Teething troubles

Claims that the 20mph had led to buses cutting services were raised in the Senedd. Here is my response





There are lots of challenges facing the bus industry and it's too easy to blame it all on the new speed limit.

Let me deal with a number of issues in-turn.

First of all let’s remember why we decided to reduce the speed limit in built-up areas: it was to save lives and cut casualties.

I set up an expert group to work with delivery partners to design an implementation plan that would work in practice. It did work with TfW which showed that impacts on journey times would be marginal. And they recommended we take the approach of a national default speed limit rather than the street-by-street approach that existed before and was seen to have failed to meet its objectives.

It did work with TfW which showed that impacts on most journey times would be marginal. And they recommended we take the approach of a national default speed limit rather than the street-by-street approach that existed before and was seen to have failed to meet its objectives.

That default speed limit approach was put to the Senedd and it was overwhelmingly approved, including by the majority of the Conservative group.

Let’s remember that. This approach was agreed by the whole Senedd and endorsed by most Conservatives.

Now over the last three months we’ve moved from the pilot phase to full roll-out and that has inevitably highlighted some issues that need addressing.

I said at the outset that we would not get this right on day one, and that we would review its implementation. That is what we are doing.

We set out guidance for local authorities to make exceptions to the default speed limit, and Councils are best placed to apply this to their own local roads – after all, legally, they are the Local Highway Authority.

We know from the data we have published and which the Senedd Research Service analysed that the proportion of roads still at 30mph now varies greatly between Councils. From over 10 per cent in Swansea and Bridgend, to under 1 per cent in four North Wales authorities.

So clearly Councils to have the power to exempt some roads where they feel it is justified, and whether a street is on a major bus route is obviously something they can take into consideration.

This change hasn’t been made in secret. Bus operators had all the information about changes to speed limits available to them to allow them to adequately plan for the introduction of 20mph.

Some bus operators like Cardiff Bus changed their timetables before the new speed limit came in. Arriva and First Cymru did not. Stagecoach decided not to make changes because they did not anticipate that the changes would impact significantly on journey times. 

We know that all companies have been struggling with driver recruitment and that that affected their ability to keep to their timetables. We also know that they wanted to make changes to some routes to reflect the way passengers were travelling – or not travelling after covid. These were all factors in the timetable changes.

We have seen claims before this week that the speed limit was to blame for delays and we have asked the bus companies for their data to help us understand that. We’ve had some, are we are waiting for more.

I am perfectly prepared to accept that there are some routes where buses are moving too slowly. I’m not convinced that the automatic response to that it to revert all bus routes to 30mph. I don’t think the right answer is to allow some of the heaviest and largest vehicles on our roads to drive the fastest in built up areas where people and traffic are mixing.

We want more people to choose to use the bus and know that for years the bus companies have said that congestion is a major problem which impacts on bus reliability.

Three years ago in the Wales Transport Strategy we said we wanted to encourage bus priority measures – thing like bus lanes and priority lights to give buses a head start in busy traffic.

In this financial year we have committed over £6m this financial for bus priority schemes and over £5m for the next financial year. I want to see bus priority measures prioritised in bids from local authorities, and included in the Regional Transport Plans they are developing.

Where there are streets that it would make sense for traffic to travel at 30mph we have encouraged Councils to take a common sense approach.

I have talked about applying a ‘sniff test’. We should ask does this feel right? If people are being asked to drive slower on a street it needs to make sense why. If it doesn’t people will tend to ignore the limit and we risk undermining the whole approach.

After three months we have all had a chance to get used to the change. And I must say that in my experience as a driver I think people are driving slower – not at exactly 20mph, but at around 25mph. That is what we expected to happen initially. We hope as the change settles in, and enforcement begins, we’ll see that fall further because for every drop in the average speed by 1mph, casualties drop by 6% and we expect speeds to reduce further as enforcement continues. We’ll be publishing the first of the regular six monthly monitoring reports in due course and we’ll have some solid data to compare with my experience.

But I also see some stretches where people are ignoring the speed limit, and in some cases that’s because it does not pass the ‘sniff test’.

There was always going to be a bedding in period and built into the powers that Councils have as Local Highway Authorities is the ability to make changes.

We know that local authorities are already collating lists of roads where 20mph doesn’t feel like the right speed. They understandably haven’t wanted to act hastily as people were getting used to the change. But they do want to review and revise their local speed limits. Nobody anticipates this will involve wholescale changes and will focus on addressing anomalies.

I have asked Phil Jones who is leading the review for us to to consider whether further tweaks to the guidance on exceptions would be helpful – for example by explicitly including major bus routes as one of the criteria local authorities can consider.

We have been clear we will continually monitor any impacts of the new default 20mph speed limit on bus services. We continue to work closely with bus operators, local authorities and TfW to tackle the wider challenges facing the bus industry.