Notes on Speed and Politics
Over the last year or so there have been some concerted debates in the political arena over speed limits. Following the imposition of 20mph speed limits across built up areas in Wales, and in certain urban areas in English cities, Rishi Sunak raised the issue of reduced speed limits to the national agenda in his ill-fated attempt to win the general election. 20mph speed limits were placed alongside 20-minute cities as some kind of far-left conspiracy impinging on the rights of car-driving citizens. This made me think about the politics of speed.
When public space is shared between cars, bicyclists and pedestrians, the politics of speed becomes a matter of life and death. According to the National Safety Council in the United States, speeding was partly responsible for 29% of all traffic fatalities in 2020 – a total of over 30 people per day.[i] According to the British organization, Roadwise, at a speed of 35 mph there is a 50 percent chance that a pedestrian will be killed in a collision. At 40 mph the figure becomes 90%.[ii] Speed is deadly and relational. The faster the traffic, the less safe the space becomes for those not in motorized vehicles. In March 2023, the devolved government of Wales reduced the default speed limit for built-up areas from 30 mph to 20 mph. Reducing accidents involving pedestrians was a significant reason for the cut in the speed limit but not the only one. It was argued that by reducing the speed of traffic, forms of “active travel” (walking, running, and cycling) would become safer and therefore more appealing. This, in turn, would lead to increased social interaction as more people would encounter each other in public space and build community in the process. Physical and mental health outcomes would improve thanks to the increase in exercise outdoors. Local economies would also improve due to increased footfall on high streets. A decrease in car use for local trips might also lead to a reduction in carbon emissions from travel.[iii] The nationwide decrease in default speed limits was based on monitoring in seven test sites across Wales where several positive effects had been recorded including a significant increase in the use of active travel to get to primary schools. Parents felt that the new speed limit made the use of space safer for them and their children.
In the United States, traffic speed is also spatially differentiated in ways that contribute to racial inequity. An analysis of pedestrian fatalities in Oregon, for instance, concluded that “BIPOC experience a disproportionate fatal injury burden with Black people experiencing the greatest disparity. The next greatest disparity was found among American Indian and Alaskan Native peoples, followed by Latinx people. Asian people also have a higher rate of pedestrian injury than the state average.” An analysis of pedestrian deaths and race at the level of census tracts revealed that areas where BIPOC were more concentrated were also places with roads with higher speed limits and lower car ownership. So, more people walked, cycled, or used public transit. The higher levels of walking alongside higher speed of traffic led to higher rates of fatal injury for pedestrians.[iv] These findings have been replicated across urban areas of the United States. An article in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine reports that:
… fatality rates per 100 million miles traveled are systematically higher for Black and Hispanic Americans for all modes and notably higher for vulnerable modes (e.g., Black Americans died at more than 4 times the rate for White Americans while cycling, 33.71 [95% CI: 21.84, 73.83] compared with 7.53 [95% CI: 6.64, 8.69], and more than 2 times the rate while walking, 40.92 [95% CI: 36.58, 46.44] compared with 18.77 [95% CI: 17.30, 20.51]).[v]
In Los Angeles, a report by researchers at UCLA concluded that while Black residents represent 8.6% of the city’s population, they accounted for 18% of pedestrian deaths and 15% of all cyclist deaths.[vi]Efforts to reduce speed limits, such as the reduction of 30 mph speed limits to 20 mph in the United Kingdom, have become symbolic of wider political currents. In September 2023 Prime Minister Rishi Sunak chose to fix on speed limits in efforts to make a case for Conservative government arguing that 20mph zones “aren’t the right values of the British people.” He promised to set out a “plan for motorists” that would limit such zones and favor drivers over public transport passengers, cyclists, and pedestrians.[vii]Similarly disparaging comments were made about the idea of the 15-minute city – an idea that focusses on the ability to reach key services within 15 minutes at walking pace.[viii]Efforts such as these to slow down traffic in order to increase opportunities for safe travel at slower speeds became central to wider conspiracy theories of sinister attempts by governments and the United Nations to impose various kinds of mobility restrictions on everyone. The speed of automobility, it was argued, was the speed of citizenship – indicative of “right values”.
We can see here how questions of speed are also questions of what Mimi Sheller calls mobility justice.[ix] The relatively fast speed of some has externalities which are related to the comparatively slow speeds of others – or, in some instances, death. The children who might walk to school in Wales, or BIPOC in Oregon have mobility capacities which are directly and indirectly related to the speed of people in cars. The same logic occurs at other scales. If I choose to fly to Paris from Edinburgh because it will get me there quicker than travelling by train, then I will emit 437 kg of CO2 rather than the 46kg I would have emitted on the train. I would save some time of course, due to the speed of planes vs trains. Speed is the main reason people choose to fly rather than travel by train. But my decision impacts the lives of people who are not able to, or choose not to, make that choice. The impacts of global warming that result from the carbon emissions of flights to Paris are experienced first and hardest by the world’s poor, far from where I live in Edinburgh. At the scale of U.S. urban space, and at the scale of a globe subject to global heating, speed is part of Ruth Wilson Gilmore definition of racism as the “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”[x] Speed, it turns out, is often political.
[i] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safety-issues/speeding/ (accessed 24 April, 2023)
[ii] https://www.roadwise.co.uk/using-the-road/speeding/the-chance-of-a-pedestrian-surviving/ (accessed 24 April, 2023)
[iii] Transport for Wales/Trafnidiaeth Cymru, Default 20mph speed limit on restricted roads. Phase 1. Interim monitoring report., Transport for Wales/Trafnidiaeth Cymru (Cardiff, 2023).
[iv] Governors Highway Safety Association, An Analysis of Traffic Fatalities by Race and Ethnicity, Governors Highway Safety Association (Washington D.C. , June 2021 2021), 5.
[v] Matthew A Raifman and Ernani F Choma, "Disparities in Activity and Traffic Fatalities by Race/Ethnicity," American Journal of Preventative Medicine 63, no. 2 (2022): 160.
[vi] Madeline Brozen and Annaleigh Yahata Ekman, The need to prioritize Black lives in LA’s traffic safety efforts, Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, U.C.L.A. (Los Angeles, 2020).
[vii] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/28/rishi-sunak-expected-to-limit-powers-of-councils-in-england-to-curb-car-use-20mph-speed-limit-traffic-camera-fines (accessed 15/02/2024)
[viii] Natalie Whittle, The 15-minute city (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2021).
[ix] Sheller, Mobility justice: the politics of movement in the age of extremes.
[x] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California, American crossroads, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.