'king nonsense so it is.
To be honest I welcome it. Not because of all the environmental, noise and pollution arguments, which are valid, but because around my way the roads constantly switch between 20 and 30.
The roads immediately around me I know but once I venture anywhere slightly new to me it is a struggle to keep up with the differing zones. If you ride at 20 - 25 in a 30 zone, you will be buzzed by angry taxi drivers at 35 - 40, which is scary.
If we’re going to have them, lets have them in all urban areas, and let’s have them properly enforced so we can just stick to ~23 and not be bothered by dangerous speeders buzzing us.
No problem with 20mph in residential streets, outside schools etc but NOT on arterial roads, trunk routes and (as a general rule ) on bus routes.
Of course once councils/TFL mark a road as 20mph it will never be upgraded back to 30mph - just like yellow lines they are there for eternity never mind how circumstances change.
I was a Blood Runner trundling through London’s deserted streets between 1am and 6am , bobbling along at a legal 20mph with only the odd plastic bag blowing in front of me - when it was pissing down even the occasional drunk never sauntered out yet I had to stick to the rules in case I was surprised by a 20mph speed camera… Grrrr
I couldnt care less
having a 20mph limit & enfocring are two different things
My daughter’s school is on this trunk road, she and a 1,000 of her fellow pupils, cross this arterial route every day. You can see from my screenshot there is no signal-controlled crossing on for example York Gate, most of the other side roads are equally without signal control. Drivers would take that corner at fast arterial road speeds and scatter the school children crossing. It is right that this arterial road is now 20 mph.
You have a point - not arterial routes in busy pedestrian heavy Central London - obviously.
Unpleasant surprise coming in this morning to find East Smithfield by Tower Hill down to 20mph. That used to be a fun limit change on the way out of London, looks as though it is going to extend all the way down the A1203
Same yesterday seven sisters, Finsbury Park all 20mph now
1,000 of her fellow pupils? I’m 100% in favour of children’s safety maybe a better idea would be to install signal-controlled crossings, even at 20 mph I’d not want to hear of children being mowed down en masse. It seems to me introducing these 20 mph limits only succeeds in slowing traffic flow and discouraging folk from driving in London when for many there is no alternative. Not that I’d want to see the return of Police vehicles competing in unofficial speed trials along the Marylebone Road as was their thing back in the 1970’s.
If there is no alternative to driving, people can’t be discouraged by a slightly lower speed limit surely?
But there is, and if driving is less ideal than the other alternatives that most people dismiss as pointless, it suddenly holds value.
And before someone pulls the whole my mum’s-friend’s-son’s-dog has to drive because of flying spaghetti monsters, there will always be cases where driving works best, but the vast majority of errands in London should/can be done without a car. The bits that cant yet be done without a car will only change when there’s public push for it to change, and that won’t happen while cars are so convenient. We have become used to the ease of car travel in cities, but it’s not a sustainable option with cities getting larger and more population dense, and to add to the unpopular opinions here, motorbikes are not the answer either.
Quite agree, my point was that if you genuinely needed a car to make a journey and there was no alternative, nothing could discourage you.
I’m not sure how much real world difference a 20 limit makes, especially for cars during the day.
The London bit of my commute is Tibbets corner on the A3 to Borough Market - approx 9 miles. If i did a constant 20mph it would take 18 minutes, constant 30mph would be 27 minutes. In the real world there are traffic lights, morons blocking box junctions, long queues of traffic etc and in the car it would probably take at least 45 minutes in the middle of the day - the only way to reduce that is to get rid of a load of the cars.
My maths is not what it used to be, I’m not going to lie. However, on the assumption these speeds are a constant, how can 20mph be quicker than 30mph? 
Well done, you spotted the deliberate error to make sure that you are paying attention 