How UK Motorways Became a Speed-Limit Trap

Car launches and carefully managed messages

Car launches are peculiar yet brilliant affairs: a high-stakes contest between PR teams and journalists, staged in spectacular places. Everything is planned to the smallest detail, including the driving route, the dinner seating arrangement and, naturally, the approach intended to present the car exactly as its maker wants. One or two phrases invariably crop up repeatedly, ensuring motoring writers absorb the central message.

Occasionally, though, these events permit a little more freedom. I remember one from 2004 particularly well, when, as a fresh-faced 12-year-old, I was flown to Australia for the ‘Vauxhall’ Monaro launch. Essentially a rebadged Holden with a 5.7-litre V8 and a wonderfully irreverent Australian character, it needed very little ‘positioning’. Vauxhall understood that sales would be limited; it simply wanted something desirable in its dealerships. When I asked to depart from the official Melbourne-based itinerary, travel to Bathurst and ultimately return the car in Sydney, the request was accepted almost immediately.

Australia’s speed-limit culture

Needless to say, it was a fantastic journey. Yet I came away with a deeply dispiriting realisation: Australia was a broken country. The widespread use of speed cameras, combined with the intrusive message that ‘speed is evil and will result in certain death’, had left everybody rigidly following implausibly cautious limits. All those wonderful V8s were travelling at 109kph on broad, flawlessly paved motorways with barely any traffic, and at still lower speeds on country roads where people were scarcely to be found.

It may have taken a few decades, but the UK has now reached the same miserable point. An extensive camera network, no discretion whatsoever, the near-total absence of human traffic policing, and strange, inconsistent ‘variable speed limits’ that appear designed solely to catch drivers out have reduced our motorways to a thoughtless 67mph crawl. No one seems prepared to pull over. No one watches anything except gantry displays that may suddenly show ‘50’ without any apparent reason. We have become a broken people too.

Variable speed limits on UK motorways

I have just returned from a weekend journey to Heathrow. It was warm and dry on a Sunday morning, but I was limited to 50mph for roughly 35 miles. At one stage, the successive gantries read 50, 60, 50, 50, 60, 60, 50. The fifth gantry also carried the message, ‘Report of obstruction’. There was no obstruction. Was it frustrating? Absolutely. But had I exceeded the limit, I would have received a fine and three points, despite the restriction having been imposed for an imaginary situation.

I support enforcement, and I support sensible, proportionate speed limits. However, we have become accustomed to increasingly restrictive rules, many of which appear to have little basis in logic or evidence. Speed is difficult to discuss, because saying “I want to drive faster” sounds self-centred and is scarcely a promising foundation for a considered debate. Even so, the inevitable destination of this course is universal 20mph limits and millions of otherwise responsible people being treated as pariahs. Government is supposed to operate by consent, isn’t it? I am used to taking aim at the PR machine during launches, but how can this national problem be addressed sensibly? Answers on a postcard...