Madam,

The French are mourning the 43 people who died last Friday in a terrible road accident.

There are many roads like this in Wales. I live on one of them.

It has a speed limit of 30mph, but it should be 20mph, given that the row of listed cottages have front doors opening directly onto the road and gardens on the other side of the road with garden gates opening directly onto the road.

Is Gwynedd Council waiting for the fatality that will inevitably occur before reducing and enforcing the speed limit?

Residents are becoming increasingly frail and are not nimble on their feet, and perhaps a little absent-minded.

Walkers and holidaymakers need to retreat into the borders or the garden walls to avoid being hit by passing cars, and could perhaps miss their footing in their haste to avoid a collision and consequently slip under a car.

Or a child visiting a friend or relative (nobody could risk bringing up a family in these cottages!) who is not used to the necessary level of vigilance required to give one a 50/50 chance of not being hit by a car, could forget, in their excitement at, say, a planned outing, the parental and grandparental advice about not venturing onto the road, and a car travelling at the legal limit of 30mph would be unable to stop in time. The distress of everyone involved, including the law-abiding driver, would be horrendous.

Sadly, speed limits tend to be seen by drivers as instructions to drive at least as fast as indicated, rather than as instructions to drive no faster and only as fast as stated when it is safe to do so.

Come on Gwynedd Council! Take some time out from planning what services to cut, and think about the safety and wellbeing of your resident council taxpayers, your visitors, your holidaymakers. Put safety before convenience.

Deborah MacIntyre, Arthog