Why yes, yes it would appear to indicate that. Is this unexpected? I mean, I would think the planners would have assumed that there would at least be a steep adjustment curve.
It's not a whole lot different than when the U.S. put the 55 mph national speed limit in place. Compliance was a measly 12-15%. When speed limits on Interstates were increased to 70-75 mph, compliance rose to well over 50%.
Bugger. The system ate my last post. Really need to learn to hit ctrl-c before 'submit'
Irish speeding rules are a little odd. Enforcement depends really on the attitude of the local sergeant, and the evilness of the judge. There's one town on the Dublin/Galway road where both the sergeant and the judge were notorious. Nobody sped through that town. Speed cameras with their fixed fines are making an appearance, but people tend to know where they are anyway.
Now, there are two important factors at play here.
One is that the Irish driving test is a little odd. It's probably one of the hardest in the world. I was one of about 10% to get a first-time pass. (I also first-time passed the military exam, which is a harder test than the civilian one. Woohoo!). To make it annoying, there's up to a 9-month backlog of tests in the cities, so if you fail one, you've got almost a year to practise before having another crack at it. However, part of what makes the test so difficult is that they don't look for automatons who blindly follow the rules and signs. Any idiot can do that, and they know right well that as soon as the examiner gets out of the car, people drive differently. So instead, they look for people who can safely, competently and courteously control their vehicles.
Case in point. My ex's brother was taking his test. His dad was a Gard. (Cop). He's tooling along a road at the posted speed limit of 30mph. It's a big, wide road, straight with loads of room between the lane and the edge/footpath/houses. People ordinarily go down it at about 50mph. As he's driving along at 30, a large backlog of vehicles starts up behind him. He is failed for obstructing the normal flow of traffic. He gets home, and complains to his dad. He got no sympathy. "You must make good progress down the road"
Now, the other factor is the fact that Ireland recently changed the speed limits from mph to kmh. (They'd been planning on this for ever, for years you're travelling at 60mph and a distance marker tells you you've got 153km to drive to Waterford. How's you mental arithmetic?). When they did this, they basically rounded the numbers down for the A roads and up for the motorways. People who had been driving down Grange Road for the last twenty years at a certain speed without incident and knew the correct speed by 'sense' didn't waste their time looking at their mph speedometers and then trying to convert to kmh to see if they were speeding. They just carried on driving at exactly the same speed they had been driving on for years without incident. Why should people have expected anything different?
The Chief Constable of North Wales was recently reported as saying "If you want people to obey speed limits, you have to have speed limits that make sense. Blanket limits of Xmph outside of towns regardless of the state of the road are going to be ignored"
He's right.
NTM
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Lower Speed Limits = More Speeding
Hybrid Mode
