Call For Greater Police Powers To Enforce 20mph Zones

Leading Cambridge City Councillor, Tim Bick is calling for a national review to give the police greater powers to enforce 20mph speed limits.

He is urging Cambridge City Council to support the call to the government and the Association of Chief Police Officers as the council considers extending 20mph zones in the city.  

Cllr Bick, Executive Councillor for Community Safety wants consideration given to empower Police Community Support Officers to carry out speed controls to free up police officers for other duties.

He also wants to see option speed awareness courses available for those breaking a 20mph limit for the first time and speed cameras developed for 20mph zones.

Cllr Bick said: “The objective of slowing traffic down on residential roads is shared by many people. It brings greater safety and a better environment. We already have a number of 20mph limits within the city and the city council is currently considering whether to broaden these further.

"They shouldn't rest solely on enforcement, but enforcement does need to be an available tool. It is clear that as the public mood moves on this, the enforcement tools need to keep up in order for the police to continue to make the kind of contribution people would expect from them.

"Where 20mph limits get designated, it should be possible to enforce them drawing on the same approaches used for breaches of all other speed limits. And given the community-based element of 20mph limits, it would also seem appropriate to consider empowering PCSOs to carry out controls in order to make for more flexibility in the deployment of police numbers across the range of incidents they need to deal with."

Cllr Bick’s call comes in a motion to Cambridge City Council on February 23 which welcomes Cambridgeshire Police’s readiness to enforce speed limits and its extension of the fixed penalty notice system for 20mph zones.

His motion urges MPs and the Local Government Association to support and follow-up his call.

The full wording of Cllr Bick’s motion reads as follows:

Welcoming the Department of Transport's encouragement of local authorities which want to introduce 20mph limits, Council accepts that enforcement is only one of the tools which influence the success of such schemes. But it welcomes Cambridgeshire Constabulary's readiness to carry out enforcement and its extension of the fixed penalty notice system to the 20mph limits to do so. To further enhance the situation, it calls on the Government and ACPO to carry out a national review to optimise the tools and powers available for enforcement, to include:

Development of optional speed awareness courses for those breaching a 20mph limit for the first time, treating it like breaches of higher speed limits

The potential to deploy PCSOs to carry out speed controls

The specification of speed cameras suitable for areas of 20mph limits
 
Council calls on local MPs and representatives in the LGA to support and follow-up this call.

Local Residents To Be Asked Their Views On New 20Mph Zones

Cambridge City Council is to launch a consultation and review to find out whether people in the city want more 20mph zones.

The council’s ruling Liberal Democrat group has allocated £60,000 in the council’s budget to pay for a review, research, consultation survey and design work over the next two years.

They have also reserved £400,000 to implement new schemes if the idea gets the approval of residents and businesses.

Cambridge City Executive Councillor for Planning and Sustainable Transport, Tim Ward said: “There have been some concerns that the current approach of creating a patchwork of small 20mph zones may not work very well. So we want to carry out a review to determine which work best and look at other areas which might benefit from a lower speed limit.

“We already have several 20mph zones which have been implemented following campaigns from local residents, and there are other small schemes in the pipeline. The proposed project includes extensive consultation to find out where people do and don't want 20mph zones. A possible outcome is that all residential and shopping streets will have 20mph limits whilst main roads will stay at 30mph.”

Cambridge City Council was granted the freedom to implement 20mph speed limits after the government announced it was cutting red tape so that local authorities no longer had to get Whitehall permission before they could act.

Cllr Ward added: “There are clearly safety benefits from introducing lower speed limits in areas where there are more pedestrians such as streets where there are shops and homes.

“And it has been well documented that, if a road accident were to happen a pedestrian has a far greater chance of escaping serious injury or being killed when a vehicle is travelling at 20mph.

“But we won’t be making any decisions until we have fully consulted on this issue and reviewed how present schemes are working; and we will only act if it’s what our residents want.”

The move has been welcomed as a victory for localism, allowing councils to act faster in response to the needs of their residents.

Local County Councillor Andy Pellew who has been campaigning for a 20mph speed limit on Northfield Avenue outside King's Hedges Primary School said; "This is a very welcome development. We must make sure that this opportunity is fully utilised by making sure that local residents are fully involved in the process of setting up these new zones."

Minor Highways issues within Kings Hedges

As you might have picked up from the minutes of the Cambridge Area Environment and Traffic Management Committee (no? It's a riveting read) Cambridgeshire Highways used to have a list of all the open highways issues in each division (split into unfunded and those with an identified means of funding) which would come to the AJC meeting, be discussed (usually added to) and then would be back in the hands of officers who would get done what they could, identifying new streams of funding if possible, and then report back to the next meeting of the AJC.

As you can see it's a fairly simple process but doesn't actually add a lot of value as a) most of the work is done by officers and (in my view more significantly) b) it encourages Councillors to get things added to the list that won't ever get done. Basically anything that doesn't have an obvious source of funding, isn't a legal requirement, or isn't part of some bigger project is just not going to happen.

The list, after a few years of b), is now pretty long and some of the the reasons why some of the items are sitting on the list have been lost in the mist of time.

Clearly it's time for a change and so the County Officers are now proposing that they spend some time in each Division with local members and prepare a list of highways issues relevant to that division.

In light of that I've been looking at the highways list we already have for Kings Hedges and the new items that people have already suggested (note that in some cases it is a problem that needs a solution rather than a solution!) and come up with the following list;

• 20mph speed limit on Northfield Avenue (outside KH Primary School), 
• Coach parking on Woodhead Drive, 
• Car parking on Lovell Road, 
• Arbury Road cycle path (specifically doing something around the Milton Road junction), 
• Verge parking on Milton Road, 
• Pavement parking across the division,
• Traffic improvements on Arbury Road outside the Manor,
• Verge parking on Hawkins Road, and 
• Cycle route on KH road (specifically around CRC junction)

That's just off the top of my head. What else do you think should be on this list?