Yahoo News I drove on key Coventry route at the speed limit and faced angry glares from speeding drivers
Anyone who lives in or near Coventry knows it well. You drive down the A46 from the M6 and after the Binley flyover, the speed limit suddenly drops from 70 to 50.
At that moment, you can instantly tell the newcomers and visitors from the locals. Newcomers like me will drop down to 50 because if the speed limit drops down like that, you’re waiting for the camera to come over the horizon, primed to snap you breaking the limit.
Meanwhile, the locals come barrelling past you at the national speed limit, as if the 50 sign is a vague suggestion rather than the law. It’s a far cry from the streets that take you into Coventry itself, where a battery of average speed cameras keeps drivers in check.
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I personally use this route any time I’m heading for the A14 to see my family in Cambridgeshire. So I was keen to consciously observe what other motorists were doing and whether they obeyed the lower limit.
I travelled in both directions and I was overtaken by everything on the road. I had two lorries overtake me as soon as I’d pulled into the left lane.
The outside lane was well out of bounds. Cars were going fast enough that with me travelling at bang on 50, I would have been a hazard and liable to come a cropper.
By the time I reached the two lane section, I had car after car pull out from behind me and pass me while glaring through their passenger window at me for travelling so slowly. I didn’t feel like I was obeying the speed limit. I was made to feel as if I’d broken down or my car was in limp home mode.
I should say at this point that there are plenty of roads where cameras are sparse and people are a bit fast and loose with obeying the prevailing limit. What puzzled me here was, this was a relatively new road.
It was only completed in 2017 and with new roads, you usually have a battery of cameras keeping drivers in check. The aforementioned A14 bypass around Cambridge is a prime example.
It’s understandable why the limit is lower. For a dual carriageway, there’s some relatively tight turns through those overpasses.
What unnerved me is the ambiguity. The A46 put me in a position where I either break the law and move with the flow of traffic or I drive at the limit where my speed differential with other motorists could cause a really nasty accident. It’s a lose-lose from a driver’s perspective.
From the time I spent with that road, it seems there can only be two solutions. One is to reassess the road and adapt the speed limit to make it more reflective of the actual speed of traffic down there. The second is to enforce the existing limit through those areas.
As things stand, the A46 in a really ambiguous spot. As a motorist, it would be nice to have a bit more certainty. After all, in the world of motoring, uncertainty always leads to accidents.
