Local Roads - New Speed Limits

I was on this road as a diversion from the new one. Parallel sections of N road are usually redesignated as L roads, only sections leading into to towns might become R roads. How have similar sections been treated elsewhere in the country?

Why would they want an inappropriately low limit, they are the people that are make most use of the road?

Just shows that the designation of roads is based no more than thr random stroke of a pen rather than the heretofore claims of technical standards being applied to decide the appropriate speed limit for a road. The whole thing is ridiculous with a hodge podge of randomly applied speeds limits with no sound basis which, especially on actual rural roads with a guarantee of no enforcement, are being roundly ignored by normal folk going about those daily business.

An genuine evidence based approach would not ignore the alignment and width of the road.

it was reduced to 80, you can see that on the Streetview, and that was fine. However, going around changing those 80 signs to 60 was a waste of public money, there were other poorly maintained signs in Monaghan that needed that work more.

If you’re suggesting that road width should justify a higher speed limit, I disagree. Traffic levels, number and distribution of entrances, presence of vulnerable users, and driver behaviour on the road- these are all factors that have more bearing than whether or not the road is wide and straight. N20 just south of Charleville is a notorious spot for fatal accidents, but all those people died on a wide, single carriageway road with passing lanes.

15 seconds per km. That's the time penalty we’re talking about, and that assumes no other traffic is on the road.

Some videos doing the rounds of a fairly horrific crash at the weekend.

Really exposes the complete nonsense of this policy in assuming that the speed limit is the issue rather than speeding. Everyone who drove perfectly safely at the original limit will be the ones fined in the name of safety while the few driving at 200kmh will continue to do all the damage to themselves and others.

Their quality of life is improved by much lower traffic volumes, the speed is likely neither here nor there.

This is primarily a case of a lazy council.

You really quite simply don't get it. What I meant was simply that it has a far greater effect on them than it does on the people who can simply use the new road to reach their destination instead. But that new road is not much if both your start point and your end point are along the old road.

And again, it's not a case of a few seconds being added to a short journey.

It's about the very real fear of picking up fines and penalty points for something as innocuous as driving at 70km/h on a road that at one point accommodated far greater volumes of traffic at 100km/h, and where you could drive 100% legally at 80km/h until just a few weeks ago. Again, all because of something as arbitrary as somebody sticking an L instead of an R into the name of the road when it was being reclassified.

In my experience at least in rural areas, the sum total of these 60kph limit changes is that there is now a proliferation of signage clutter. With the previous limits, the general R/L speed limit of 80kph meant that once you were outside of urban areas and off N-roads, there was no need for speed limit signage. Now, at least where I am, every junction between L and R roads needs a full set of speed limit signs on all arms, which in turn means that a main R road needs an 80kph speed sign every 500 metres or so.

If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, this is it. But I wouldn't be surprised to see demands for R roads to be lowered to 60kph on a blanket basis "to reduce signage clutter" which is the trick that Dublin City Council tried with its "Love 30" campaign a few years ago.

OK, if "evidence-based policy" means lowering speed limits is as much an unqualified public good as you suggest, then why not lower all speed limits to 5kph?

My question was rhetorical. You didn't put any qualifications on your broad, blanket statement. My follow on question is why do we need broad speed limit reductions when we already have somewhere in the region of 300,000,000 vehicle-km between fatalities?

14-PIN-annual-report-FINAL.pdf

The only thing stupid are these speed limit reductions, which have only resulted in more signage clutter and sod-all else.