Money is well spent

To introduce ‘20’s Plent’”, that’s a 20mph speed limit on every residential road (with no extra speed humps or cameras) in Worthing would cost about £200,000. That might sound like a lot of money to your readers, but to put that in context, if instead £200,000 was spent on speed humps, it would cover just two miles of road.

We must also remember the costs to our society of traffic. Every year on Worthing’s roads around two people are killed, and 280 injured (40 of them seriously) and 84 per cent of these casualties are on 30mph roads. The cost to Worthing? £13.5 million according to the Department for Transport – and that’s every year.

If a 20’s Plenty scheme reduced this by just one and a half per cent, it would have paid for itself in just one year, and would be saving money every year after that. For comparison, since 20’s Plenty was introduced in Portsmouth, overall casualties have been reduced by 22 per cent, and for motorists by 37 per cent.

And let us not forget the wider benefits of streets where our children can play, older people can safely cross for a chat with a neighbour, and everyone enjoys less noise and less pollution. What price quality of life?

Duncan Kay,

20’s Plenty for Worthing Campaign