For the Sake of Argument
The disastrous new 20-mph speed limit has sparked an outbreak of common sense.
For those who enjoy those strange dreams in which you cannot move your car faster than the speed of an emphysemic slug, your dream has come true.
This week, the Welsh Government introduced a default 20-mph speed limit. It’s like driving on Sesame Street whilst on ketamine.
The reaction is akin to placing a can of beans on a bonfire. As I write, 380,000 people have signed a petition to rescind the new law. That’s around one in six adults in Wales.
Behind this emotionally, spiritually, morally, and financially mendicant policy is climate tsar, Lee Waters. Next week, he’s up for a vote of no-confidence. His entrée from fantasy to reality is going ever so swimmingly. Mercifully, I’m applying for asylum in Paris. Wish me luck, mon cher lecteur.
What’s the problem? Many think driving at 20 mph is excessively cautious and causes unnecessary frustration. Not to mention the £4.5 billion bill.
Last year, Monmouthshire council, one of the few Welsh councils peopled with sentient beings, scrapped their 20-mph trial after traffic serpentined around the largely rural county. In summary, the daily breaders who work for a living didn’t like this desperate little intrusion into their daily lives.
It seems nobody in the Welsh Government took notice of that failed experiment.
According to the respected pollster, YouGov, it’s not just me. Almost two-thirds of people, including majorities in every age group and social class, oppose driving as if one’s car runs on morphine.
Supporters cling to a poll which claims more people support than oppose the new speed limit. That is a classic example of tailoring the question to get a tailored answer. Incidentally, the originator of the word ‘pollster’ meant it as an insult like the word ‘huckster.’
If you ask: Do you oppose or support the speed reduction? Two-thirds say they oppose it.
If you add, ‘on roads where cars mix with pedestrians and cyclists…’ you get a different answer. Reader, not to wearily belabour the point, but those questions are not asking the same thing.
Just like everything else these days, we war over the best method with which to crack an egg. One side insists on cracking the top. The other side insists on cracking the bottom. Both sides are convinced the other side is evil or stupid or stupidly evil or evilly stupid. Most revealing about this skirmish is the lame and diseased condition of public debate.
When pressed, supporters say, ‘Well, it’s not on all roads. What’s the problem?’ That’s a red herring. The roads on which one drives are the roads one cares about. If your house is on fire, the fact that your neighbours’ houses are not on fire, is hardly a comforting fact.
The most predictable argument in favour is a typical one: It’ll save lives. Apparently, the new law will save eight to ten lives per year.
Only the most rabid existentialist would argue in favour of more deaths. But this is the age of the Pizza-Salad Fallacy. On social media, if you say, ‘I like pizza,’ a semi-sentient interrobang will pop up and say, ‘So, you’re saying you HATE and wish to enslave all salad?! Disgusting. Educate yourself!’
This debate is much the same. To oppose driving excessively slow is to aid and abet eight to ten deaths a year. And yet, if I suggested we ban walking on Snowdon to save the same number of lives, I’d be sectioned under the Mental Health Act of 1983.
The second most predictable argument is: It’ll save the planet. To oppose this law is to will the planet into a floating pile of cinder. Wales is a small slither of the United Kingdom. The U.K. produces just one percent of global carbon emissions. Quite how we will decide the fate of humanity is not quite clear.
Apparently, this measure is ‘pollution neutral.’ This measure is also logic-neutral. Our largest newspaper, WalesOnline, last week claimed unpopular seatbelt laws introduced back in the 1980s prove this loathed measure right.
With respect, WalesOnline compares apples with oranges and comes up with pears. Asking drivers to wear a seatbelt whilst moving two tonnes of steel, glass and explosive liquid at speed is reasonable. Asking drivers to trundle along at 20 mph is unreasonable.
This mass flaunting of common sense is unsurprising. The Welsh Government is economical with the truth. Did you hear the government has abolished physics?
Apparently, travelling ten miles slower per hour will not affect journey times or will do so only slightly. I’m no Stephen Hawking, but this madman down the boozer reckons there’s a relationship between speed, distance, and time. He says travelling at a lower speed over a particular distance will take longer.
This new law appeals to those who cloak their craving for novelty as ‘progress.’ Wales is the first nation to do this. Isn’t that wonderful? The first! Reader, a silent fire alarm is a first. Would you buy one?
Awkwardly, Wales is not exactly the first to do so. Back in 2016, they did the same thing across the drink in Belfast. A three-year study by Queen’s University, Belfast, found ‘little change in short or long-term outcomes for road traffic collisions, casualties, or driver speed.’
That doesn’t matter. What matters is some people get to feel good about themselves.
As T.S. Eliot put it, half the harm done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. Those locked, he said, ‘in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.’
By posting their support on Facebook, supporters can peacock their righteousness. They’re not just saving lives but the planet itself. They’re enlightened and forward-thinking. They’re radical yet reasonable. They oppose death.
And yet, the reasonable ones are likely those in opposition. Most suggest lower speed limits outside schools, hospitals, and residential areas. Supporters of the new law reject this moderate consideration.
Of course, they do. To compromise would dilute the luxury of their luxury belief.
After all, the appeal of a luxury belief is its tribal signal. They laud the abstract over the concrete and lord above the dreary common sense of the riff-raff and the gammon.
And there lies the tribal fault line. If it were conclusive these new laws would prevent scores of deaths, like the seatbelt laws, all but the improperly medicated would be in favour. (I favour a 10-mph limit in residential areas, if not for the fewer cat deaths but for the ease of rolling a cigarette at the wheel.) Few are in favour of this madcap scheme.
As Orwell didn’t quite put it, some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
Your writing is utterly brilliant. In a just world you'd have a much larger following ❤️
It's so ironic. You wish that civic leaders would pay attention to truly important issues. Then you get this and realize you're better off if they do nothing!