Speed Cameras: A358 at Henlade (Taunton)

[Herned]

But that source is very different to your statement

I would say that a huge proportion of the country's roads could be safely driven (in the sense of not going out of control round corners etc.) vastly higher than the speed limit. I could easily achieve 120mph on an empty motorway, and yet the speed limit is much lower. Speed limits have to be based on lots of factors, and driver's sense of what is sensible is only part of it

[James]

I'm guessing once it gets trunked the limit will have to be set to follow DfT guidelines, so they will raise it.

Oddly on this occasion it appears the limit was increased to 40
https://goo.gl/maps/i8kdfizZpbP2

Cycling backwards shows the old 30 limit

[ajuk]

But that source is very different to your statement

I would say that a huge proportion of the country's roads could be safely driven (in the sense of not going out of control round corners etc.) vastly higher than the speed limit. I could easily achieve 120mph on an empty motorway, and yet the speed limit is much lower. Speed limits have to be based on lots of factors, and driver's sense of what is sensible is only part of it

Nope, when speed limits are unusually high the only other thing that tends to be unusually high is the level of compliance, not speeds. Raising or lowering speed limits by as much as 20mph has been shown to have very little effect on actual traffic speeds. Most people have a very serious aversion to crashing or running people over and drive accordingly and if you don't do that you sure as hell are not the type to pay attention to lower posted limits, that's why it's important that the speed limit isn't something silly, because that makes it more difficult for law enforcement to single out people who do not have those aversions.
Hence why speed limits are meant to have some kind of basis on the speed most people feel comfortable driving at along a road, and the more off-kilter the speed limit is with that speed the more divorced from reality it becomes.

[Herned]

What you have done there is used used logic and common sense, something which both quite a few drivers and those responsible for setting speed limits seem to lack.

I can think of plenty of examples of ludicrous speed limits that are so widely ignored that coming across someone obeying them is unusual - I expect there is a thread somewhere with loads of examples.

E.g. Further on the A358 [gmap]https://goo.gl/maps/PH8PQgbh7M52[/gmap] here the speed limit has been recently reduced from 40 to 30. Nothing new has been built or changed. It queues in the morning back past the start of the new limit anyway, and when there’s no traffic it is perfectly safe to travel at 40 and the limit is completely ignored by most traffic

[Graham]

Oddly on this occasion it appears the limit was increased to 40

As this thread has been resurrected, I will add a few further details.

The stretch of road I was caught on is indeed the stretch that has subsequently been raised to 40mph. The reason I missed the 30mph sign at the time is that I was in the middle lane when I went past it, and there was an HGV in both the inside and outside lane, so the 30 signs were not visible to me at any point. Credit must go to a particular person on the local council, who saw that the local magistrates court was getting clogged up with people doing 50+ on this stretch of road, worked out what was going on, and made sure that something was done about it.

A brickbat, however, must go to Taunton Magistrates Court, who should have recognised there was a problem, but did not. The attitude of the court is exemplified by the post of "itsme", further up the thread. This was posted a couple of days after my court hearing (and resurrected a dormant thread); this and the tone of the post (and the fact that itsme has not posted again on this forum) strongly suggests that itsme has a direct association with the court.

There are people who argue that this stretch of road is "obviously" a 30 limit because it has streetlights on it and no repeaters. I would suggest, with all due respect, that this is nonsense. The country has many, many stretches of D2 in semi-rural areas with no repeaters, and in almost every other instance the actual limit is NSL. The only other example similar to this one that I am aware of is the A40 immediately to the east of Headington roundabout, where the 30 limit is arguably the most inappropriate in the country, and 99% of vehicles break the limit. The difference here is that Oxfordshire police choose not to enforce the limit, as they have better things to do.

Following this event, I have perforce become a worse driver. Every time I find myself on a semi-rural D2 with streetlights and no repeaters (and there are many of these in the country), I have to assume that I have missed a badly-positioned 30 sign, and reduce my speed to 30, even though I am 99.9% certain that the actual limit is 70.