Norway to increase speed limit to 110 possibly 130km/h

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#947297 7-Dec-2013 22:15

DarthKermit:
jarledb: But what is this thing about increasing your speed when you get to a passing lane here in NZ? People will be cruising at 90 Km/h on the single lane and when they get to a passing lane stretch they are suddenly increasing their speed well over 100 Km/h.

I prefer to slow down to 90 k or so to allow people who want to pass the opportunity to do so.

Even if you do exactly 100kmh, drivers here have a gene that forces them to overtake you (breaking the speed limit to do so). They are utterly unable to follow a car at the legal limit here on an empty road - they must always overtake and be in front, even if they then sit 3 car lengths in front doing the same 100 kmh speed.

HotDogBreath

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#947312 7-Dec-2013 22:54

I am proud to be a driver in NZ. I have been driving for over 20 years. I average over 500 km / week between New Lynn & Silverdale. I use cruse control @ 95 km on the North Western & Northern motorway. There is no need to drive any faster. I have completed a defensive driving course for no reason other than it is the right thing to to. 100km/h is a great speed for NZ. Faster will cost more lives over time. End of story. Driving in NZ is a privilege. Enjoy it. Speeding will only cost lives..... it's just not worth it to save a few minutes.

jpoc

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#947313 7-Dec-2013 22:54

Comparing the roads in and around Auckland on which I drive on a daily basis to the roads all over Germany on which I drove for most of the last twenty years, I would say that we have higher speed limits than Germany.

In Munich, most roads in the city now have a 30kph limit. Larger roads which are not intensively residential are 50kph and the CBD has an extensive car free core. The Northern half of the Mittlerer Ring is a much higher quality road than SH1 through Auckland from the bridge to the end of the Newmarket viaduct and it has a 60kph limit - dropping to 50 in the tunnels and round the Southern half which is more like a normal urban road.

The Autobahn roads around Munich and other cities generally have variable limits governed by overhead signs. Close to the city, they will be 60kph from the morning rush to late evening. By the time that you get far enough away from a German city to see no speed limits on an Autobahn, New Zealand roads will have dwindled to a single lane in each direction. In Germany, those latter roads will have a 100kph limit but the limit will drop to 70kph where there are junctions.

Even those parts of the Autobahn network that are free of formal limits are not really as free as you might expect. There is a recommended limit of 130kph and if you exceed that, any accidents are your fault and your insurance company does not have to pay to fix your car even if you have fully comprehensive cover. They will pay third party claims but might decide to bankrupt you to offset their costs. One high profile case involved 'Turbo Rolf' a notorious test driver employed by Daimler-Benz. A woman and her child were killed when their small car left the Autobahn and hit a tree. There were no witnesses to the accident and there was nothing to suggest that there had been any impact with another vehicle but another driver reported that he was passed by Turbo Rolf who was going flat out in some D-B prototype and a short time later, he came across the scene of the accident in which two people had died. Turbo Rolf went to prison after judges decided that he had contributed to the accident by passing the victims at such high speed that the driver had been spooked and had swerved.

jpoc

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#947317 7-Dec-2013 23:02

JimmyH: I'm broadly happy with the limits where they are - although a higher limit would be nice in places, the reality is that many of out highways and drivers aren't up to higher speeds. I would also be keen on the Police getting a way of testing for drivers under the influence of drugs, and treating them the same as drunk drivers. I would also be very keen on drastically higher penalties for repeat drunk drivers.

However, I am slightly grumpy about the way the Police are going about enforcing other aspects of the system - where it seems to be more about revenue maximisation rather than safety. Placing speed traps where they are likely to catch the most people rather than places where speed is a particular safety issue springs to mind. A couple of years ago I even say one clown set up with his speed gun *on* a long-ish motorway off ramp. If the traffic was heavy then braking hard enough to get from 100Km/h leaving the motorway down to 50 Km/h where he was would have meant an almost certain rear-ending. Also, dropping the tolerance from 10km/h to 4km/h seems a bit like revenue gathering and PR grandstanding, rather than a serious safety thing. 4 Km/h is within the calibration error of most speedometers, means almost constant attention to the speedometer (instead of the traffic around you!), and braking whenever you hit a slight downhill gradient (which is bad for fuel economy).

I'm all for throwing the book at drivers who are driving at seriously excessive speed. However, I wish they would also be more willing to ticket excessively slow drivers - who also cause major safety issues.

I do not brake for the downhill bits. I turn on the A/C thus keeping my speed down without wearing out the brakes and saving fuel because I can then turn the A/C off between the downhill sections.

tdgeek

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#947326 7-Dec-2013 23:33

jpoc:
JimmyH: I'm broadly happy with the limits where they are - although a higher limit would be nice in places, the reality is that many of out highways and drivers aren't up to higher speeds. I would also be keen on the Police getting a way of testing for drivers under the influence of drugs, and treating them the same as drunk drivers. I would also be very keen on drastically higher penalties for repeat drunk drivers.

However, I am slightly grumpy about the way the Police are going about enforcing other aspects of the system - where it seems to be more about revenue maximisation rather than safety. Placing speed traps where they are likely to catch the most people rather than places where speed is a particular safety issue springs to mind. A couple of years ago I even say one clown set up with his speed gun *on* a long-ish motorway off ramp. If the traffic was heavy then braking hard enough to get from 100Km/h leaving the motorway down to 50 Km/h where he was would have meant an almost certain rear-ending. Also, dropping the tolerance from 10km/h to 4km/h seems a bit like revenue gathering and PR grandstanding, rather than a serious safety thing. 4 Km/h is within the calibration error of most speedometers, means almost constant attention to the speedometer (instead of the traffic around you!), and braking whenever you hit a slight downhill gradient (which is bad for fuel economy).

I'm all for throwing the book at drivers who are driving at seriously excessive speed. However, I wish they would also be more willing to ticket excessively slow drivers - who also cause major safety issues.

I do not brake for the downhill bits. I turn on the A/C thus keeping my speed down without wearing out the brakes and saving fuel because I can then turn the A/C off between the downhill sections.

A/C?

jpoc

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#947339 7-Dec-2013 23:40

tdgeek:
jpoc:
JimmyH: I'm broadly happy with the limits where they are - although a higher limit would be nice in places, the reality is that many of out highways and drivers aren't up to higher speeds. I would also be keen on the Police getting a way of testing for drivers under the influence of drugs, and treating them the same as drunk drivers. I would also be very keen on drastically higher penalties for repeat drunk drivers.

However, I am slightly grumpy about the way the Police are going about enforcing other aspects of the system - where it seems to be more about revenue maximisation rather than safety. Placing speed traps where they are likely to catch the most people rather than places where speed is a particular safety issue springs to mind. A couple of years ago I even say one clown set up with his speed gun *on* a long-ish motorway off ramp. If the traffic was heavy then braking hard enough to get from 100Km/h leaving the motorway down to 50 Km/h where he was would have meant an almost certain rear-ending. Also, dropping the tolerance from 10km/h to 4km/h seems a bit like revenue gathering and PR grandstanding, rather than a serious safety thing. 4 Km/h is within the calibration error of most speedometers, means almost constant attention to the speedometer (instead of the traffic around you!), and braking whenever you hit a slight downhill gradient (which is bad for fuel economy).

I'm all for throwing the book at drivers who are driving at seriously excessive speed. However, I wish they would also be more willing to ticket excessively slow drivers - who also cause major safety issues.

I do not brake for the downhill bits. I turn on the A/C thus keeping my speed down without wearing out the brakes and saving fuel because I can then turn the A/C off between the downhill sections.

A/C?

Air Conditioning.

tdgeek

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#947341 8-Dec-2013 00:02

jpoc:
tdgeek:
jpoc:
JimmyH: I'm broadly happy with the limits where they are - although a higher limit would be nice in places, the reality is that many of out highways and drivers aren't up to higher speeds. I would also be keen on the Police getting a way of testing for drivers under the influence of drugs, and treating them the same as drunk drivers. I would also be very keen on drastically higher penalties for repeat drunk drivers.

However, I am slightly grumpy about the way the Police are going about enforcing other aspects of the system - where it seems to be more about revenue maximisation rather than safety. Placing speed traps where they are likely to catch the most people rather than places where speed is a particular safety issue springs to mind. A couple of years ago I even say one clown set up with his speed gun *on* a long-ish motorway off ramp. If the traffic was heavy then braking hard enough to get from 100Km/h leaving the motorway down to 50 Km/h where he was would have meant an almost certain rear-ending. Also, dropping the tolerance from 10km/h to 4km/h seems a bit like revenue gathering and PR grandstanding, rather than a serious safety thing. 4 Km/h is within the calibration error of most speedometers, means almost constant attention to the speedometer (instead of the traffic around you!), and braking whenever you hit a slight downhill gradient (which is bad for fuel economy).

I'm all for throwing the book at drivers who are driving at seriously excessive speed. However, I wish they would also be more willing to ticket excessively slow drivers - who also cause major safety issues.

I do not brake for the downhill bits. I turn on the A/C thus keeping my speed down without wearing out the brakes and saving fuel because I can then turn the A/C off between the downhill sections.

A/C?

Air Conditioning.

I thought that, but how does that allow you to not use brakes on downhill driving?

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Batman

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#947354 8-Dec-2013 01:08

Rotfl

Aredwood

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#947408 8-Dec-2013 12:15

tdgeek:
jpoc:
tdgeek:
jpoc:
JimmyH: I'm broadly happy with the limits where they are - although a higher limit would be nice in places, the reality is that many of out highways and drivers aren't up to higher speeds. I would also be keen on the Police getting a way of testing for drivers under the influence of drugs, and treating them the same as drunk drivers. I would also be very keen on drastically higher penalties for repeat drunk drivers.

However, I am slightly grumpy about the way the Police are going about enforcing other aspects of the system - where it seems to be more about revenue maximisation rather than safety. Placing speed traps where they are likely to catch the most people rather than places where speed is a particular safety issue springs to mind. A couple of years ago I even say one clown set up with his speed gun *on* a long-ish motorway off ramp. If the traffic was heavy then braking hard enough to get from 100Km/h leaving the motorway down to 50 Km/h where he was would have meant an almost certain rear-ending. Also, dropping the tolerance from 10km/h to 4km/h seems a bit like revenue gathering and PR grandstanding, rather than a serious safety thing. 4 Km/h is within the calibration error of most speedometers, means almost constant attention to the speedometer (instead of the traffic around you!), and braking whenever you hit a slight downhill gradient (which is bad for fuel economy).

I'm all for throwing the book at drivers who are driving at seriously excessive speed. However, I wish they would also be more willing to ticket excessively slow drivers - who also cause major safety issues.

I do not brake for the downhill bits. I turn on the A/C thus keeping my speed down without wearing out the brakes and saving fuel because I can then turn the A/C off between the downhill sections.

A/C?

Air Conditioning.

I thought that, but how does that allow you to not use brakes on downhill driving?

Extra load on the engine from the A/C compressor and extra electrical load on the alternator (more load on the engine) due to the current draw from the magnetic clutch in the compressor, the condenser cooling fans, and the interior fan.

Aredwood

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#947417 8-Dec-2013 12:28

The govt needs to introduce compulsory practical testing for licence renewal. Only it will never happen because so many would fail that any govt that tries would lose lots of votes. It is silly that under the current system you can easily get your full licence by 18 (or so). And then you won't have to do another practical test until you are at least 60.

jpoc

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#947419 8-Dec-2013 12:31

Aredwood:

Extra load on the engine from the A/C compressor and extra electrical load on the alternator (more load on the engine) due to the current draw from the magnetic clutch in the compressor, the condenser cooling fans, and the interior fan.

It just occurred to me that this probably does not work so well in some automatics. Another reason to prefer a manual.

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#947422 8-Dec-2013 12:44

I think it should become law to fit all cars with audible speed indicator.

I spend nrow time looking at the Speedo than the road

But what choice do I have?

MikeB4

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#947435 8-Dec-2013 13:18

Best device on a car to stop speeding is the cruise control

Fred99

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#947463 8-Dec-2013 14:17

Aredwood: The govt needs to introduce compulsory practical testing for licence renewal. Only it will never happen because so many would fail that any govt that tries would lose lots of votes. It is silly that under the current system you can easily get your full licence by 18 (or so). And then you won't have to do another practical test until you are at least 60.

I disagree.
The cause of serious accidents is seldom from ignorance of road laws, but flagrant disregard for the laws that everybody knows. Excessive speed, failing to give way, reckless overtaking etc.
You could train and test people once a week if you like to know what an orange traffic light means, but I expect 99.9% of people know exactly what it means anyway.

Fred99

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#947464 8-Dec-2013 14:24

joker97: I think it should become law to fit all cars with audible speed indicator.

I spend nrow time looking at the Speedo than the road

But what choice do I have?

GPS app on a smartphone, or a dedicated car GPS, have audible speed warning alarms you can set at the limit, or above the limit. More accurate than car speedos as well.
The time I'm probably most likely to exceed the limit is by not noticing a transition to ie 70km/h from 100 km/h on the open road, on the outskirts of some small town etc.
GPS maps generally have the zones mapped, give or take a few metres, but not road works or other temporary limits, which are usually well signposted anyway.

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