As for speed limits, they’re a joke! If we had a country wide look at speed limits, then maybe people would take notice, but at present, they are just advisory. When was anyone ever done for speeding on the Ballygarvan Road in Cork, for example?

I don’t think driving in a 50kph zone for an extra minute or two ever killed anybody, impatience is the real killer. I often see people risk their own lives and the lives of their fellow road users purely out of impatience, sure the might have ‘places to go and things to do’ but all their impatience gets them is maybe 30 seconds or a few cars ahead when they reach their destination.

Clearly this is a mistake since the metric conversion, and there are many such mistakes around the country.

Is there a forum or contact number or email where you can report such things to the councils to have them corrected?

On the subject of limits, I stick to them all, even the outrageous ones, simply because it’s not up to me to decide that I can break them. But I would *very* much like there to be a forum for the public to vote on speed limit changes on certain roads. Imagine there’s a road that’s 80kph and should be 60kph, or vice versa, and there was a forum for the public to express their opinion, and if this opinion was occasionally reviewed and taken on board - I feel it would go some small way towards making the situation better.

If we’re crawling along the N7 at 60kph at 4am without a car or pedestrian to be seen for miles around - we should have a voice.

It’s certainly a better idea than breaking the limit and lining the pockets of the Gardai or whoever.

Yes, traffic should move more slowly in built up areas but speed limits on the outskirts don’t always match the landscape around them. Everyone can think of stretches of road where the speed limit is 50 or 60kph and there are no houses to be seen.

I think drivers need additional cues that they’re in a slow-down zone–things like unbroken lines instead of stripes, large red boxes painted on the roads with the giant number 50 encircled on them.

Years ago, I used back roads for fluid lane movement. Then I encountered a cow on the road at a bend, a loose horse on the trot, a JCB reversing across both lanes of traffic and a log truck that shed its load. I quickly learned that drivers have to learn how to share and that sharing sometimes means slowing. Based on the speed of cars speeding past my front door on a national road inside a town’s boundary limits, my perspective is certainly a minority opinion. I wished people would respect the pavement in front of my place, for the sake of the footballs that bounce there, the cats that cross there and the dogs that walk there in the lane of traffic.