SO Oxfordshire County Council is congratulating itself for spending £300,000 to achieve a drop in speed on Oxford’s roads of less than one mile per hour.
This would be the council that this week cut services by £119m – some of which could have been avoided without the nakedly political bribe of ‘freezing’ council tax for a year.
Today we report how the move to cut the speed limits on most streets in Oxford from 30mph to 20mph has seen actual speeds on our roads fall by 0.9mph an hour. The number of accidents has also fallen — from 166 to 159.
Rodney Rose, the cabinet member for transport, says this is proof the council’s scheme has been effective.
The reality is that the falls are almost negligible. The reduction in speed is less than how fast your average house spider travels.
And a drop of seven out of 166 is no basis to draw a favourable statistical conclusion – something the county’s official spokesman does admit.
An overall desire to make our roads safer is not wrong, but spending £300,000 for such a dismal result in such financial times (particularly when police will not enforce the new limit) is wasteful.
It is just a pity that a study showing the same result in Portsmouth did not come out before the council gave this its approval.
Other cities, based on the results in Oxford and Portsmouth, will surely not adopt such a pointless scheme.
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