Safe Speed Forums

I see the signs are up for the M6 road works near Stoke from the 1st June

40 mph speed limit will be posted there. Not 50 like the M42 roadworks.

Looks like another fund raiser comming up....

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Speed camera policy Kills

I think 40mph is the new 'standard' speed limit for roadworks.
As soon as people have gotten used to that they'll reduce it to 30mph.

Cheers
Peter

I think "standard" is a bit of a misnomer here. On a journey back from northern Leicestershire to Somerset (A42, M42, M5) a while back I passed several sets of motorway roadworks, some with a 70mph speed limit, some with 50 and some with 40.
Obviously they were of the same type and different lane restrictions were in place, but the scale of the roadworks was independent of the speed limit. Of the ones with just the hard shoulder coned off and no visible machinery, people or barrier works (although I would not expect anyone to have been working on these late on a Sunday evening) at least one set had a 40mph speed limit and another had a 70mph speed limit.

I presume this is beneficial to road safety in the same way that removing the correlation between road environment and speed limits has been

Won't be long before the start funding the roadworks from the camera fines form the work zone.

It concerns me that the limit is applied in the interest of the safety of the workers.

So why does it still apply when the workers are not there.....

In the US the works zone speed limits apply only when workers are present.

Why don't we have that over here?

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Speed camera policy Kills

Narrow lanes / incomplete safety barrier / etc are good reasons to leave the limit in place. But 40 does seem rather too low; surely a 60 mph limit would be sensible when the workers aren't around.

When they are not present it should be at least 60mph since we can all manage to drive on NSL single carriageways which can be narrow and have oncoming vehicles with no safety barrier.

It is very inconsistent and confusing, and in many cases pointless.

The M5 for most of the last year had 3 stretches of 2.5 mile long 50mph limits because of the loss of the hard shoulder while the new information signs were being put up. I regularly used the road and found that these were the most frustrating and pointless limits you could imagine.

For example in the 2.5 mile long limit area there would only be 2 or 3 places where the hard shoulder was blocked (for about 100 yards each), and at most times that I went past, there would be nobody working in the limit area at all.

For some reason it was quite common for a small team to be doing work OUTSIDE of the speed limit (typically before) with a small truck and mini JCB on the hard shoulder protected at best by a few cones.

The M27 was undergoing similar work at the same time, but for some reason there was no need to impose a limit there at all.

The excuse about loss of hard shoulder is ridiculous because there are many locations on UK motorways where the similar loss of hard shoulder is happily accommodated by nothing more than a simple sign (No Hard Shoulder for 100 yards) - and these are permananent.

Needless to say the limits were almost completely ignored and all drivers could tell that they were pointless for about 2 miles of each 2.5 mile sections.

The problem with this pointless and over-the-top imposition of such limits is that it reduces or removes all respect for such limits, and in the few cases where they are justified and needed, they are then ignored. Bit like the little boy that cried "Wolf".