Disruption as it happened – the speed limit debates of the twentieth century

We hear about digital disruption constantly. One area that often features as being in a state of disruption is transport. A common point made is the prospect of automated / autonomous / driverless vehicles potentially improving the currently tragic road safety situation of over 1.3 million fatalities per annum globally. So I thought it could be instructive to look back at the disruption brought on by the automobile and focus on one aspect: speed limits.

How did society meet the challenges of previous technological disruption? How is it that we have the speed limits we do that are a product of the disruption brought on by the coming of the automobile? Why it is that speed limits are so controversial, so difficult to debate rationally and continue to be set at speeds we now know with the benefit of hindsight and understanding that human drivers, cyclists and pedestrians make mistakes, are often too high to be safe?

In my limited research I found a tome by William Plowden entitled The Motor Car and Politics 1896 – 1970, published by Bodley Head in 1971 that pulls together the controversies and debates surrounding the automobile in the UK. Speed limits is a major theme, along with other controversial disruptive topics such as numbered vehicle identification, driver licencing and testing, fees and taxes, road conditions, etc. I also looked at a few other sources to expand my research to the USA, Europe and Australia.

The advent of the automobile or car was certainly a huge disruption to society that we perhaps underappreciate today given their ubiquity.

Pre 1896 the well-known, almost clichéd, red flag speed limit was the law in the UK. This was a general (i.e. all roads) speed limit of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) (and 2 mph or 3.2 km/h in towns) which was motivated by the noise of steam driven traction engines or locomotives and the like.

Cars (or ‘light locomotives’) began appearing as imports into the UK and in 1896 the speed limit was raised to 14 mph (22 km/h), although in practice this was imposed at 12 mph (19 km/h) by the Local Government Board. The requirement that a person with a red flag precede the vehicle was dropped for cars.

Several states in the US also enacted red flag speed limit laws, among them Vermont and Pennsylvania with 4 mph (6.4 km/h) speed limits. In New York City a 5 mph (8 km/h) speed limit was in force during the 1870’s and 80’s. Pedestrian fatalities ran on average at four per week with common causes being due to spooked / runaway horses and speeding drivers; the safety problems from speeding certainly predate the automobile.

The capabilities of automobiles were advancing rapidly and no sooner had the new speed limit been imposed that it was being broken as a matter of course by the Edwardian early adopter motorists with means well above average for the time. Cars were a novelty, used mainly as pleasure vehicles and expensive. Nonetheless, despite their relative rarity compared to horse drawn vehicles and the then relatively new bicycle, car owners were quick to organise and influence, through the formation of the Automobile Club (later to become the RAC). One of the main areas the AC campaigned for was the abolition of speed limits. In the lead up to the next iteration of traffic law there was much debate on the best approach to safety and other (to many) more pressing issues of noise and dust: whether to impose a prescribed speed limit with its quantitative advantages to enforcement, versus a qualitative performance based approach based on dangerous or furious driving and relying on courts to interpret furious and dangerous.

Interestingly the car brought through-traffic back to towns and villages, something that the railways had virtually eliminated. Cars were able to be driven at speed on relatively newly paved roads; many paved as a response to the emergence of the bicycle not that long beforehand.

Some English counties became infamous for keenly enforcing the speed limit allegedly as a means to recoup the costs of road repairs caused by automobiles traversing their counties, damaging their roads and otherwise not contributing to the costs. The notion of speed enforcement as revenue-raising has endured for over 100 years.

The AC continued its campaign to abolish speed limits and won over the County Council Association, which wanted numbering of cars and higher penalties to deal with the motor problem more generally. UK industry development was a common argument, with comparisons made to continental Europe and the USA. The UK government used the AC as virtually the only stakeholder, with the AC holding a member’s referendum, but the AC didn’t win on all fronts, particularly speed limits. Political debate ensured but the speed limit question was decided very late in the debate. There were proposals for limits between 15 and 25 mph (24 and 40 km/h) based on not much more than opinions and leanings towards the pro motor and anti-motor camps. With time running out before the start of the grouse shooting season the next day, a new limit of 20 mph (32 km/h) was legislated for three years in 1903. This ‘trial’ limit was renewed periodically right up to 1930. The Local Government Board could approve applications from Counties and Boroughs for localised lower speed limits, but this was rarely pursued.

In the early 1900’s many US states enacted 20 mph (32 km/h) speed limits, some opted for 15 mph (24 km/h). Connecticut has a 15 mph (24 km/h) speed limit in the countryside and a 12 mph (19 km/h) limit in the city. By enraging locals with his automobile, William K Vanderbilt II is said to have motivated authorities to impose speed limits in Newport RI in 1900 and Long Island NY in 1902.

The capabilities of automobiles improved and their top speeds continually increased even before the 20 mph (32 km/h) limit commenced in the UK on 1 January 1904. This new speed limit was flaunted continuously. People (almost always men) of reputation suffered the indignity of being prosecuted for what they saw as the trivial offence of speeding. Police set speed traps easiest for them to catch out speedsters, often on long straight open roads, perceived by motorists as safe. The same arguments continued. The AC renewed its push to abolish speed limits. A new organisation emerged initially entitled Motorists Protection Association for the Prevention of Police Traps, which became the UK Automobile Association. Bicycle patrols were mounted to warn motorists of police speed traps, with the Automobile Association legally sailing close to the wind for contempt. Automobile clubs in the US also protested the imposition of speed limits.

Very soon there was a Royal Commission established, which focussed on the themes of danger, dust and costs, but this progressed very slowly with all manner of ‘extreme’ views put forward from both sides of the debate. Even hair raising accounts of very narrow escapes from speeding cars were seen by many as an extreme view and may well have been downplayed in the deliberations. Another extreme view was a proposal for special roads for motorists without a speed limit that probably would have mimicked a railway without tracks (or an early form of the modern motorway). This concept was cynically opposed by the RAC and Motoring Union as unhelpful to the abolition of speed limits on all ‘ordinary’ roads. The commission resulted in new laws that were silent on the speed limit. Meanwhile automobile crash fatalities were rising alarmingly:

? 1909 saw 373 fatal crashes, or approximately 50% of the total for the much more numerous horse-drawn vehicle fatalities)

? 1914 saw 1329, or around 130% of horse-drawn vehicle fatalities.

Now that is a tragic consequence of a technological disruption, but of course such numbers of would soon be overwhelmed by the casualties of First World War, and in 1919, the global influenza pandemic.

By the 1920’s the 20 mph (32 km/h) speed limit was widely seen as discredited given medium size family cars were expected to reach 55 mph (88 km/h). Published bus timetables were not able to be adhered to without breaking the speed limit. Argument continued. The Roads Department set up a committee and sought views on speed limits. A draft parliamentary bill was actually published for feedback; a very different approach for the time; but the bill was not enacted.

It was 1930 that saw the UK speed limit abolished and policing relying on subjective interpretations of dangerous, furious and a new category of careless driving.

The relentless growth of car ownership continued apace, as did fatal crashes to unprecedented levels not repeated until 1964. The UK’s middle class was by now fully embracing the automobile. Almost presciently, a Daily Express motoring correspondent wondered if the speed limit were to be restored, whether 60 mph (96 km/h) would be the choice? The UK’s Pedestrians Association, an organisation founded in 1929 to represent the interests of pedestrians in face of the automobile onslaught (now Living Streets), submitted in 1933 that “The Ministry of Transport has permitted to be unleashed on the roads forces of destruction which are beyond the powers of the police to control”. Of course force is the product of mass and acceleration, or in the case of a crash, deceleration, so the comment from the PA is quite accurate.

Robust debate continued from the various secular interests and strange logic was applied to downplay the rising toll. Col Moore-Brabazon, after relating experiences of being whipped in the face while driving (presumably by horse-whip), questioned the level of concern over 7000 road deaths per year from automobile crashes when the suicide toll was over 6000 “and nobody makes a fuss of that”.

The mounting fatalities motivated the introduction in 1935 of a 30 mph (48 km/h) speed limit in built up areas; the general urban limit that is in force today in the UK, and many other countries as a 50 km/h speed limit.

Other measures to regulate and control the automobile progressed more slowly after the Second World War, with little change to speed limits; all the while car ownership just kept on relentlessly. Increased mobility enabled by wide car ownership was changing society in many positive ways previously unimagined. The rising death toll was of concern but perceived by many as a price of progress. Encouraging motorised travel during the 1960’s, the UK Department of Transport sought to raise 30 mph limits to 40 mph (64 km/h) where it seemed safe to do so. IN 1965 the first general speed limit since 1930 was introduced: 70 mph (112 km/h). There was not much support from motorists for a 50 mph (80 km/h) speed limit proposed by the Pedestrians Association.

While this brief historical outline has focussed on automobiles, commonly a lower speed limit was also were applied to trucks and buses. The variety of speed limits between different states and cities were seen as a problem for heavier vehicles, and the natural outcome was that car drivers were always slowed by trucks adhering to a lower limit. So differential speed limits for heavy vehicles have largely been phased out, and in virtually every case, the limit was raised to match the car’s, not the reverse of lowering the speed limit applying to automobiles.

So how can the handling of the automobile disruption be described when looking at speed and its impacts on safety? Commentary by Plowden is one of government detachment, disproportional influence by motorists and their new organisations, the silence and powerlessness of most pedestrians, particularly those in the working classes, the polarisation of pro- and anti-motor viewpoints with little attempt to bring a scientific approach to the debate; the only science applied appears to be that stemming from the advances in the speed capabilities of automobiles. Looking back through Plowden, it seems numbers were plucked from the air as options for setting speed limits. There was much government indifference, delay and indecision to what we now label a massive disruption.

There was an atmosphere of privilege in the crucial period in the first part of the twentieth century that pervaded motorists’ attitudes towards speed in the UK: principled opposition to speed limits by the AC / RAC and AA on the basis that it was believed speed in and of itself was not unsafe; that speed limits would be driven up to (as has largely proved to be the case); a sense that pleasure driving was a self-imposed risk to life and limb, much like a sport (which ostensibly ignored risks imposed to other cars, pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists and in those days horse riders and drivers); that bad law would be unenforceable; all with a largely reactive government responding to pressures real and perceived from influence grounded in class, wealth and property.

It was as though it was all too hard for much of the time, with arguments against speed limits including that it was undesirable to strictly enforce the speed limit even to the extent that the non-enforcement of regulations is due to the fact that public opinion (class influence?) is against their enforcement.

The automobile was not the only technological disruption in the early twentieth century. Another burning issue was how to handle the rapid reticulation of electrical power. Government and its bureaucracy were quite out of their depth in dealing with the automobile; there was a dearth of technical expertise.

From these reactive beginnings can be seen the result today: often unscientific, inappropriate, unsafe speed limits. Yes there are modern codes of practice for engineers and technicians, but these were founded the outcome of political machinations from the early twentieth century, with layer of technical rigour that at least brings some consistency to how speed limits are set.

The lessons for today’s digital disruptions:

• be proactive,
• bring best science to the debate,
• be aware of sectional influences and motivations, and
• be ready for surprises.

Originally published in Medium April 2019 by myself. Republished here for LinkedIn connections.