Chris Harris on… speed limits

For those of us who take the view that most politicians are lowlifes, and therefore most political discourse is a battle of egos instead of the stuff that might actually make a practical difference to people’s lives, there was an interesting nugget of information released last year. Strangely, it came from the mouth of former prime minister Liz Truss.

Truss announced that she would be “prepared to look at” scrapping the 70mph limit on motorways. Now this might just have been a bit of flirting with Middle England’s frustrated road users, but it did the job for me. My ears pricked up. The speed limit has become one of those subjects we’re not allowed to discuss for fear of offending people. I won’t list any of the others here for fear of being cancelled, but we all know what they are. The one we’re dealing with here is especially dodgy if you happen to present a television show about cars – but we all have to live dangerously now and again, so here goes...

The current 70mph limit was set in 1967. It’s hard for anyone under the age of 70 to understand how much life has changed since then, but the motoring landscape is, as you can imagine, quite different. I can’t think of an area of public life that is so unrecognisable but is still governed by a law that could never have conceived it would need to last for so long. If the 1967 speed limit was an aeroplane, it would be a DC10 still pounding transatlantic journeys.

Sadly the most common argument delivered in defence of increasing the speed limit on motorways is also one of the easiest for the naysayers to counter. Yes, auto technology means cars can travel safely at much higher speed these days, but the roads are so much more congested you could argue that the two cancel each other out. The issue here isn’t so much people like me who the anti-speeding lobby views as murdering lunatics wanting to travel at 190mph the whole time, it’s just the sensible application of a limit where it is necessary. It really is terribly simple.

When the roads are busy, 70mph makes perfect sense. Quite often even when that limit is in place on a variable limit section of motorway it isn’t possible to travel that fast, and that’s fine. But at 9pm, on an empty stretch of motorway, with excellent driving conditions, in a car that’s capable of cruising at double the limit, it all seems a bit silly to me. And to clarify, this is coming from someone who thinks the 20mph limit in Bristol, where I live, is absolutely spot on.

The problem we have is that the law no longer reflects the way people use the roads. And the great folly of the past 20 years is that the anti-speed lobby thinks speed cameras are a decent substitute for police cars – they aren’t. Now, we should have the sophistication to vary the limit to suit the circumstances. This is what Lord Buckmaster said in 1931 on the same subject: “The existing speed limit was so universally disobeyed that its maintenance brought the law into contempt.” Spend 10 minutes on the M40 and you’ll see that nothing has changed in 90 years.