[mcv]

Point 2 is nitpicking. Obviously every trip is different, but a reduction from 30 to 20 mph does not have nearly as big a difference on travel times as your proposal to reduce all the way to 10 or 5 would have.

Everything is a compromise. 30 mph was a bad compromise because it's a deadly speed that will kill people in a collision. 20 mph is significantly safer. Reducing further to 10 mph or even 5 mph would not have a significant further effect on safety in normal traffic conditions, but would have a significant impact on travel times if people have to drive at that speed for a significant part of their trip.

I think it's your complaints that are 100% subjective. There is evidence for these policies. Politicians rarely go into that evidence for public announcements because most people aren't that interested in the evidence, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You're suggesting that politicians randomly pick some numbers out of the air just to upset people, but the opposite is true; you generally need an excessive amount of evidence to get politicians to do anything at all, especially when it even slightly inconvenience the oil and car lobby. I mean, look at the lack of action to mitigate climate change despite the excessive amounts of evidence.

[nvm0n2]

Your first paragraph contains a one sentence explanation they could have easily chosen and presented, but they didn't. That's the complaint.

> your proposal

I haven't made any proposals. My proposed alternative would be for the Welsh government to focus on much bigger problems that they may actually have a mandate for. The alternatives were just examples to illustrate the point. Ask yourself why 20 and not 25, if it helps.

> you generally need an excessive amount of evidence to get politicians to do anything

What an amazing country you must live in. For the schmucks like us in the rest of the world, we have the politician's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done. Evidence-based policy making is the exception not the norm :(

[mcv]

I can understand the situation is different in the UK. It's certainly seen some big decisions that weren't rooted in any kind of reality. And of course many other countries also suffer from the occasional decisions made for completely the wrong reasons.

But I'm not yet convinced that's the case here. I don't know the details of what's going on in Wales, but the Amsterdam decision to go from 50 to 30 makes a lot of sense. According to the graph matsemann posted (https://www.nullvisjonen-agder.no/images/grafikk/dodsrisiko-...), 30 is significantly safer than 50, whereas 40 is still in the middle of that curve.

Also, in Netherland, 30 is already a standard speed limit in many places, and it doesn't make sense to confuse the situation by introducing new speed limits in between the existing ones unless there's a really good reason to do so.

[nvm0n2]

It's pretty obvious what's going on, as this is one of several related actions all of which are intended to penalize or restrict car usage. We know the safety argument isn't the real reason because nothing has changed about safety lately that would trigger a sudden re-think here, they weren't talking about it before and the actual expected changes are in the order of single digit deaths per year. If it was a genuine concern about safety they'd have been pushing for this limit 50 years ago.

What's actually changed in the last few years is the new political obsession with net zero. Politicians don't have a mandate for that and haven't won the argument for it, which is why these measures are facing so much resistance.