Portsmouth: corner cases

When a road in Cycle-Town Portsmouth is a 30mph road, there's now an implicit message you can drive faster. Given the ambiguity of speeding enforcement, that means up to about 30-38 miles an hour. Yet there are all these side roads now with a 20 mph limit. Do the drivers slow down to the allowed 20 mph range (max about 24 mph) before entering, or do they turn in at full speed slowly coasting down later.

In this photographer's limited experience, it's the latter. If you are crossing a 20mph side road adjacent to a 30 mph main road, you still need to fit enough to sprint across the side road at speed -more speed than 20-mph everywhere areas.

Sometimes they've tried to deal with this by narrowing the pavement, and adding bollards to stop you cutting over the pavement at speed. This road looks like it is actually two-way, so narrowing down to one lane at the junction is very aggressive.

Presumably bikes can take the corner on the pavement and let their front suspension handle the high-speed landing as they push off the edge of the build-out.


Other roads have less traffic camling; this child who has the audacity to ride his bike on the pavement is as at risk to cars turning at speed on a 20 mph side road as if it didn't have a speed limit.