Speed Limits Rise

Published Date: 22nd Mar 2014

Many motoring groups have backed the Danish report, which claims that increasing the speed limit is safer – but there are some question marks over whether it could be easily transferred to the UK.

This study, carried out over two years by the Danish Road Directorate, looked at how the driver’s behaviour and accident rates changed when speed limits were raised on rural roads and motorways.

The most important finding was that after raising limits on two way rural roads from 50mph to 56mph, accidents fell; this was due to a drop in the speed differential between the fastest and the slowest drivers, resulting in much less overtaking.

On some sections of motorways where the limit was raised from 68mph to 80mph over nine years ago, fatalities also had fell.

With the slowest drivers increasing speeds, the fastest 15 per cent were found to be driving a little slower on average.

A Transport Research Laboratory spokesman explained that the research raised interesting questions. “A key element isn’t just the risk of the crash that is proportional to travelling speed for a given road, but the risk of injury should a collision occur.”

“We would be interested to see how the Danish study has handled confounding factors. This would all influence the applicability of this scheme to other countries or road networks," he went on to say.

A spokesman for the Alliance of British Drivers said: “This research would seem to suggest that we are going the wrong way in the UK. This has proven that deaths and accidents have fallen despite limits increasing.”