It’s time for our main roads to be 20mph.

by Sam Wakeling from Safe Streets Now

Think of the main roads near where you live. What happens there?

These are often our high streets and busy roads between our residential 20mph areas. Places where we live, go to school, work, shop, and rely on for getting around our city. Where we walk, wheel and cycle, cross the road, and need to drive.

But outdated Sheffield City Council policy means these are excluded from 20mph limits and kept at 30mph (or even 40mph), with the dramatic increase in traffic danger this speed brings. It’s not surprising that these roads are then where most serious injuries and deaths happen.

In the last three years, 31 people have been killed in Sheffield on roads with speed limits above 20mph (these being 90% of all road deaths). 26 of these tragedies happened on urban roads which have been or will be excluded from the 20mph schemes. Hundreds more people have also been seriously injured on these excluded main roads.

While residential streets are the bulk of our highways, main roads, making up just 7% of our highways, are where 45% of the worst crashes happen.

To meet Vision Zero, the goal of ending road death and injury, we need safe main roads.

So, what if we turned this upside down? If we focused on our most dangerous roads first, which should we look at?

If we count how many people have been killed or seriously injured (KSI) on a certain road in recent years (2018-2023), then use the length of road, we get a KSI rate per km.

The highest are:

1. Ecclesall Road (Ring Road to Hunters Bar): 17.7 KSI/km
2. Broad Lane/Tenter Street: 16.7 KSI/km
3. Barnsley Road (Northern General to Saville Street): 15.2 KSI/km
4. Inner Ring Road (Shalesmoor to Matilda Street): 14.8 KSI/km
5. Crookes Valley Road: 12.9 KSI/km

These numbers are also just the tip of the iceberg of damage caused by fast traffic. They don’t show all the minor injuries, the injuries which don’t get reported, the costly “damage-only” crashes, the terrifying near misses, the fear and isolation from people avoiding dangerous roads, the rumbling, grinding noise from traffic which increases at higher speeds, and the air pollution.

All these pressures can be eased by safer speeds. It’s time for our main roads to be 20mph.

Join people calling for this; sign the petition:

https://www.ipetitions.com/p/safe-speeds-for-sheffields-most-dangerous-roads