ABERDEEN will today become the first city in Scotland to introduce a blanket 20mph speed limit in the city centre.
The limit has been introduced to make the city centre safer and more pedestrian friendly.
It will cover Union Street and its side streets, along with part of Ferryhill, the edge of Rosemount and the West End, and some streets north of the harbour.
Ian Yuill, convener of the Environment and Infrastructure Committee, said it was a further step towards the pedestrianisation of Union Street.
The council is committed to that but it can not be implemented until a number of roads around the city centre are redeveloped. The work is underway and it is anticipated that the main part of Union Street will be pedestrianised by 2010.
In the meantime, the pavements along the busiest section have been widened.
Mr Yuill said that there had been a real problem because of the volume of pedestrians in Union Street which had resulted in some spilling on to the road.
"'The 20mph limit is designed to make the streets safer for the many thousands of people who use the pavements every day. It is just part of the answer but we want to show that the city centre is not just for cars, it is for people as well.
"As well as making it safer, we believe it will it will make it a more pleasurable experience for people shopping in the city centre if traffic is moving at a slower speed.
"There is already an informal agreement with buses and taxis which use the bus lanes that they will keep to 20mph so that means half the road is restricted and we are simply extending it to all vehicles."
Superintendent Harry Thorburn, of Grampian Police, said they were enthusiastically supporting the speed restriction.
"Obviously our interest is purely to do with road safety. Even a partial reduction in speed has proven to markedly reduce the severity of road accidents.
"There are quite a number of accidents in the city. In the last year there were 53 road deaths in Grampian and six of them were pedestrians.
"Pedestrian casualties figure significantly in the killed and seriously injured statistics and one that crops up time and time again in the city centre is the person crossing the road.
"The reduction in speed will make a difference to the impact in an accident."
He said they did not envisage any problem enforcing the limit and they would be looking at intelligence led operations.
"Intelligence will very quickly identify any hot spots and problem areas and we will have a very close regard to areas frequented by children and near schools and I don't anticipate a problem with resourcing."
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