this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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While it sounds good on paper, in practice, they've screwed it up. They're putting the new speed limits in place on every 30mph road in Wales before they've put the public transport alternatives in place.
There's currently no reason for someone to switch to public transport, especially if the buses are going to be stuck at the same speed as the cars, but stopping regularly too. Our roads are too narrow to install bus lanes, and barely have enough room for single file traffic through lots of the towns and villages. The trains are being upgraded, but that's not scheduled to finish until at least next year, and at the moment they're slow and very unreliable. It feels like every week the trains are cancelled and an inadequate replacement bus service is put on.
I'm disabled, and have to travel from my town, Aberdare, to the main hospital in Cardiff, UHW, on a regular basis. If I had to leave now, it would take 42 minutes by car, or 2 hours and 6 minutes by public transport. The shortest journey is tomorrow morning and would take 1 hour and 31 minutes, more than double the time of the car journey. The closest inpatient hospital is 22 minutes by car, or over an hour by public transport. The difference the new speed limits are going to make is negligible compared to how slow public transport is here.
All this is going to do is annoy and upset people, and turn them off the idea of using public transport, and push a lot of people towards voting for the parties who were against this. Out of the main parties, that mainly seems to be the Conservatives, so that's going to be bad for all of us.
I'm not from Wales, so I don't know how good the cycling infrastructure is there. But for me this change would make me feel much safer cycling on busy city streets. So this might encourage a few people to take their bike instead of their car.
The person you replied to is disabled - or so he claims, even if we assume he is lying about that, there are other people in his town who actually are disabled (I don't even have to look, disability is common enough around the world). While bikes are great for "normal people", they are not an answer for the disabled who may not be able to ride them at all. As such while cities should encourage more biking, they should not make bikes the backbone of how people are expected to get around.
I'm aware that the person is disabled, but they explicitly stated in their comment that "there’s currently no reason for someone to switch to public transport" and that "all this is going to do is annoy and upset people". That to me implied that they didn't think of cycling as an alternative to driving a car at all, which is understandable given that they probably can't cycle. So all I did was offer the perspective of someone that does cycle and has to ride on busy streets because there are no bike lanes in hope that they'd appreciate that perspective just as much as I'd appreciate someone giving me their perspective when I'm missing something due to my personal circumstances.
I agree that there need to be alternatives to cycling in place for those that can't or don't want to cycle. Its all about capacity planning, though. If you assume that 20% of your population will use bikes for short to medium distances you'll have to plan with much more frequent and larger busses or even consider building subway or train infrastructure to get all these people to their destination than if you assume that 70%-80% will use their bikes. So as a transportation planner you'll need to make a judgement call on how you want the future of transportation to look like in the area you're responsible for, but I don't think the choice to make biking the backbone of transportation is necessarily to the detriment of everyone else. To the contrary, the public transport might be less crowded if most people use their bikes, so that for example folks in wheelchairs or those with trouble walking have it easier to get on and off.