While a survey reveals that 1 in 3 French people do not respect the speed limits, specialists say that reducing the speed by 10 km / h would allow a 40% drop in mortality.
The Société d’autoroutes du nord et de l’Est de la France (Sanef) observed the behavior of drivers on the A13 at kilometer 72, located in the open countryside in the Eure department. It is a 3-lane, curved, linear motorway with an average traffic of 23,000 vehicles per day and per direction of travel, close to the national average. Result: if the average speed of vehicles is 127 km / h, all lanes combined, 39% of motorists exceed the authorized speed. But speeding above 150km / h remains limited (3%). Although the number of speed-related deaths has fallen from 30% to 10% in ten years, some experts have said for several years that lowering speed limits even further would reduce the number of road fatalities.
“If we lower the speed, we gain lives, and it is unstoppable”, indicated last April, Sylvain Lassarre, director of research at Ifsttar, to our colleagues at Le Figaro. For a long time, some modeling experts have also claimed that when the average speed is reduced by 1%, the fatal accident rate is reduced by 4% and the number of serious accidents is reduced by 2%. On the ground, same observation, when in France, in the 1970s, the first speed limits appeared, increasing the motorway speed to 130km / h and to 90km / h on the road, this had reduced road fatalities by 17%.
Speed turns a crash into drama
The league against road violence is also one of the associations that has been fighting to further lower speed limits for several years. For her, even if the speed is not always the triggering factor of the accident, it is responsible for other factors which increase the number of deaths on the road. On the site of the league against road violence, we can read that speed is often the factor that prevents an accident because it does not allow to stop in time or to bypass an unforeseen obstacle. It is again the speed that is questioned as an aggravating factor transforming a simple collision into a human tragedy. Not to mention that the speed of some forces other users to be careful for two.
Behavior change has a direct impact
A report fromNational Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) already explained in 2007 that reducing the speed of motorists would reduce the number of road deaths. “Since 2003, after several years of virtual stagnation in road fatalities, a new political orientation based on better application of the rules, in particular compliance with speed limits, has produced good results: road fatalities have fallen by more than 40%, specified this report. The improvement began in December 2002, following the well-publicized announcements of the Interministerial Road Safety Committee, which led to a sudden change in the behavior of road users. This media shock provides scientists with a quasi-experimental situation and makes it possible to indisputably measure the relationship between average speed and mortality, ”continued INED.
Less than 2,000 deaths in 2020
The objective of the Ministry of the Interior is to reduce the number of deaths per year on the roads from 3645 victims in 2012 to less than 2000 in 2020. According to current statistics, reducing the speed of 10 km / h would allow a reduction 40% of mortality according to statistics. However, such a measure would prove to be totally ineffective for others. Reducing the speed limit to 120 km / h on the motorway, for example, would not have the desired effects. When last April the National Road Safety Council suggested that lowering the speed limit would lead to a drop in road fatalities, the magazine Autoplus in particular recalled that only 143 people lost their lives on a motorway in 2012 and that speed was only rarely involved in these accidents, drowsiness or alcohol being the main culprits.
.
