There are the environmental benefits too. Reducing your speed to 30km/h reduces air pollution in urban areas. Slower driving can also have a positive impact on the numbers walking or cycling. Fewer cars means fewer emissions. Driving more slowly reduces noise pollution too.
Then there’s the money argument - you’ll save money by driving more slowly.
The driver who, arriving at roundabouts, pedestrian crossings and junctions at speed, has to brake hard, is guzzling fuel and money. Constantly decelerating and accelerating empties your fuel tank faster.
Earlier this year, speed limits on rural roads were reduced from 80km/h to 60km/h as part of the Government’s campaign to reduce road deaths to zero by 2050.
The next phase is to reduce speed limits in urban areas from 50km/h to 30km/h. The Department of Transport however says this must happen through special speed limit by-laws, rather than a default speed limit.
This will involve each local authority undertaking a statutory public consultation process and considering all representations, in accordance with the requirements of the Road Traffic Act 2004.
[ Data on Irish drivers observed using mobile phones is questioned by RSAOpens in new window ]
Speeds will only be changed where a majority of the elected members vote to do so, the department has said.
Meanwhile, progress in other countries speeds ahead. Scandinavian countries have a de-facto 30km/h limit for most urban roads with Oslo and Helsinki recording zero pedestrian deaths last year with 30km/h as a key reason.
Spain set a national 30km/h limit for all urban roads with a single carriageway in each direction from May 2021. In Wales, the new national 20mph (32km/h) speed limit for cities, towns and villages in the nation became effective in September 2023.
As we continue to wait for action for Irish towns and villages, we can speed things up ourselves by slowing down.
