Plans to increase the legal speed limit on the UK’s motorways would lead to a rise in casualties and carbon emissions, a leading charity claims.
It is thought that a new motorway speed limit of 80mph could be made law before MPs take their summer leave in July.
The plans could form part of a wider strategy to radically overhaul speed limits in the country, as town and city roads could see their speed restrictions tightened as traffic on the motorways speeds up.
Increasing the speed on motorways could cut journey times and could prove a boost to the economy in the long term. However, according to The Independent, any decisions to alter speed restrictions would be based as much on the cost to implement as on safety concerns.
But road safety charity Brake, thinks that the case against increasing motorway speeds is already clear.
Ellen Booth, Brake’s campaigns officer, said: “It would be simply immoral to raise motorway speech limits when research indicates it would lead to more deaths and serious injuries, which cause devastating trauma to families, and which are a considerable economic burden. It would also fly in the face of this Government’s commitment to lower carbon emissions. In short, a decision to raise the motorway limit would go against safety, environmental and financial sense.”
The charity points to research from the Transport Select Committee published in 2002, which shows that raising the limit from 70 to 80mph would result in a 5-10 per cent increase in motorway casualties. A rise in motorway speeds would also increase UK fuel consumption and carbon emissions.. At 80mph, a petrol car emits 14 per cent more CO2 per kilometre than driving at 70mph, while diesel cars emit 25 per cent more, according to research from the UK Energy Research Centre published in 2006.
Furthermore it is not clear that increasing motorway speeds would even have the desired affect of reducing journey times. The Transport Committee Report on Road Traffic Speed published in 2006 found that higher speeds would do little to reduce journey times; in fact on the congested motorways of England, an 80mph limit might well increase them because it would create an uneven flow.
In the past few weeks, Spain’s government announced a decrease in their motorway limit to 68mph in a bid to cut the country’s reliance on oil in an increasingly unstable market and help consumers manage the price hikes they are experiencing at the pumps.
