Speed Trap on The Slade

Wed 8 Oct 2008, 20:17

I'm very much in agreement about speeding on the Slade, and indeed in other parts of Charlbury - it never ceases to astonish me to find cars racing througth the centre of the town at 35-40 m.p.h. in narrow streets where I would have thought that 20 was about the safe limit. However there is a broader issue which I think provides a bit of context. Over the last five or six there was been a huge expansion of speed limits in rural areas. In our locality, 50 m.p.h. limits went up on the Woodstock Road last year, and similar signs went up most of the way to Swindon on the very rural road between Burford and Lechdale. Many of these limits seem arbitary at best, and I wouldn't be the first one to notice that the 50 m.p.h limits on the Woodstock road give out shortly before you reach the lethally sharp bends just before the back gate to Blenheim. There are speed limits all over the A44 too, many of them, it seems to me, patently absurd - particularly to anyone turning off the main road onto side lanes, which have (at least in theory) a 60 m.p.h. limit and are signed as such. Today, driving on the other of Banbury, I suddenly became aware the wide rural B road I was on had had a 40 m.p.h. limit slapped on it - and though I reigned in and slowed down, no-one else on the road was driving at 40, I felt dangerously exposed in doing so, and I honestly couldn't see what it was that justified the new limit, or why this particular stretch of road in South Northants required me to drive a third slower than any of the other roads in the locality.

What I'm saying, I suppose, is the more limits are introduced onto empty country roads, the more drivers become attuned to ignoring all of them. That, I think, is precisely what is happening. And that is clearly bad news when it comes to the limits on the Slade, which are fairly obviously essential.

I feel the same about some of the parking regulations in central Charlbury. The double yellow lines in Church Lane - which in theory prevent resident commuters from taking the train to work and leaving their own cars outside their own houses - are infamous. There are plenty of other examples too: of yellow lines to protect access routes that no longer exist, to prevent parking outside businesses which turned into residential addresses 15 years ago, or to provide turning spaces for bus services which no longer run. Once again, it seems to me that less would be more. If we had fewer regulations, and regulations only when clearly essential, then those regulations would be more likely to be respected by the whole community. But because all too many appear to be obsolete or simply ridiculous, all too often we ignore them - if we think we can get away with it. The situation certainly isn't helped either by the widespread public perception - not always entirely unfair - that parking regulations and indeed sometimes speed cameras sometimes come dangerous close to being income-generating exercises rather than devices to protect the public.