Autocar, a car insurance provider in the United Kingdom, has released the findings of a recent survey that showed that an enormous 90 percent of drivers in the country admit to exceeding the speed limit on freeways while driving.
Only a small fraction of the survey participants – 3.5 percent – claimed that they had never before broken the 70 mile per hour speed limit on the country’s freeways. Equally, 94.6 percent said that at some time, they were aware that they had gone over the speed limit when they’d done it.
It was also concerning that 6.1 percent of the survey participants admitted that they drove those freeways at a speed of 90 miles per hour on a regular basis.
Considering this survey’s findings, the decision by Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, to implement a public consultation for the increasing of the freeway and two-lane highway speed limits to 80 miles per hour seems rather fitting.
Another of the goals of the survey was to determine what the public thinks of potentially raising the speed limits, and the participants stated that this was something that appealed to them.
Experts in the auto insurance industry think that the findings of the survey indicate that Hammond’s decision to open discussion about a speed limit increase on freeways will be quite popular among the drivers in the country. Should the government choose to change the speed limit to 80 miles per hour, it likely won’t go into effect until 2012 or 2013 at the soonest.