UK Speed Limits Are Breaking the Nation

Car launches and carefully crafted messages

Car launches are peculiar yet marvellous occasions: a high-stakes contest between PR teams and journalists, staged in spectacular places. Everything is painstakingly arranged, whether it is the driving route, the dinner seating chart or, naturally, the plan for presenting the car exactly as its maker intends. A handful of phrases invariably resurface throughout, repeatedly hammering the central message into motoring writers’ minds.

Naturally, certain events offer rather more freedom. I remember one from 2004, when, as a fresh-faced 12-year-old, I was flown to Australia for the ‘Vauxhall’ Monaro launch. It was a rebadged Holden with a 5.7-litre V8 and a wonderfully infectious Australian sense of humour, so it needed little in the way of ‘positioning’. Vauxhall understood it would only sell in limited quantities, but simply wanted something cool in its showrooms. When I asked to depart from the official Melbourne-focused itinerary, travel to Bathurst and ultimately leave the car in Sydney, approval came within seconds.

It was, needless to say, a brilliant journey. Yet I returned with a rather bleak realisation: Australia was a broken country. The sheer number of speed cameras, together with intrusive messaging that ‘speed is evil and will result in certain death’, had made everyone observe ludicrously cautious limits at any cost. Those wonderful V8s were travelling at 109 km/h on broad, flawlessly surfaced motorways with little traffic, and even more slowly on country roads, including areas where scarcely any people existed.

UK speed limits have reached the same point

A couple of decades later, the UK has arrived at the same disheartening place. An enormous camera network, no discretion whatsoever, the near-total absence of real human traffic enforcement, and odd, inconsistent ‘variable speed limits’ apparently designed solely to catch drivers out have left our motorways crawling along mindlessly at 67 mph. No one seems prepared to move over. No one watches anything except gantry signs that may inexplicably display ‘50’. We, too, have become a broken people.

I have just returned from a weekend trip to Heathrow: a warm, dry drive on a Sunday morning. Even so, I was limited to 50 mph for around 35 miles. At one stage, consecutive gantries showed 50, 60, 50, 50, 60, 60, 50. At the fifth gantry, extra wording appeared: ‘Report of obstruction’. There was no obstruction. Was it frustrating? Absolutely. But exceeding the limit would have brought the expected fine and three points, despite that limit having been imposed for an imaginary situation.

A sensible debate on speed enforcement

I support enforcement, and I support reasonable, rational speed limits. However, we have been gradually numbed to increasingly strict restrictions, many of which appear to have no basis in logic or evidence. The argument over speed is not an easy one, because saying “I want to drive faster” sounds self-centred and provides little foundation for a considered discussion. Yet the obvious endpoint of our current course is universal 20 mph limits, with millions of otherwise sensible people treated as pariahs. Government is supposed to operate through consent, is it not? I am used to taking aim at the PR machine during launches, but how can this national problem be addressed sensibly? Answers on a postcard...