The Green Party has called for a blanket installment of 20mph roads across all residential roads in Reading in the same manner that they have been implemented in Portsmouth and Oxford.
Keith Taylor, who is the Green MEP for Sussex and the South East, commented "Introducing 20mph can make a real difference to a town like Reading. It can save children’s lives. In both Portsmouth and Oxford 20mph residential streets have reduced the speed of traffic without the need for other traffic-calming measures."
The calls come after the Portsmouth City Council noted a 22% reduction in recorded road casualties after introducing the zones.
AA head of road safety Andrew Howard claims the policy is difficult to implement simply due to confusion over what constitutes a residential road. He said "There are some where its sole function is to get you to and from your house, there are others where the much greater function is getting people around town. If a road is a bus route or bigger, its prime function is carrying people around and can’t really be a 20mph limit."
Finally Reading's Head of Transport Richard Willis claims the scheme would not emulate Portsmouth or Oxford and that they were looking at creating 20mph blocks across connecting streets. He says "But what we want to do is look at this as a bit more of a whole and say that in some cases it’s ridiculous that you’ve got a 20mph road that then has another road off it that is not 20mph. So in theory you could accelerate to 30 going into a residential side road. We’ve got to tidy this up and make some more sense out of it.
"You can’t just put signs up and expect people to follow them, they’ve got to be able to be enforced."
The Driving Force driving school in Coventry would support the implementation of some 20mph roads, however council's must be cautious to not push them too much.