I was bought a bicycle for my 11th birthday so I could get myself to secondary school. Still riding to work 40+ years later (but not on the same bike).
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Same here but 5 years younger.
Iâve left this to stew a bit, but yes, in part. I think thereâs a whole slew of irrational thought out there - public transport and active travel are unsafe, âdirtyâ (I hear that one a lot), something not quite nice that the poors do.
I get that cars are frequently more convenient but in this particular instance youâd need your head looking at to drive voluntarily in the school run traffic here - itâs atrocious. And yet they still do it.
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Exactly this; I agree wholeheartedly- I sit behind these in unnecessary traffic jams every fucking morning and afternoon it seems!
On balance- I drive around the less salubrious suburbs and there are quite a lot of muggings and stabbings unfortunately⌠I can understand people choosing another way to travel. 
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Just laziness Iâm afraid.
All school runs are shit, for everyone, in every town and city up and down the country. It doesnât matter what car is driven at all. When EVs are a thing , people will still moan about the school run.
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Interesting experience the other day, heading through a village called Shirburn. This is in Oxfordshire, so @HughJanus not withstanding you would expect a large number of residents to be best accompanied by a pineapple ring and peas.
Oxfordshire has of course put lots of 20mph limits in, but not there. And surprisingly there were a lot of posters asking why they hadnât got their 20mph limit.
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I used to live in Shirburn.
The place is a racetrack. The run from Oxfordshire villages and towns towards the M40, is focused on this one road. Itâs busy, and nobody drives at 30 (the current limit).
Their claim to 20mph is misguided as there is NO community, and precious little âfootâ traffic to justify it. The traffic is continuous but there is very little impact on the residentâs lives. Apart from FOMO.
Where I am, there is a community (itâs part of the reason for us being here), but no footpaths and a âblindâ bend in the middle of the village. The 20mph limit is justified.
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The other day someone described the 20 MPH zones as cash mugging funnels.
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Sadiq Khan and Safety? Too many double standards for me to take this seriously, Iâm afraid.
20mph zones save lives and donât slow traffic ⌠In London
The last time I drove in London (OK, central London) I was lucky to average 10mph on weekdays. So the mayor might well be right.
But in rural Oxfordshire, where almost all small communities have now been âtwentiedâ, the new limit really does both slow the traffic (dear Lord, that is literally the whole point of it) and delay it too. I have to laugh every time I drive through Ipsden. This is one (the busier one, I think) of the two east-west roads.
It is ruler straight. The 20 zone is less than a couple of hundred metres long. The rest of the road is NSL. Yup, the law limits you to 60 ! Fear for your life limits you to a lot less than that. On the left are the church, the village well and four houses. Four. Two are large and expensive and set back from the road. The other two are a pair of farmworkersâ semi-detached cottages.
There really hasnât been much (any ?) thinking about this limit. They just did it because ⌠well ⌠because.
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Iâm half wondering whether someone in one of the expensive houses is on a committee or similar and wanted the slowdown outside their house.
In quite a few French villages you could tell roughly where the Mayor lived because youâd come across arbitrary 30kph speed limits when the rest of the village was 50kph throughout!
Iâm inclined to agree with you on this one.
Iâm all in favour of measures that discourage congestion and pollution, but 20mph in London is pretty irrelevant.
Either cars crawl around at 8mph or on the odd occasion that thereâs open road they do 40 in a 20 zone then jam on the anchors as they go through the patch thatâs covered by a gatso.
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Theyâd live in one of the posh houses. Actually I think the one nearer the road might still be a farm (then again itâs half-timbered and the aerial view shows it has a swimming pool, so maybe not). I did once meet a very large tractor coming the other way though, so Iâm guessing theyâre used to vehicle noise. And the sort of person whoâd race through here isnât the sort whoâd be deterred by road signs. Theyâre hardly likely to get nicked, after all.
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I wonder why councils donât do this ? âŚ.Oh, yÂŁah
Councils around here do the smiley/frowny speed sign quite a bit. A mate of mine is a parish councillor and I recall him saying that the DoT has rules about where they can and canât be put but when his council managed to get one set up at one end of their village they learned that the thing had a calibration adjustment knob in it (I really canât understand why). So the council could, to a degree, have it set to be more or less intimidating.
I helped with the original calibration of our village signs. My speedometer and Speed Limiter was checked by a Gatso, then I had to maintain 30 mph while knobs were twiddledâŚone on the display, several parameters in the software. This was all done several times late on a Sunday night.
We have since had a second one fitted at the other end of the village, but I was not needed due to their faith in the software.
Real time 20 shows as 21.
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