Anyone who has driven around any city or town in the UK over the past few months would have noticed huge changes on the roads. Some bus lanes are now operating at all times, cycle lanes have popped up, roads have been closed off, and speed limits have been reduced to 20 miles per hour in many areas. If you live in London, you wouldn't be able to miss extended operating hours of the congestion charging zone.
As a driver, these things all irk me, and have been met by considerable objection from a significant proportion of people. The results are not that great either.
- Additional traffic jams as a result of either side roads being closed off or lane closures to accommodate poorly thought though cycle lanes on major arterial and/or orbital roads;
- Drivers getting distracted because they're crawling along a long, non-residential road with few pedestrians or obstacles at 20 miles per hour (32 km/h);
- Having to suffer the indignity of shelling out £15 in 'congestion charge' for the privilege of driving into central London on a Sunday (when there wouldn't be much congestion anyway), resulting in even more traffic on the very same roads just outside of the congestion charge zone, which have been narrowed to build cycle lanes that few people use.
Most, if not all of these measures have been brought in as a result of Covid-19 and without consultation, causing uproar.
However, this blog is about metrication, so why, you may ask, is all of this relevant?
One of the reasons given for not completing the switch to the metric system was the 'significant cost' of updating signage - specifically, of replacing speed limit signs. I, as well as the UKMA, have argued that this need not be a significant cost. Signs would not need to be replaced fully. A sticker could be placed over existing signs to update them to metric units - exactly the thing that has been done to Congestion Charge signs in Central London, and bus lane signs on red routes to update their hours of operation. These were done basically 'overnight' and were clearly not prohibitively costly. Or at least nowhere near as costly as the hundreds of kilometres or poorly thought through cycle lanes and pavement widenings up and down the country which are rightfully due to get ripped up.
As a nation, we thought through how we would tackle the metric changeover decades ago. We've got evidence of it working in other similar countries, such as Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and to a lesser extent the English-speaking Caribbean). We just need to bite the bullet.
Comments