(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 519: 20 is Plenty
February 5, 2025
This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Member of the Welsh Senedd (Parliament) Lee Waters and Dr. Jennifer Kent of The University of Sydney. They talk about how Wales set climate targets, did a roads review, got to a 20 mile per hour speed limit across the country, and what it might take for other places to do the same. They share the importance of leadership, the data around benefits related to 20mph, and how waiting to long for change might doom it.
Some relevant items:
Wales 2021 Transport Strategy – Wales | Welsh roads review – Wales | Welsh roads review – Streetsblog | Lee Waters’ blog on the process – Lee Waters
You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:
[00:01:33] Jeff Wood: Lee waters and Jennifer Kent, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast. [00:01:49] Thanks for having us. Thanks. Thanks for being here. Before we get started, Jen’s an old hand here at Talking Headways. We’ve had her on a couple of times, but Leo, maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself. [00:01:58] Lee Waters: Yes. So I’m a politician in Wales in the United Kingdom. I’ve been elected for nine years, I think. [00:02:05] And before that, I’ve done a bunch of things. I used to run a small policy think tank. I work for a sustainable transport charity called Sustrans, which is, I suppose, where a lot of my thinking developed, and before that I was a journalist, a political reporter in the House of Commons in Westminster and in Wales. [00:02:24] Jeff Wood: And Jen, maybe if you can give folks a quick backgrounder, although we have had you on episode 342 and 422, if folks want to go back and listen to those, but if you could give us some basic stuff, that’d be great. [00:02:33] Dr. Jennifer Kent: Yeah, sure, Jeff. It’s great to be back here. So my name is Jennifer Kent. I’m a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia. [00:02:41] My research is all about the links between transport, urban planning and health. And my big focus is on families and transport, trying to make parenting a little bit less car dependent. [00:02:53] Jeff Wood: So I do want to chat with you all about travel speeds and specifically Wales’s implementation of 20 miles per hour nationally. [00:02:59] But first I want to ask about Wales’s transportation culture and go back in time and ask what’s kind of sparked some of this thinking that led to where you all are at now. [00:03:09] Lee Waters: I guess the bit I should have mentioned in my background is that I was the transport minister in the Welsh government for five years until about nine months ago. [00:03:17] A key piece of information, really, in the sense of why I’m talking about this. Yeah, so Wales is a, it’s a, it’s a fairly little country. We know we have three million people, but we’re spread out. So sparsely populated, very rural, with quite small cities by international standards. Our Cardiff, Cardiff is our capital, it’s got about 300, 000 people. [00:03:38] We’ve got a very long, porous border with England, a lot of movements back and forth to England. Our transport links move East west. There’s very little north south movement because the mountains are in the way. It’s always said that Scotland has got the right mountains in the right place, between it and England, and Wales has got the mountains in the wrong place. [00:03:55] We divide ourselves between north and south. So that’s our, that’s our geography, and we’ve become very car dependent. And also, because we are poor, we’re one of the poorest parts of Europe. Our economy’s been in decline for a hundred years. We’re, Bigs of coal and iron and steel economy, which obviously has been in decline. [00:04:14] We’ve got ourselves addicted in the idea that the way we get ourselves out of poverty, the way we deliver economic development is through roads based policy, even though, you know, we have spent. hundreds of millions on lots of roads over the last 30 to 40 years, and we’ve become poorer. People don’t seem to have put those two facts together, but it’s still a very heavy part of our thinking that, you know, we want to get agglomeration development, we want strong road links into England and between the cities, and that’s where our focus should be, and our public transport system has become quite poor. [00:04:47] Jeff Wood: It’s interesting because when I was reading over like all the policies and the things that you all put together, you all are very forward on things like climate change. And that’s kind of behind a number of the thinking as well, not just economic development, but the fact that, you know, the climate’s changing. [00:05:02] And as we found out in the last couple of weeks here in California, that’s really devastating and we don’t want it to get even worse. That’s part of the thinking behind kind of moving in this direction. [00:05:12] Lee Waters: Yeah, I used to say when I used to run a think tank that if an alien came from space and landed in Wales and to find out about us, read our policy documents, they’d think that we’re the amazing progressive country because our policy, they’re all the right things. [00:05:25] But the practice reality is much more complex than that, but for sure, the reforms that I’ve been driving have been heavily based in the framing of how we get ourselves onto a more sustainable footprint. And we’ve had some sort of trailblazing pieces of legislation. We passed something called the Wellbeing Future Generations Act, which puts in law a requirement to think long term and to collaborate. [00:05:51] And to think about the children who have not yet been born. What kind of whales are we creating for them? So we’ve got, you know, we’ve got some progressive framing. We’ve got the usual net zero climate targets. And the one thing we have done, which has been very useful to concentrate the minds in policy debates is set five year carbon budgets, because obviously you’re not going to get the net zero. [00:06:11] In the last 10 years, you’ve got to build up to that. And once you break down that trajectory into five year chunks, it makes you realize how sharp the reduction in emissions needs to be in the next five years, the next 10 years, especially. And also transport has been the one bit that’s been let off the hook when it comes to carbon emissions. [00:06:30] It’s been the, it’s the slowest Moving of all the sectors and so my argument within government has been if we are sincere about net zero, and I think there’s still a question mark around the world around about that, then we cannot achieve it unless we change the way we do transport, and there’s no point saying we’re going to do that in 20 years. [00:06:50] We’re going to do that now. And also, we cannot rely solely on electric vehicles to get us. Onto that pathway, which is the standard response because it’s easier. It doesn’t challenge our car dependency. So we have to decarbonize for sure. But we also simultaneously have to reduce car journeys and we have to shift modes from car to active travel and to public transport. [00:07:15] Jeff Wood: And Jen, I have a question for you too. I, I’m interested in what brought you to looking at all of the policies and programs that Wales has been getting themselves up to. It’s interesting to think about the juxtaposition of not just United States and Wales, but also Australia, which is very similar. I feel like the United States from a culture perspective. [00:07:34] Dr. Jennifer Kent: Yeah, absolutely. Basically, I just think you can’t look at changing travel behavior without looking at the policy and political context. So, I’ve been trying to extend my research into looking at some of the structural embeddedness of the automobile in the way that politicians responding to their constituency, obviously, think about Mode shift. [00:07:58] So that’s why I’ve been very, very interested in what Lee’s been doing in my research. It’s all framed at the moment around, as I said, getting families out of cars. And I’ve got 2 themes that I’m looking at, and that’s getting families to travel west. more generally. So looking at why we have all these overscheduled children that need to be driven around Saturday mornings for sport consistently, and also getting people to travel differently. [00:08:26] And that’s where Lee’s work has just been such an inspiration to me, really. He visited Australia back in, I think it was August. And, you know, they’re so forward thinking in terms of Really getting the political clout behind some of the decision making that we know needs to happen and I guess similar to the US here in Australia, our politicians just don’t have that kind of bravery. [00:08:52] They’re not courageous like that. And so I’m really interested in the different environment and structures that were going on when some of those more forward thinking decisions were made. [00:09:02] Lee Waters: And I just respond to that because I think it’s important. We don’t set barriers that are too hard to leap. And if we’re going to wait for the politics to be perfect, then we’re never going to change. [00:09:15] And there’s always a danger when you look at comparators, particularly international ones, where it’s easy to say, well, But we’re not like that. X country is not like that. And therefore that lets you off the hook. And actually the thing about politics is it, it’s very fluid and it changes. So you’re always looking for this Overton window when you can seize the moment. [00:09:35] And, and actually our politics changed in the last year, quite a lot. So, you know, the progressive circumstances I was able to seize are no longer there. The changes I put in place, I hope are resilient and are able to withstand changes in politics to a large degree. But the point I’m making is from a politician’s point of view. [00:09:53] There will sometimes be an opening and seize that opening. Don’t wait for the perfect conditions. And even if you were in a political context, which doesn’t seem terribly promising, there are still gains that can be made. [00:10:05] Jeff Wood: It’s interesting from reading some of the interviews that you’ve done too, and especially on the 20 mile per hour changes that, you know, this is something that we have analysis paralysis here in the United States where we sit there and talk about stuff for years and years and years. [00:10:17] And then, you know, the time may have passed where the implementation could have actually happened, but With the 20 miles per hour, you could have consulted and consulted and consulted with folks locally forever and ever and ever, and then never opened it. But you’re just like, well, some, at some point we just need to open it. [00:10:30] And the same thing happened here in the United States recently within New York city, where, you know, we had congestion pricing finally run past the post. And it’s like, we just got to start somewhere. There’s so many 4, 000 page environmental documents you can build before you can, you just got to try it out and see if it works. [00:10:45] Lee Waters: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. We did, you know, we did take some time over it. We took about four years from beginning to end to try and design the implementation. The thing I was particularly keen on is, in Wales, local government is very important because they, at the sharpen, they deliver the stuff. [00:11:00] So I wanted to make sure that whatever we came up with, we’re going to work on the ground. And so we spent quite a lot of time in trying to get the keys and things. stakeholders in the same place of agreeing a practical route map for bringing about change. And though the change has been bumpy, you know, it’s been from an implementation point of view, pretty successful. [00:11:21] The stats are very encouraging. We’ve only, we don’t yet have a full year’s data. We’ve got nine months of data, but we can, we can see that casualties have fallen by 28 percent and we’ve got particular gains on the higher speed. So the average speeds have been All come down, but the fast speeds have come down the most. [00:11:40] So before, you know, the average speed, our speed limit was 30 mile an hour, and people were doing on average in the mid 30s. Now the speed limit is 20 mile an hour. People are doing on average the mid 20s. So it’s not 100 percent compliance, but the quantum is down significantly. And just from a physics point of view, you know, the, the safety impact of that, that less kinetic energy in the urban environment has a profound effect on the casualty stats. [00:12:04] So even though there’s been a lot of cultural resistance, a lot of political pushback, a lot of noise in the system, you know, the stats are pretty robust. [00:12:14] Jeff Wood: If we go back in time and look at how we got to the point where you all were reducing the speed limit, what were some of the steps that led to that? I mean, there’s the roads review, there’s looking at the policies that led to that as well. [00:12:25] We talked a little bit about climate change. I’m wondering kind of what the steps were to get to that point and why, you know, it led to a reduction in the speed limit across the country. [00:12:34] Lee Waters: Well, the journey really was a political one. We had a new leader, a new first minister, and he had a progressive package of policies, and road safety was part of that, and then putting us on a climate trajectory to get us to net zero was another part of that. [00:12:50] There wasn’t, there wasn’t Particular strong read across with those at the beginning, and I was charged with trying to implement them, so we did a number of things, and we did them all at once, if you like. So the overall framework was about getting us on to our net zero trajectory. And that meant looking at what the drivers for carbon emission increases were. [00:13:11] And we had, as in lots of countries, a long pipeline of road schemes in development constantly. So if you’re an incoming transport minister, these schemes take seven, eight years to develop. And by the time a transport minister sits at that desk, the pipeline is full. And money is committed, stakeholder expectation is set. [00:13:32] And these schemes just keep coming and you can’t stop them. All you have to influence is what happens. For the next round of development for seven years, hence, and so I was quite keen to disrupt that and say, we need to pause here. There’s no way we’re going to meet these carbon budgets if we just keep doing what we’ve always done. [00:13:50] So we need to stop what we’re doing. We canceled the big motorway scheme, which was controversial. And then we said, all schemes in development where there aren’t shovels in the ground, we’re going to stop and we’re going to review that pipeline against our carbon targets. And so we had 50 schemes in the works and all but 15 of them were cancelled because they were seen by an independent panel. [00:14:11] We set up and then in Sloman, the roads review panel, a judge that they were not consistent with our carbon targets and of the 15 that remained. Most of those will change quite considerably to reduce their carbon impact from this to reduce the embodied or the embedded carbon, but also to build in modal shift into those designs. [00:14:32] So to reduce speed, to build in active travel links, to build in bus lanes and infrastructure. So we did, we did a job of work on the roadside. We brought in a big package of public transport reform. So we’ve been building a metro around our capital. It was ongoing, but the missing piece was bus reform. So we’ve been working through the system to create a far more planned and integrated bus system, and that’s well advanced. [00:14:59] We have in law From a campaign I led before I came into politics, a piece of legislation called the Active Travel Act, which creates a legal responsibility on all highway authorities across the country to develop and maintain a network of routes for walking and cycling. So multiple points on the different transport modes. [00:15:18] We had reform agendas for each of them. And then the, the speed argument was treated separately, but there’s a huge read across with Active travel in particular, because we know one of the main barriers to people cycling and walking more is a fear of the road and fear of being hit. And so reducing speeds had a big benefit for clean air and for physical activity, and also for, obviously, for reducing road deaths. [00:15:43] So it’s quite complicated political messaging, really, because which one of those do you major on? And we majored on the road safety element, not least because, you know, there’s been a lot of Cultural, political pushback and all this, you know, we are being portrayed by our opponents as being anti car, anti motorists, damaging the economy. [00:16:02] So, I think it was important that we frame these things in different ways and try and seize on the benefits that have the greatest political traction, I guess. So, Tackling the speed limit was, it was an important way we did that. And I think there was, there were two features, I think, of the way we’ve done it in Wales, which are interesting to audiences outside of Wales. [00:16:23] And the first is we took a default approach. So we didn’t say you can look at roads on a case by case basis. And the burden of proof is to show why should you bring speeds down? We turned that on its head. We said, we’re going to drop the speed limit. everywhere in areas where people and traffic mix. So in all residential areas around shops, around health facilities, around community centers, using the Stockholm declaration definition of people and traffic mixing, we said all those areas are going to drop currently from 30 to 20, unless the local authority decides to make an exception. [00:16:59] So the burden of proof has shifted. It is not to say that we’re going to Where’s the case for 20 is just to say 20 is the starting point you make a case for 30 And that I think has been the boldest approach that we’ve done which I think is interesting To others who take different approaches and the second big difference we did and this really struck me when I was in Australia With Jen is that the argument there is you can only reduce speeds after you’ve changed the infrastructure. [00:17:29] So until you change the character of the local road, only then can you look at speed. And we didn’t do that. We’ve made no infrastructure changes at all to our roads. We’ve said, we’ll simply drop the speed. And if after dropping the speed, there are still difficulties, there are collision black spots. Then we’ll look at infrastructure changes to lock that in. [00:17:49] So we’re doing it the other way around, because as soon as you say, you must make the infrastructure changes first, you create a huge financial barrier to being able to do it, because it is so expensive to do anything on the highway, that in practice, it kills off progress. So we’ve liberated ourselves from that framing. [00:18:08] And I think that’s been very powerful. So I definitely recommend that to reformers elsewhere. [00:18:13] Jeff Wood: Jen, I’m curious about some of the thinking in Australia. I mean, I know that here in the US, like there’s also one of the things that people say, especially for when you try to make big changes, like congestion pricing, or even just, you know, lower the speed limits is we need the infrastructure first. [00:18:26] So it’s kind of like, you know, it’s a, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Like, you know, do we reduce the speed limits or do we have to build in all the transport infrastructure? Like, you know, Crossings or we need better bus system, or I mean, a lot of that is actually feels like I don’t want to say nimbyism, but just like opposition to change. [00:18:42] But I’m curious about the Australian experience on this, too. [00:18:45] Dr. Jennifer Kent: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that’s just purely a really convenient distraction and point of procrastination for actual action. And what I think it represents is at the bottom of it. In Wales, they want to change and they, well, Lee wants to change and he found a way to overcome some of the key barriers that are consistently just thrown up to actually making the road system a safer and healthier, more sustainable system. [00:19:17] And I think that’s at the heart of it in Australia. We are really struggling to confront. I think there’s a lot of cultural resistance to getting away from the automobile as, you know, the way you travel, you have a right to travel by car. And so we’re really struggling both politically and I think institutionally with this idea that you can actually confront that, that we need to. [00:19:44] And I think it’s similar in the US. So at the heart of it is this. Failure to have that desire to confront the automobile and it’s something that I’m really interested in actually is the way that these. Policy proposals land in that cultural context is just such an interesting way of thinking about it. [00:20:03] I mean, we have very different cultural traits in Australia, in Wales, in the US, but particularly with, you know, European, Scandinavian countries. Where there’s more emphasis on the individual. There’s less emphasis on community as the cornerstone of what we’re doing as a society. And so when you get those conditions, it’s really hard to push forward with these tricky political proposals, but at the soul of it, it has to be this want to change the system. [00:20:32] This, I mean, I would say Lee, fairly passionate kind of desire that, you know, what is the right thing to do when you find the way to do it. [00:20:40] Lee Waters: I do think that the role of leadership is underplayed in a lot of the debate, really, about how to bring about transport change. Because we do have such set narratives about the role of transport in our economy and society. [00:20:54] And it feels kind of inevitable that we will keep to deepen our car dependency. And I guess, particularly in the US and in Australia, there’s the issue of the size. And particularly, I was struck in my conversation in Australia, it’s an unchallenged fact. In the debate that people need to make long journeys and therefore the only practical modes of transport are flying and long distance driving. [00:21:18] And actually, you know, this is like, it’s always a data free conversation because you know, the data isn’t there in a lot of depth in Australia, which is, which is a telling point in itself. But I’m willing to bet because this is true around the world, that most people’s journeys are not long distance. [00:21:36] Business commutes. They are everyday journeys. And most people make short journeys. Even in large countries, most of the journeys people make are not those hard to change journeys. They are relatively easy to change where there are alternatives and where you put incentives and disincentives into place. [00:21:54] But that’s not what the narrative is. The narrative has been dominated by the business debate, by the long distance commute debate. And because we’ve got this econometric framing on transport in particular, The focus is always based on the formulas and the cost benefit assessments that are used by the economists, which are all about journey time savings and commute journeys. [00:22:16] And they completely underplay the leisure and the personal journeys, even though that’s what makes up the majority of journeys. And so from the beginning, you know, you’ve lost the argument because the argument becomes a business commute one, even though that’s not what most journeys are, and those are probably the hardest journeys to shift because The most complicated. [00:22:35] So, you know, I think what we need to do is go back to first principles and say, What are the easiest journeys to change? Let’s not start with what I’ve got, you know, the example I like to give is, you know, I got to pick my granny up from the hospital and pick up a bag of cement on the way home. Now that’s going to be impossible on bike or by public transport. [00:22:55] And they’re almost all conceivable circumstances. So let’s not start with that because that’s a tiny, tiny, tiny minority of the sort of journeys people make. Let’s start with, okay, which journeys could we shift if we really wanted to? And there are piles of journeys we could shift if you really wanted to, but that’s not where the political economic debate focuses on. [00:23:14] And then, and so we kind of lost the argument before we’d begun it. [00:23:18] Jeff Wood: How hard is it to when you have just, it makes it easy political opposition when you can just go against something, there’s a silent majority and there’s a very, very vocal minority. [00:23:28] Lee Waters: Yeah, and you know, that’s really what’s come to bite us really, frankly, in Wales with cancelling so many road schemes, there was a, there was opposition, but it was manageable. [00:23:38] The Big, more challenging opposition has come around speed limits. And you know, this whole idea of motor normativity. And Jen and I have been discussing this. I think she’s doing work of her own on this in Australia at the moment. There’s work that’s come from Wales. Professor Ian Walker at Swansea University has done a lot for leading on this. [00:23:55] And this idea that we are so conditioned for our norms around car dependency. That we’ve come to treat the adverse consequences of, of a car centric approach in a different way to treat any other risks in our lives. And I think that psychology is fascinating and it permeates the mainstream thinking. [00:24:16] And whenever you politically, whenever you try and do something, which can be perceived as a threat to people’s freedom and mobility, It’s kind of the third rail, if you like, in the American phase of politics, it becomes very charged and very difficult and very easy to attack. And so by reducing speed limits in built up areas, we really have antagonized a lot of people, you know, in a country of 3 million people, half a million people signed a petition against this and within the first two weeks of the speed limit changing and it galvanized political opponents around it. [00:24:50] Even though these were a minority. You know, a sizable minority and a very vocal minority. They were still a minority, but they absolutely dominated the debate. And thankfully we’ve held our nerve and the data is doing what we suspected the data would do, which is what is done everywhere else this has been tried, is that speeds come down and as speeds come down, casualties and deaths come down. [00:25:14] But you have to have the political will and the nerve to see through that significant pushback that you do get, and that’s not easy. [00:25:22] Jeff Wood: Jen, can you let folks know a little bit more about motor normativity and what that means? I mean, there’s been research around the world on this, but it’s really interesting what this means and where people are coming from when they’re in opposition. [00:25:34] And it might not necessarily mean that they’re in a regular norm on other subjects that they would be related to the car. [00:25:42] Dr. Jennifer Kent: Yeah, absolutely. So as Lee said, the motor normativity survey was first developed by Ian Walker and the team from Swansea and Bath Universities. It’s basically just a series of, of questions that enable us to understand how people have these default, really quite subconscious, preferences towards the automobile. [00:26:04] And a big component of it, as Leigh said, is this underestimation or misunderstanding of the risk that is embedded in car driving. And what Walker and his team have suggested is that this is a subconscious normative bias that exists in societies where cars dominate. Here in Australia we’re developing a survey which is going to further validate and test that scale and what I’m really interested in is how that relates to other indices of cultural bias and indices of national cultural bias as well. [00:26:40] So what I’m wondering is whether motor normativity is almost like a proxy for individualism, for Lack of respect for authority for this prioritization of individual freedom over the collective and so forth. And I want to be able to understand the way that that has become inbuilt into our, you know, structures, the structures of our cities and become so, so difficult to undo over time because, you know, retrofitting a city For active public transport use is one thing, and then retrofitting a national culture or a national normative bias is another thing. [00:27:19] And I think we’re only starting to realize as researchers the way that those 2 things are so interlocked and so, you know, literally cemented into the ways. that our cities work, and it’s really taken the transport research world by storm, this concept of mononormativity. And I really love that Lee is taking it up from a political perspective and starting to understand that, because I think if we can unpick some of that bias. [00:27:45] And really start to understand how it differs around the world and how that is then reflected on mode share, you know, sustainable transport uptake, et cetera. We can start to have a better insight of why we’re finding it so difficult to shift the private car. I’ve even started to do some work on how this is reflected in vehicle size as well. [00:28:08] So in Australia, we are happily, it seems, following the footsteps of the U. S. to making a lot of our car market be around those really large twin cab utes and so forth. And I think that that is one of the biggest threats that we have to transition at meeting our net zero targets. And it’s just happening without us even thinking about it. [00:28:31] And that’s just another element of bias that we feel as though we have this right to drive the biggest car that we can possibly afford rather than trying to minimize our impact in that way. [00:28:42] Lee Waters: And you know, I think it’s really interesting this whole debate of individual rights versus group rights. I think it’s a really rich vein of research because it just, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the journey we’ve been on in Wales and the way it’s gone and how it could have been done better and differently. [00:28:56] What’s really interesting is that the 20 mile an hour speed limit campaign started off as quite an innocuous You know community based campaign, really, and it was popular and, you know, we did surveys four years out showing 80 percent public approval for reducing the speed limits. And then we, you know, we, we were expecting that to dip as we got closer to implementation. [00:29:18] There’s something called the Goodwin curve. Okay. Goodwin. Did this work on based on the lending congestion charge was suggested that when things are at the abstract level, they’re popular as soon as you get to an implementation, it dips. But then as people get used to it, it starts to become more accepted again. [00:29:34] So that’s the general pattern you’re expecting. But COVID happened. And again, we don’t have enough research to be able to say this with any confidence, but certainly my instinct and my experience as a community politician around this is that attitudes really shifted with us. And we had a government in Wales that was different to the UK government in that we had lots of popular support during COVID for taking a precautionary approach. [00:29:58] And people liked the fact that we were being paternal and keeping people safe. We have a strong political dividend from that as they did in New Zealand and Scotland and in other progressive countries during the pandemic. But that soured very quickly as we came out of the pandemic and people no longer wanted governments to be telling them what to do, what was good for them. [00:30:18] And so I think there was this spot at which these things came together. And it was bad timing in that sense. And that at the time when people were really fed up with government telling them what was best for them, we were bringing in this change, which was doing just that. Plus they were doing it around the car. [00:30:35] Which is the most toxic of places to do it anyway, and it really did land very badly in that immediate period, which according to the Goodwin curve, we’re going to have the maximum opposition in any event. So there was a very pronounced pushback, and I do wonder if some of that was related to the post COVID change of mood. [00:30:56] And also, you know, we had the debate in the UK around Brexit and leaving the EU, and what was interesting, again, some of the research around that, Not unlike some of the research in America around the Trump vote. You know, these are not simplies of instrumental decisions. These are based in people’s culture and their people’s views about the states, people’s views about their own individual freedoms. [00:31:17] And, you know, it did feel to me like a lot of the people who were against 20 mile an hour, the sort of people who were supportive of Brexit. And those who were in favor of 20 mile level, those who, the sort of people who supported remain, they just a different view of the state and collective action. So I think there are lots of political, social, cultural, psychological things all at play here that coalesce around the car. [00:31:44] Jeff Wood: The politics part is really interesting. I’m also wondering about the social aspects of being inside for such a long time and kind of. You know marinating and social media as well. I mean, I feel like there’s some of that going on too That might be part of why maybe people soured on something that they had thought was a good idea before [00:32:02] Lee Waters: Yeah, maybe and this certainly was, you know, a very active social media element To all of this, and I don’t think, you know, in terms of reflecting what we did well and didn’t do well, I think the two things we did poorly, which you know, we’re always, we’re always going to have a rough reception with some people on this. [00:32:18] We’re always going to be at least 20 percent of people who are never going to be reconciled to it. But there were two things I think we did, which made it worse. And one was. The lack of community level consultation on a street by street basis of what should be the exceptions. So what we said as a national government, we will set the default and then it’s for local authorities to say, in our community, we think these roads should remain certain because that would make sense. [00:32:40] And that wasn’t done sufficiently well for a whole host of reasons, but it wasn’t. And there’s a real risk aversion in the local authorities about being seen to be having liability if there were collisions on those roads that they had you. Use their discretion on and so they rather sit behind a very firm set of rules because there’s that culture in highway engineering particular, which is very much a manual based culture. [00:33:02] And so, you know, when you said to them, you do have discretion, that was very uncomfortable for the professions, I think. So, you know, there’s a whole rich seem to talk about in that, but just not to dwell on it for this point. So, you know, there are definitely issues about. The granular implementation of it on a community level. [00:33:17] And also the way we communicated it. So we tried to do a behavior change based approach. We had specialists working with us to frame this in behavior change terms. And so the very clear advice was not to make this emotion based. And so a lot of the arguments against lowering speed limits were emotion based. [00:33:37] And some of the best arguments in favor of reducing speed limits are about saving lives. And that, you know, we could have denied ourselves the whole toolkit really in making that argument because the very strong behavioral advice was don’t go there, try and normalize it. So we, we had messages like a little bit slower, but a whole lot better. [00:33:56] Which again, you know, makes a lot of sense. And when you look at some of the arguments behind it, the research behind it, it’s sensible. But it’s, it’s arid, it’s bloodless, and it doesn’t engage people emotionally. And a lot of these, back to our earlier conversation about what’s going on politically underneath here, with people’s identities, a lot of that is very emotional. [00:34:16] And I think we kind of lost that emotional battle in choosing. A behavior framing for our messaging, and also we just didn’t spend enough money on it. We spent about a million pounds on the communication side, which is very small. I think the total implementation costs are about 28 million pound and only a million on the com side. [00:34:34] And that was that was the completely. wrong ratio of spend, really, I think, because, you know, back to the social media point of view, and then mainstream media, the way this was weaponized by the right wing UK media, because this played very much into their tropes, we turned up with a knife to a gun fight in the, in the old line. [00:34:52] And that’s what I think, those two things in particular, we were caught off guard on. [00:34:56] Jeff Wood: It’s hard when the media doesn’t quite it’s getting better here in the US with certain outlets and things like that, but it’s hard when the folks that write the stories and stuff also have that windshield bias. I feel like when there’s not an understanding of the benefits and even in New York right now, knives are out for pricing, even though After two weeks, we’ve seen some really amazing pictures from the streets of New York city. [00:35:17] I do want to focus a little bit on like the positives. I mean, obviously this has been a good policy. The number of people killed was down 35 percent serious injuries, down 14 percent slight injuries, 31 percent from the time that I read about this. I’ve read articles recently about insurance rates going down or people’s insurance companies saying that there’s been a lot less collisions going on because of the speed limit reductions. [00:35:40] And so those are some seriously positive. Results of this policy. [00:35:44] Lee Waters: Yeah, we, you know, we have hard data now for the first nine months of implementation, and we can say, you know, with certainty that there have been, say, we’re a small country, so three and three million people, but, you know, we know there are 489 fewer casualties in the first nine months alone. [00:35:59] And a 28 percent fall in casualties. So there’s, you know, those are serious data. Those, those are lives saved, tragedy averted, but part of the problem, you know, just in terms of the comm side of this, you know, when you save someone’s life, they don’t often know you’ve saved their life. You know, sometimes they will. [00:36:17] And we’ve had certainly anecdotal experience of people saying, well, I was hit, but I was hit at the car doing closer to 20. And had I been hit by the same car doing closer to 30, I would have died. But those messages are kind of lost in the noise. And that’s what’s so interesting about this. So there are definite positives, but you pocket positives and you focus on the negative. [00:36:38] You know, it’s the nature of human psychology. And also what was very interesting is that people were intimidated by the cultural pushback. So, To begin with, you know, we had doctors and emergency departments willing to go on the record saying this will save lives. We support this policy. And then we went back to them six months in to say, well, you know, can you update us? [00:36:59] Can you repeat that message? And they didn’t want to do it because they were fearful of the environment. And we certainly had local campaigners who were saying to us, well, you know, so we went, we deliberately tried to get positive case studies because people were coming to us with examples. Obviously, you know, my father’s life’s been improved because he now doesn’t feel scared to go out. [00:37:16] The noise levels in my community are much lower. It’s much more pleasant. Again, we knew the research was going to produce this, so we were expecting it. And then when it came and we had positive stories of people saying this, we said to them, please, can we use your story? And. Almost to a man and woman, they said, No, we don’t want to go public on this. [00:37:35] So it’s fascinating, really, the degree to which the pushback of a minority drowned out the positive benefits to the majority. But over time, you know, I was quite confident that as people got used to it. That would lessen and, you know, just anecdotally, people are definitely driving slower and they’re getting used to driving slower. [00:37:54] And what’s really interesting, again, this is anecdotal, you know, you do see people who go from Wales to England, where the speed limit is still 30. People who don’t agree with the speed limit change in Wales, but they go to England and say, Oh my goodness, it feels so much faster there, it feels dangerous. [00:38:08] So it’s interesting how we, how norms adapt and how quickly, but you know, the data is strong and stable. And as long as we can hold our nerve. I know this is not a change anybody is calling to be reversed. For all the pushback, nobody’s calling for this to be reversed. They’re calling for more roads to be exempted, they’re calling for this is the absolute classic of the perversity of human beings, is that people want the streets they live on to be slow, but the streets they drive on to not be slow. [00:38:40] And that’s, you know, from a political point of view, is impossible. But that’s the contradiction that we have to deal [00:38:45] Jeff Wood: with. That’s the windshield perspective again, right? Where you see out your windshield and you’re trying to get to where you’re going. And if you’re standing on the street with your daughter or son or your little one and you see somebody speeding by, you’re like, I wish that speed limit was so much lower. [00:38:58] Yeah. Because they go by so fast. [00:39:01] Lee Waters: It just makes it very hard problem to tackle as the problem. And because there is political pushback at a time when politicians are dealing with so many other difficulties around cost of living and, you know, multiple simultaneous crises, you know, this is a, an optional battle that you don’t really need to have from a politician’s point of view. [00:39:21] And so, you know, I do fear that people will look at the Welsh experience where the politicians can think, Oh yeah, the stats are good, but there’s a whole world of pain that we don’t need. [00:39:31] Dr. Jennifer Kent: I do think it’s, I mean, it’s something that we need to, I think, get better at in transport research and practitioner communities, celebrating some of those wins, you know, I think we’re so short sighted and just on to the next thing, the next, you know, the next grant, the next paper, the next, rather than looking back and thinking. [00:39:48] And, you know, I don’t want to put you in the position of the glorified politician, but I remember saying to you when you were back in Australia, I mean, that’s 489 people whose lives have not been substantially impacted or, you know, torn apart by the idea of being involved in a serious road accident. And I was saying to you, do you wake up in the morning sometimes or go to bed sometimes and think, oh, my gosh, like. [00:40:15] I have saved the lives of X number of people. That is something that very few people, unless you’re a surgeon or a midwife or whatever, can actually say, particularly a transport planner or a transport minister. And I think that we just need to Take a step back and really reflect on the impact that we can actually have in these spaces on people’s actual everyday lives and, you know, pat ourselves on the back for that a little bit. [00:40:42] Lee Waters: Yeah, well, I was just not human nature though, is it? [00:40:45] Dr. Jennifer Kent: No, [00:40:45] Lee Waters: I think, you know, I do sort of reflect on other big changes have taken place, which are now. Accepted and celebrated and never questioned. So I think the two immediate ones or three. So one seat belts, which was hugely controversial and difficult at the time. [00:41:03] Smoking in bars, you know, very difficult at the time. And also with us in Wales, we’ve got a brilliant track record on recycling of waste. So we’ve got like the second best levels of recycling in the world. Whereas 20 years ago, we were among the poorest performers in Europe. And though it’s commonplace, you know, if you live in Wales, you recycle instinctively. [00:41:23] But as we did that gradually, you know, there was pushback all along the way. And I think it’s just having that confidence to just accept you’ve got to build into your model. You know, if you’re going to do these things, there is going to be, you have to prepare yourself. There is going to be opposition. [00:41:39] But it is in the grand scheme of things, transient and back to your point at the beginning, Jeffrey, about, you know, over consulting, you know, I think there’s a real balance between, but in consulting enough and making it good enough, not letting the perfect be the enemy, the good, good enough to get over the line because once it’s over the line. [00:42:00] then you tend not to reverse. But sometimes you’re a bit bloodied getting it over the line because it is imperfect. But if we waited for perfect, we’d have never done it. And even though what we’ve done is imperfect, and it certainly has some political collateral damage, it’s nonetheless now what we do. [00:42:19] And I think that will consolidate. [00:42:22] Jeff Wood: Jen, you had 100 experts sign a petition asking for changes locally in Australia. What was the result of that? And why did you put that together in the first place? [00:42:31] Dr. Jennifer Kent: Well, the main reason for putting it together was to confront that idea that we need infrastructural change before we can put forward the policy change. [00:42:39] So even within academia, there are a lot of transport researchers or engineers, and they like to engineer out the And I think that the idea of putting that together was to put Academic research behind that idea that you can change the system without actually having to invest a lot of money on infrastructural change the results from it. [00:43:04] I’m actually still working that out. I know that the letter has been distributed. to multiple local government organizations, state government organizations, and it has made its way to the federal government. I wasn’t expecting for it to be anything, you know, for fireworks to happen from it, but it’s still recorded there in history that we as an academic body are behind this idea that we don’t need structural change for change to happen. [00:43:31] And it coincided with Lee’s and it was just a good way to promote. that visit as well to the academic community. And I think it has brought us together as transport researchers around this idea of, you know, slower street speeds being one of the key components of a more sustainable transport system. I think it goes back a little bit to what Lee was saying about the idea of using the emotion behind. [00:43:56] This change to push forward, you know, what we know is just good planning. What we know is just required for sustainable transport and slow street speeds are a great, great way to put that forward. I know in the US at the moment, Kevin cries at. from University of Colorado Boulder is working on this concept of emergency streets, which is very, very different approach to what they’ve done in Wales. [00:44:22] It’s basically if a fatality happens within a few days that street is changed infrastructurally to slow speeds down, you know, as a mark of respect for what’s going on in that space. And I find that sort of. Full of emotion could actually really work in the U. S. because emotions are heightened in many other different ways. [00:44:46] So I think getting that emotion forward and using it to push forward what we know is just good planning, it could be a good strategy for us in this space. And that letter was part of trying to do that. [00:44:59] Lee Waters: I’m just two quick things to that one. One is, you know, in terms of we discussed how car centric our cultures are. [00:45:05] And so this is a counter cultural argument that we’re making here. And you’re not going to change that with a letter. You know, it’s going to take more than one initiative. This is about chipping away over time and accepting that this is an uphill battle. So, you know, I think these initiatives, you know, you ask the question, what did it achieve? [00:45:25] And, you know, the fact it brings people together and starts to change the framing of the conversation, that’s a result. You’re not immediately going to get a eureka, you know, scales falling from the eyes moment from, from one initiative. You’ve got to keep. plugging away at it. And the second just thing that just came to mind listening to Jen there is just the other thing we’ve done on speeds is back to the climate argument is in our future roads policy. [00:45:47] So we canceled a bunch of roads and we’ve said we’re going to have a new set of tests for when roads are the right solution to a transport problem in the future. And they will be, and we will continue to build roads, but we set the bar higher for when roads are the right thing to do, particularly from a climate lens, accepting that if we just keep on doing more, We’re going to keep getting more induced demand. [00:46:08] We’re going to keep getting more embodied carbon and that knocks us off the trajectory we need to be on. But one of the things we’ve said is that because one of the arguments often for road building schemes is a safety one. There is a accident black spot, collision black spot, I think is better. And therefore we need to make the road safer. [00:46:25] The way we make the road safer is by allowing people to travel at high speeds. More safely, so we put in great separated junctions or we put in safety barriers or we change the character of the road so people can drive faster with different sight lines and so on. And what we’ve said is if there is a collision black spot, the first thing you should be doing is reducing the speed, not building more road. [00:46:49] And that’s a simple, but I think very powerful change to the orthodox paradigm of the professions. And this idea is the job of highway engineers to allow people to travel safely, fast. Whereas, actually, that means challenging. [00:47:04] Jeff Wood: It’s the whole kinetic energy argument over again. I know that there’s folks researching here that have talked about the safe systems pyramid, Kerry Watkinson, David Ederer, and one of their things, their main points is that kinetic energy that’s created from driving faster really is a danger. [00:47:16] And so if you can reduce that energy in any way possible, and, you know, speeding reductions is one way, then you can, you know, end up saving lives and creating less collisions. [00:47:25] Lee Waters: Yeah, the whole embodied embedded carbon argument is fascinating because that has not been part of the calculations for when you build road schemes. [00:47:34] So, you know, the amount of concrete, the amount of steel, the amount of materials that goes into building the infrastructure. and significantly to the overall carbon impact of a scheme, but that is not part of the calculations of the cost benefit of this. And so we’ve started saying when you look at, particularly when you look at the induced demand effect of increasing road capacity, which often happens on the back of these so called safety schemes, is not only you producing a lot of carbon through building the road, you’re creating extra journeys, which also then increases the amount of carbon that’s consumed and introducing the concept of counting the carbon from the build and the induced demand. [00:48:15] Also, I think, you know, if you can get that baked into the calculations shifts the balance of the argument and changes the nature of the discussion you have about the right transport solution to a problem. I [00:48:26] Jeff Wood: have [00:48:27] Lee Waters: one more thing [00:48:27] Jeff Wood: to ask. What’s coming up? What’s the future of the program? And hopefully it stays intact. [00:48:33] But what do you see going forward? [00:48:35] Lee Waters: So in terms of the speed limit, then, you know, we’re making some changes to clarify the discretion local authorities have to issue the exceptions because there are, there are some roles that have inappropriately been reduced to 20 that make more sense. They just don’t pass the sniff test. [00:48:49] And I think once you lose the sniff test, you lose a lot of the credibility, I think with. compliance. So there’s some small changes to be made there, but they’re going to be on the margins. I think now it’s just about keeping the data coming and locking in those norms. But then in terms of the broader program, you know, we’ve got to stick to our decisions on not reverting to type of road building. [00:49:10] And that’s going to be hard to do when the focus is going to be constantly on growth, economic growth. Because those ideas are still so orthodox and so embedded that the way you increase growth is by increasing traffic and building new roads. So that’s holding the line on that. I think is going to be the challenge and then doing the thing that everybody always says is, you know, not just disincentivize the behavior you don’t want to see, but incentivize the behavior you do want to see and make it easier. [00:49:36] You know, my mantra has always been, you’re going to make the right thing to do, the easiest thing to do, because people will do what is easiest. And we’ve spent 70 years making it easy to jump in the car for short, everyday journeys. And we have to make the alternative true. We have to make it easier to jump on a bike or jump in a bus or walk. [00:49:55] And so changing that reality on the ground is a long term change, but we’ve got to keep focused on convenience and choice. Going back to the political framing of this, I think that’s where, you know, If we concede those arguments, we’re dead because the strongest pro bordering argument is around choice. [00:50:11] And actually, it’s a false argument because what we’ve done is taken away people’s choice. We may be forced people into car ownership because they don’t have an alternative. And real choice is making daily judgments. mode agnostic. So people can genuinely make a choice how they get around rather than being forced to jump in the car. [00:50:30] And we’re a million miles from that. So I think framing it around choice and convenience making non car options convenient, I think is where our focus needs to be. And Jen, where are you all headed? [00:50:42] Dr. Jennifer Kent: Yeah, well, you know, I’m feeling a bit insignificant in my academic ivory tower. My, my main focus at the moment is unpicking some of those cultural bias and, you know, those deep seated cultural beliefs. [00:50:57] I’m transferring that onto moda normativity from the perspective of cultures of parenting. So I’m looking very much at. the ways that cultures of parenting have changed over the last 20 years or so and how that is again preferencing the private car as a way to, you know, be a good parent today. And it all really is wrapped up in, in that complex ball of what it means to protect your children and give them the very best education and other experiences in their life and so forth. [00:51:26] And that really relates to the motor normativity question that I think Lee’s been dealing with in Wales. That’s where I’m headed. [00:51:35] Jeff Wood: Awesome. We’re going to put some of the documents in the show notes. Leah and Jen. Thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. [00:51:41] Lee Waters: I really enjoyed the conversation. [00:51:42] Thank you. [00:51:43] Dr. Jennifer Kent: Yeah. Thank you, Jeff.
