What effect has the implementation of 80 km / h had? The League for the Defense of Drivers has plunged into accident statistics, department by department, to see if, as the Road Safety trumpets, “349 lives have been saved”. Their verdict is not so glorious.
The speed limit of 80 km / h on the secondary network, from which many departments are now free, has it really made it possible to ” save 349 lives »As presented by the pseudo-experiment of Road Safety? The League for the Defense of Drivers, which has contested from the outset this record, has plunged into the figures to draw its own conclusions.
A peeling of the figures month by month and department by department
To carry out its investigation, the League analyzed the accidentology statistics of the ONISR *, department by department, twelve months before and twelve months after the implementation of the measure. The period studied therefore extended from 1er July 2017 to June 30, 2019, the 80 km / h on the roads having been introduced on the 1er July 2018. The verdict is final: in nearly one in two departments affected by the measure (excluding Paris and its neighboring departments, but overseas included) ” road mortality remained unchanged after the speed limit was lowered to 80 km / h (in 8 departments), or increased (in 39 departments) », Details the organization of defense of the drivers.
The results are therefore less glorious than that presented by Road Safety, which reached this result through convoluted calculations. Moreover, as the media and specialized associations have repeatedly pointed out, the experiment was biased. Some sections were redeveloped during the test …
Accidents unrelated to the lowering of speed
” Except to strictly identify the roads passed from 90 to 80 km / h, except to strictly identify the causes of the accidents, the so-called positive “balance sheet” of the 80 km / h made by the government remains hypocritical and untrue. », Details the Driver Defense League. During her investigation, she discovered that the terrible collision between a TER and a school bus in Millas (66) appeared in the statistics of the 90-80 km / h comparison.
“” Road Safety does a partial job, knowingly ignoring the other clearly identified factors of accidents, such as alcohol, narcotics, drowsiness, the phone while driving … to retain only the cause of speed », Annoys Nathalie Troussard, the general secretary of the organization.“
Especially since the state body did not bother to limit its conclusions to the only network limited to 80 km / h. “ The statistics include the said network where the speed limit has been lowered by 10 km / h, but also the sections at 70 or 110 km / h », Mentions the League.
Source: League for the Defense of Drivers
* the National Interministerial Road Safety Observatory
