TOO FAST AND FURIOUS? OR PERHAPS NOT FAST ENOUGH?
Famously – or infamously – the look-at-mesaving-the-planet Tesla Model ‘S’ comes with driver-selectable power settings: Ludicrous and Insane. And that seems to me to be a good way to describe some of the UK’S speed limits. Whether those characteristics significantly contribute to many drivers’ casual disregard for them is a matter of opinion, but they are beyond question inconsistent and often confusing, with bizarre variations from one governing body to another, and all too often poorly signed. If you want people to follow rules you have to make it as easy as possible for them not to get it wrong. So the authorities’ occasional reliance – to quote the best-known example – on the presence of street lights alone to indicate a 30mph limit is surely missing the point. Unless the point is to raise money by fining people, rather than making the world safer to start with.
There is a bewildering complexity in the way limits apply to different classes of vehicle, too. Until recently, lorries over 7.5 tonnes were, on those single-carriageway roads where the so-called national speed limit applies, limited to 40mph – this dating from the days when they had frankly rudimentary chassis, and certainly less than fantastic brakes. Presumably that was itself felt to be the cause of a number of accidents, with car drivers taking risks to overtake, and so a few years ago the limit was raised to 50mph. (But only in England and Wales, note; in Scotland it remains at 40mph.) Fine. But you now have the situation where 44-tonne artics are rumbling along ‘A’-roads at the 56–57mph permitted by their own maximum-speed limiters, their drivers safe in the knowledge that unless something goes badly wrong they will slip in ‘under the radar’.
OK, so you don’t drive a 44-tonne artic, or even an 18-tonne rigid. So what does that have to do with you? Good question. But quite possibly you – like me – run an ordinary, bogstandard, common-or-garden van or openback pickup truck, either for work, or perhaps to tow your race or trackday car. (There are now more than four million of the things on UK roads, my own 2006 Mercedes Vito included.) And in which case you, too, are on those same single-carriageway, national-speed-limit roads limited to just 50mph – and at which speed you will likely incur the wrath of all and sundry, especially the many thugs who seem to drive four-axle tippers. And there’s more. Take dual carriageways, which in many parts of the country have become cheap – and dangerous – motorways. There your Vito, your Transit, your Sprinter, your Vivaro or even your Vwamarok pickup is – again like our notional 44-tonner – limited to just 60mph, when the world and his wife in their cars (and their car-derived vans) are steaming past at a legal 70mph, or often as much as 85–90. Only on a full-fat, blue-signed motorway can you lawfully do 70mph.
And there, surely, is one limit above all others that warrants being raised. To reflect not just modern cars’ – and lighter vans’ – vastly improved road behaviour, compared to those of 50 and more years ago (when the 70mph limit was introduced), but also the reality of the situation. Traffic levels are vastly higher than they were in the late 1960s, or even in the late 2000s, and they are not going to fall any time soon, unless the government builds the best public-transport system the world has ever seen. But increasing lengths of socalled smart motorway, with variable speed limits, are proving themselves to be effective at keeping really crowded stretches moving at an easy 40–50mph, and if – as seems to be the justification for the mad HS2 project – time is money, then surely we should, where circumstances allow, be trusted to drive at a speed most people (and their vehicles) are now more than capable of doing without undue risk. Otherwise, how safe are we – to paraphrase Ralph Nader – at any speed?