ON yet another deadly bank holiday weekend on the country’s roads, we are just days away from welcoming the promised new speed limits on rural roads.
Last week the ‘Slower Speeds, Safer Roads’ information and awareness campaign was launched, to highlight this week’s changes.
From this Friday, February 7th, the speed limit on many rural local roads will change from 80 kilometres per hour to 60 kilometres per hour. A campaign to highlight the changes is being run on radio, online, in print, and other locations to increase awareness of this change. Indeed, this very newspaper has carried those adverts.
But there is no doubt that a lot of people don’t realise the changes that are coming – which were mooted a few years ago as another weapon in the increasingly complex fight against road deaths.
Just this week alone, the gardaí have stated they caught 1,000 people speeding during the bank holiday weekend.
The government says that in line with the ‘Vision Zero’ aspiration for 2050, adopted across EU States, Ireland’s road safety strategy is aiming to bring down the high number of road deaths and serious injuries on Irish roads by 50% by 2030.
It says that research has shown that speed is a contributory factor in a third of fatal collisions, and that reducing speed significantly reduces road deaths.
The latest changes come about as a result of a working group of relevant stakeholders which reviewed the country’s speed limits and made recommendations to help set consistent and appropriate speed limits across the road network.
The working group comprised the Department of Transport, Road Safety Authority (RSA), An Garda Síochána, Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), the National Transport Authority (NTA), and the County and City Management Association (CCMA).
Their findings were published in September 2023 and concluded that protecting vulnerable road users must be a key focus when setting speed limits.
The findings noted that the risk of being killed is much greater for collisions between a car and a vulnerable road user at 50 km/h, when compared with the same type of collision at 30 km/h.
In April of last year the changes were signed into law and included provisions to amend the default speed limits on rural, local roads, urban roads and national secondary roads.
The change in default speed limits for rural local roads, from 80km/h to 60km/h, will be implemented first, starting this weekend.
Future implementation phases will focus on the speed limit in urban areas, which include built-up areas, as well as housing estates and town centres, reducing to 30 km/h.
The speed limit on national secondary roads is recommended to reduce from 100km/h to 80km/h.
The government has also stated that France and the UK have lowered their speed limits on certain road types in recent years, contributing to a 10% reduction in road fatalities in France and to a reduction in insurance costs in the UK.
While the reduction in claims pay-outs in this country hasn’t had the desired effect on insurance premiums, the public can only hope that this latest move will help to push the dial further in that direction, as it has done in the UK.
There is also research that shows that while not everybody will obey the new speed limits, the overall reduction in speed as a result of responsible drivers obeying the new rules should go some way in helping to reduce road deaths.
Since the law was changed last April, local authorities have been working methodically to change the signs all around our rural roads in time for this weekend’s introduction.
The legislation establishes a safer baseline for speed limits on affected road classes but has not diminished the role of local authorities which are at liberty to vary speed limits under their jurisdiction, where appropriate.
Local authorities have received grants to change speed limit signs from ‘80’ to ‘60’ on relevant local roads.
The striped ‘rural speed limit sign’, which is used as an alternative to the more traditional speed limit signs on specific single-lane rural roads, will also now mean that a maximum 60km/h limit is in force.
As with all speed limits, it will be an offence to exceed the stated limit and enforcement will be a matter for An Garda Síochána.
But with garda numbers falling, and a very visible lack of a garda presence on many rural roads, the responsibility to observe the changes will, of course, fall to the drivers themselves.
Let’s hope everyone does the right thing and obeys the new limits.
As the bumper sticker says – drive like hell, and maybe one day you’ll get there.
