Life Begins at Thirty (MPH)

Creative Commons Credit Gaetan Lee

If you were not thrilled with our idea of bringing back the 55 MPH speed limit, you will be crazed by Glenn Lowcock's proposal for a universal 30 MPH speed limit. He suggests that "We’d adapt. Where once a ‘tolerable’ one-hour regular journey could take us 50 miles, we’d now go only 25 miles in that time. So we’d simply, sensibly, review the radius of our daily lives, and ‘shrink to fit’."

-Fewer people would commute by car and more would work from home;
-Handymen might come into their own again, as the higher cost of transporting goods forced up the price of new products.
-home or ‘near grown’ food and drink would become the cheaper option. While we’d find ourselves eating locally sourced stuff.
-when we needed a break, we would take the train, really smart ones that go a lot faster than 30.

He concludes:

Finally, the shift might bring another welcome change – weakening our fixation with the speed, glamour and status of cars. They’d all be rather irrelevant when zippy little sports cars were left chomping at the bit. Imagine, hybrid models like the Smart car, perfect for getting round town, might take over as the new Porsches…

So, who’s up for slow travel? ::Green Futures