Safe Speed Forums

London Evening Standard hereHansard here

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Safe Speed for Intelligent Road Safety through proper research, experience & guidance.

Close some streets on a Sunday so that we can all "play" in them, huh?

Great idea. Just as long as it's not my road...

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

So no-one will be able to go out at all on a Sunday. Man's an idiot!

It's a woman actually

Another side-effect would be that many people would be prevented from going to church.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Misread it. Thought it said Alun Milburn!

Kids should be playing in parks and gardens not roads anyway. If they need exercise then walking to the park would be beneficial.

How else are the lazy little X-Box lovers going to get exercise if cars aren’t allowed to chase them up and down the cul de sac?

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.

I just hope the kids don't get the days mixed up and go playing in the road on Saturday by mistake!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

You really couldn't make it up.

Some might see the responses in this thread as being anti-non-motorist. I see something very different: the proposers didn't seem to even consider the concept of 'play streets'. Where I've seen such schemes implemented (properly), the schemes are reasonable as well as consistent. Play streets surfaces are quite different from normal roads, so children wouldn't ever be misled towards playing in actual roads, and drivers would be going very cautiously anyway.

Given this, the proposal of simply banning cars seems extreme and quite anti-motorist, to me anyway.

If the road was a proper cul-de-sac (as opposed to a gated-off one) and the road surface was altered as appropriate, and the residents themselves paid for the schemes, then I won't argue with it.


Do children play on Sundays only?

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

That implementation would sound feasible except the tendency in the UK has been to cheaper contractors and I think the trust to apply proper systems seems less likely than more.
The recent years of encouraging people away from vehicles is therefor less surprising that people are suspicious of a 'new idea' even if it might be based on a genuine desire to aid a problem. however if the problem is one of lack pf play areas then why not activate or enable all playgrounds to be accessed by local children (whether they attend that school or not - perhaps) and tackle the problem head on than look for substitutes.

It is the total ban on cars that is one of the problems as we are a very mixed society where all people who live on a single street or even in a cul-de-sac all have very different needs. Some local children near me do occasionally play in the cul-de-sac but always with close parental or adult supervision and any vehicle sees them taught to stay still until the vehicle stops or departs.
I can imagine that Sundays are proposed as they are seen as a generic 'day off' and so likely that the greatest number of children will be around and adults too.

And there is the crux who is to pay for these extra 'niceties' when the Country is bankrupt ? If parents need a place for kids to play then what is wrong with their gardens if they have one? Or the local 'green areas' ? Has H&S stopped local people fixing up a swing or other 'toys' ?
Is it that the local street is considered safer in fact, than the run down local derelict houses that kids might visit to occupy themselves ?
I think teaching a child that a street can be played in and taught that running around on it is potentially dangerous as will the child truly recognise a coloured area - and what about the coloured blind or blind kids ?
I still think this is a cop out and a bad one. Whilst it might work in a (very) few areas I think the danger of potential traffic is better to be a usual and teach the children that they must pay extreme attention at all times if they so wish to venture with parents approval.
Certainly older children are often seen with footballs, so how about the clubs opening up the football fields to children in the evenings or weekends ? Perhaps that may give back something to all the fans that seem to pay small fortunes to them for support !?

I am now in receipt of a few emails from people protesting that I have disagreed with this proposal - how little they understand this Campaign, and how amazing that they all say precisely the same thing ! I think that firmly classes itself as spam!

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Safe Speed for Intelligent Road Safety through proper research, experience & guidance.

Just a quick point from me, if I haven’t missed it already being made..

In the years I have been living where I do I can think back to the early 70’s when I saw vast areas of fields with trees to climb and a lovely small brook where you could fish with your net to see wriggly things. I made a crude but effective bow and arrow from branches and I remember another branch made a good pretend javelin. You had to invent you own entertainment like a parachute made from a handkerchief and cotton with my toy soldier as the reluctant guinea pig as I threw him off the top of a tree. The air smelt cleaner and you could literally get lost in the thick of it where not a single house could be seen.

My point here is this was all on your doorstep back then in lovely surrounds so I didn’t have to play in the street, but today they have all been turned into housing and roads with the odd Tarmac play area, should you want to play basketball. In this crazy paranoid society parents don’t want their kids further than a stone’s throw away, but you’d need more like a canon to hit the nearest fields now. Kids have always played in the street but now it’s almost the only option and the bigger picture for me is what on earth are we doing to them and our precious environment.

I think Mole was right about me being a hippy.

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.

A survey showed that grandparents often strayed many miles from home and with each successive generation we have got closer and closer to home. What the cause of this is, is unclear, but many factors are likely to have influenced this trend. I can easily see that overcrowding is one main cause and then the advent of technology is another! Plus as communication has increased, so does the knowledge of crime rates, and so fear spreads and parents become unsure and feel insecure in allowing children to roam too far.

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Safe Speed for Intelligent Road Safety through proper research, experience & guidance.

The main reason that parents of this generation are less willing to grant their parents the freedom that I enjoyed half a century and more ago is quite clear. The vastly increased number of motor vehicles and their greater speed. When I was at primary school a group of us would walk a mile to school without any adult supervision, playing in the road as went. And I was cycling unsupervised at the age of nine or ten.

But, though I now live in a quieter area, I was never able to allow my own children to go to school unaccompanied or to cycle the roads alone

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Oh come on! I don't think you're that much older than me, and when I was going to primary school there were plenty of cars on the roads and in urban areas they went just as quickly as they do now – probably even quicker as there were no speed humps or Gatsos. I would say it comes much more from the general tendency to increasingly mollycoddle children, combined with an irrational and exaggerated fear of "paedophiles".

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

I don't know how old you are Peter but I was born in 1948.

When I first went to school in the spring of 1953 there were about 4.8million vehicles registered in the UK. Today there are something like 36million. And a larger proportion of those cars are in regular use today than in 1953. Back then working class people didn't own cars - my father got his first car in 1959- nor did people commute by car in the numbers they do today. Most working class commuted by bus or by bicycle - my father continued to cycle to work until he retired, despite owning a car.

We used to lay a game in the school playtime. When a car went past you had to duck down behind the wall so that you wouldn't be visible to the driver and last one down lost a point. Try that today and RSI would soon result

You are probably right about urban car speeds decreasing but rural speeds are faster because of the better capabilities of modern cars. And you are certainly right about "an irrational and exaggerated fear of "paedophiles", though back in the fifties we were cautioned about taking sweets from strangers.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

This is what I was getting at - many aspects change. Communications help us to be more informed and aware of many additional crimes and far more immediately than ever before. This has surely therefor 'helped' us become a more fearful and scared Nation ?
Now we seem to need to know as much as we can.
Do you not think that all of this information has not corrupted our ability to feel safe and thus the desire to 'protect' our loved ones ?
The more we are told about 'how dangerous' it is 'out there', the more concerned we might become.
Couple this with a greater population and growth of the cities, reducing the empty spaces.

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Safe Speed for Intelligent Road Safety through proper research, experience & guidance.

We did have the good old wireless even back in the 'forties, Claire, and , for those of us who could read, there were newspapers - though we might have to read them in the public library. So I think that people were as well informed even if it did take a bit longer to get the information. And there was a lot of face to face interaction (aka gossip) so if there was a paedophile killer or a rapist on the loose we soon knew about it.
What we didn't have, to anything like the degree we have today, were attention seeking popular press and television reporters prepared to whip up hysteria in the pursuit of good copy.

So I would be inclined to say that is misinformation which has corrupted our ability to feel safe.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Good to see the much-maligned motor car doing its bit to tackle childhood obesity. I think such games should be made compulsory!

More seriously, does anyone know if we really ARE any more or less safe on the streets these days? I'm probably one of those people who thinks things are far worse than they used to be, but I don't live ina big city any more, so it's not such a problem at present. I grew up in Liverpool (yes, Liverpool!) and it was pretty common for people (especially elderly neighbours) NOT to lock their houses if they were only going to be popping out for an hour or so. Talking to my father in law, who grew up in Stockport in the 1920s and 30s, we were talking about childhood holidays. Hisfamily used to go to New Brighton or maybe even somewhere exotic like North Wales! They'd go on the train with travelling trunks - often sent on ahead. I asked how the logistics worked and he said "oh there would always be lads offering to take luggage to the station for a shiny sixpence"! I commented that I probably wouldn't take any total stranger up on such an offer these days but he shrugged and said it was the norm back then. Stories like that tend to make me think that things were better then, but it's not a statistically useful sample!

We didn't do obesity in the fifties. Not enough money and not enough food in the shops.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown