Gov Plans to reduce speed limits

Very much agree about the N52. I regularly travel to/from Longford and Trim. The upgraded N52 National Secondary road between Mullingar and Delvin is a fantastic single carriageway of that classification. Completely realigned in many places, no sharp bends, lots of long straight, generally excellent sightlines and has dedicated right turn lanes in the central median. The road is wide, the emergency lane/hard shoulder can fully allow a standard sized car to fit into it. The speed limit is 100 km/h. I often use this stretch of the N52 for all the good reason above and always in off-peak hours so the road is nice and quiet and I can set the cruise control to an indicated 105 km/r and probably not have to do anything but steer until I get to the approach at Delvin. From Delvin, I then take the (recently resurfaced) N51 from Delvin to Athboy and finally the R154 from there to Trim. The journey time is almost (to within 1 minute) identical to an alternative to use the R156 which passes through Killucan, Raharney and Ballivor.

The problem here is that the R156 is a very windy road, rather narrow for an R road, generally bad sightlines, no hard shoulder.......in short, not a great road. However if the speed limit on the N52 between Mullingar and Delvin drops from 100 to 80, this will add around 3 minutes to my journey time if I take that route so if I'm in any sort of rush, I will then take the far less safe road which would also has an 80 km/h limit.

N52 (currently 100 km/h limit, may be dropped to 80:

R156 (currently an 80 km/h limit and not likely to change). I picked a straight stretch of road to show how narrow it is and lacking hard shoulders however it is actually very windy.:

Insane to think about reducing speed limits when there are no resources to police what we have at present.

Because car speedos over read the cars actual speed. Mine registers 104kph when I’m actually doing 100kph.

There are a few regional roads around me that are definitely candidates for 60. Some are much better though.

I don’t think American policing is what we need… they are far from the ideal model and there is way to much abuse of power with regards to their traffic stops.

yes Rules of the road need to be enforced but please not the American model where people are scared shitless of being stopped and abused by some power hungry civil servant.

If government really wanted to take it serious then all they need is to make it mandatory for a GPS unit that monitors speed added to every car. It won’t happen due to privacy etc but that would be an absolute way of cracking down on speeding and is a way better option than limiting speed cars can do etc

Exactly why I said every car gets fitted with a special GPS unit that tracks speed…it gets checked for calibration during NCT.

At the end of the day that would only address speeding but shows there are ways of addressing the problem. you still need Gardai on the roads policing all the other rules.

Not once have I heard of someone fined for not leaving enough space with the car in front. Speeding isn’t the only problem….we have 100’s of provisional drivers on the road unaccompanied or drivers without licenses.

But as Gardaí are a limited resource would the majority of people want them policing the roads or instead making the country safer by addressing crime on our streets and being physically present to prevent the **** show we have in our cities with open drug dealing and anti social behaviour

I live just off the road in Clonmel where that accident happened a few weeks ago. Boy racers traveling twice the speed limit and doing burnouts have been a problem in the area for years, and the Gardai are well aware of it.

They're the sort of people who remove the mufflers from their exhaust, and love to broadcast to everyone within a 1 mile radius at 3AM how fast their hatchback can go, so you don't exactly need to be a master detective to find them if you actually care about cracking down on speeding.

Also should be pointed out: Annual fatalities on the road in this country have hovered around 150 since 2015. Between 2005 and 1995, they hovered around 400 annually. That's a 250% decrease since 2005. This narrative that road deaths are skyrocketing out of control is nonsense. Just properly enforce the speed limits as they are.

Being forced to travel 30km/h on a windy, hilly road where people will regularly do 100km/h does not make me feel any safer.

Overreading is something that was true in the days of mechanical speedometers but doesn't apply to modern cars. I suspect you're comparing with GPS and assuming that it is more accurate than your car because satellites, google, etc.

If you have any form of ESP/skid control on your car (most do) then your car speedo is more likely to be accurate than what you get from a GPS reciever. The rotation sensors used for anti-skid are very accurate, and unless you've fitted non-standard wheels or tyres on your car (bigger or smaller outer diameter affects the calculations), the speed reading will be within 1% of true surface speed.

I was once clocked at 100.0 km/h on the open road having not seen a 60km/h limit (the Garda kindly showed me the readout on the speed gun), so my cruise control was still set at 100. It's an expensive way to calibrate the system, but at least it answered a question I had often wondered about...

GPS, on the other hand, is not good at very accurate speed, for a couple of reasons. First, most consumer receivers only report about once per second, with a typical position accuracy of 2.5 metres (limits are between 1 and 5 m), so your reported position will normally be only within 2.5 metres of your true position, with a fairly random distribution of error. An error of 2.5 metres might not sound like much, but consider that moving 1 metre in 1 second is a speed of 3.6 km/h, and your position can be wrong by more than this per report. The receiver averages readings to try minimise this error, but it's still there in the output (because you're in motion at an unknown speed, it's impossible for the software to compensate for positional errors in the way it can when you're stationary), depending on how the averaging is done, it can underreport your speed. The second reason is more subtle: GPS measures speed as overhead dispacement, not surface distance travelled, so it is only at its most accurate on absolutely flat terrain that's also at local sea level, or what GPS considers to be sea level (you do not want the boring detail of what altitude means in GPS, or how the whole concept of global position is really just a useful fiction anyway...).

Won't happen.

The Government have introduced this to be seen to be doing something, anything, but it won't become law in this Dáil and so unlikely to become law at all.

I don't think you understand, I don't think the tech is there, or ever will be there, to do what you describe

But I will admit it's a good idea

Yeah and then a plane flies over your car and cuts you off from the satellite... It's like Tesla's full self driving, the tech needed isn't there and likely never will be

ok so if it doesn’t work for <1% of the time the 99% of time is still much better than we have currently. It’s doesn’t need tech that is required for a self driving car.

So yet again what tech is missing or are you only taking about <1% of cases like above that can easily be accounted for by using an average over a km or two.