Half of police forces have seen 90mph+ drivers in 30mph zones

Roughly half of police forces in the UK have witnessed drivers travelling in excess of 90mph in 30mph zones, with senior police figures calling out drivers “putting everyone at risk”.

A Freedom of Information request by the RAC found that across the 39 police forces that responded, almost half (48 per cent) had caught motorists travelling at more three times the speed limit in 30mph zones, while almost all (90 per cent) had previously caught people driving in excess of 60mph – or in other words, double the speed limit.

Chief Constable Jo Shiner, the lead for road policing at the National Police Chiefs Council described those travelling at such speeds as “reckless, selfish and completely unacceptable”, stating that “[We] know that some incidents of going over the speed limit can be genuine mistakes or errors, but the speeds cited here are clearly drivers taking deliberate decisions to travel at excessive speeds, putting everyone at risk”.

More concerning is that 90mph seems to be nowhere near the maximum for some drivers. The RAC found that more than half (58 per cent) of forces have previously caught drivers hitting speeds as high as 140mph – double the highest legal limit allowed on UK roads. 

Not all of these offences were committed on the motorway, either. The highest disparity between the limit and the speed a motorist was travelling was in Somerset, when a driver on the A303 was caught hurtling down a 50mph road at 161mph.

Motorists driving at dangerously high speeds appears to be becoming somewhat of a plague on UK roads, with a recent investigation by the BBC finding that between 2019 and 2023, as many as 23,000 people were found to have been driving on the road at speeds in excess of 100mph.

Chief Inspector Craig West of Kent Police told the BBC in January that “speed does kill” and that the fallout of collisions at high speeds is “devastating for the families and friends of the victims and for the officers”.

Government data shows that speed is a factor in just under two thirds (58 per cent) of road fatalities, with 888 people said to have been killed in or by speeding vehicles in 2023.

Later this year, the government is set to lay out its new Road Safety Strategy. Speaking to Auto Express, a Department for Transport spokesperson said: “There’s no excuse for those who risk the lives of others through speeding, and there are already tough penalties in place for drivers who speed.”

However, when asked what measures would be implemented to curb what appears to be a prevalent issue of high-speed offenders, the DfT declined to elaborate, simply saying that the Government department would “set out more details in due course”.

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