Sometimes you wake up and discover that the road outside your house has changed because of a consultation you'd overlooked. So it was on Monday morning when the speed limit on Bow Road dropped by 10mph.
On Sunday, and for many previous decades, you could drive along Bow Road at 30mph. But on Monday, without so much as a whimper other than the emergence of much signage overnight, the maximum speed was suddenly 20mph.
Bow Road is part of the A11, the main road from London to Norwich. It's also part of the Transport for London Route Network, or TLRN for short, as are many of London's main roads and red routes. This gives TfL jurisdiction over maintenance, parking restrictions and speed limits, no matter what the local council thinks, so if TfL wants to set the speed limit at 20mph they are perfectly within their rights. In this case Tower Hamlets had already decreed that its roads should have a 20mph limit so TfL is merely catching up.
The relevant consultation, entitled 'Lowering speed limits', was launched in September 2021. We've already introduced a 20mph speed limit on all our roads within the central London Congestion Charging Zone, they said, and in early 2023 we intend to introduce a further 28km of such limits within the boroughs of Camden, Islington, Hackney, Haringey and Tower Hamlets. We're also coming for the Gants Hill roundabout, Ruislip Road in Ealing, Upper Richmond Road in Wandsworth and West Wickham. We've made some maps, now brace yourselves.
In Tower Hamlets it turns out 'early 2023' meant 27th February. One road affected was The Highway through Wapping and the other was the A11. The affected stretch runs from the edge of Whitechapel (which had already been twentied) along Mile End Road and Bow Road to the start of the Bow Flyover. It doesn't continue up Stratford High Street because that's not a TfL road, that's still under Newham control.
The newly-restricted section of the A11 is 2 miles long. At 30mph two miles would be a 4 minute journey whereas at 20mph it's 6 minutes instead. That's quite an impediment to free-flowing travel, potentially delaying cars, lorries and buses by multiple cumulative hours. But in reality few drivers get up to 30mph anyway, not least because there are at least a dozen traffic signals between Whitechapel and Bow and they slow down the traffic far more than any speed limit ever could.
The widespread introduction of new lower speed limits is part of TfL's Vision Zero Action Plan, a long term strategy with the laudable aim of eliminating deaths and serious injuries from London's transport network. Reaching zero deaths by 2041 is a ridiculously tough target given the everlasting potential for human stupidity, but TfL are trying to design risk out of our highways wherever they can. If they were truly serious they'd drop the speed limit even lower (why not 19mph? why not 18? why not 10?) but the need to keep people moving thankfully rules out the ultimate mitigatory option.
A lot of 20s now smother various parts of Bow Road and its approaches. Some are actual signs, for example at the point beside St Mary's Church where traffic coming off the Bow Flyover is now expected to slow down. Others have been painted on the road as intermittent reminders or at entrances from sidestreets, in that elongated way geometry decrees when attempting to resemble circles from the driver's seat.
It's all got a bit messy in places, especially where previous 30s and 20s were needed to demarcate the change from red route to sidestreet. Technically no signs are now required here because every road hereabouts has an identical 20mph limit. However the sign painters have been busy adding 20s anyway, and because they've been unable (or unwilling) to delete the 30s, some junctions now have multiple messy numbers.
Here on Addington Road they've added a 20 next to a 30 so good luck picking the correct number. They've also painted the 20 across a lane nobody drives down because it's immediately adjacent to a motorbike park. This is not the work of geniuses.
It's worse on Kitcat Terrace. Here the approach to Bow Road is already occupied by a 30 so the White Brush Crew have simply drawn a 20 in front and hoped for the best. This means traffic approaching the A11 first encounters a 20 and then a 30, which might be legally suspect were it not for a 20 sign on the pavement. Worse they've scrawled 20 in fresh paint all over historic cobbles because they couldn't be arsed to paint over the 30 at the end of the road. A few months ago a utility company drilled a long trench down Kitcat Terrace and painstakingly returned the cobbles afterwards to retain the illusion of Victoriana. However TfL's contractors have just blundered in, scrawled and buggered off.
And here's an impressively futile sign on Albert Road. 20mph ahead, it says, because you're exiting a 20 zone. It used to say 30mph ahead so the sign made sense, but for some reason somebody's kept the old 20 while adding a new 20.
Main roads in Greenwich, Lewisham, Lambeth, Southwark, Wandsworth, Merton and Kensington and Chelsea are next in line for lowered speeds, apparently by the end of the year, so you too may wake up one day and discover somebody's plastered 20s all over your street. Let's hope the contractors have learned how to paint properly by then.
