Recently, I was a passenger in a car that was being driven by a careful driver along a narrow winding hill road. The speed limit for this road was 100kmh, but there were several corners where signs suggested you should slow down to 60kmh or 70kmh.

So, we were travelling around these corners at the recommended speeds and then speeding up to about 90kmh on the fairly few straight bits. About three cars were driving behind us, one of which turned out to be a traffic officer who later pulled us over and said we should have been travelling at 100kmh as we were holding up traffic which wanted to drive at the full 100kmh.

I can hear you saying “about time, let’s give these slower drivers the message”! Now, I would be the first to agree if we had been on a long “wide” straight road, because I like to drive at 100kmh when possible. But, when you are driving on a single-lane narrow winding hilly road with lots of corners, I’m not sure whether people should be “instructed” to drive at the full 100kmh if they don’t feel safe doing so. At one point we were driving behind a large truck that was going about 80kmh and we passed it when it was safe to do so. Incidentally, there were no places on this road where we could have safely pulled over to let faster cars past.

So, do you think there should be a “slow” speed limit of say 85kmh for a 100mh speed zone so that people know they need to travel no slower than this? In other words, how slow is too slow?

Overall, I was pleased that the driver of our car didn’t exceed 90kmh on this particular road because I doubt whether I would have felt as safe if the car had been going at 100kmh. I would be interested to hear your views on this.

Thanks

Fred