The speed management situation in Sweden

Problem description

Table 1. Average speeds on roads with various speed limits in Sweden

The proportion of vehicle mileage above speed limit on average for all roads is 57%. If all vehicles kept the speed limit more than100 lives lost in road accidents per year could be saved.

Existing measures

A new speed limit system with 10 km/h steps is being introduced, so that the speed limit can be more in harmony with the actual road characteristics.

Trials with changed speed limits in built-up areas. Six cities were involved. New speed limits; 40 and 60 km/h; were tried for the first time. The cities decided on their strategy themselves. The main results were:

Table 2. Change of mean speeds and 85-percentile speed for all roads where changes of the speed limit was carried out, all vehicles, weekdays 6AM to 6PM.

The main conclusion is that the effects on speeds were quite small, and depending on the speeds in the before situation. The higher the speeds before, the greater the effect. Based on this the conclusion is that cities selected streets that already had rather low speeds.

Municipalities

Municipalities have large autonomy to decide the introduction of 30 km/h speed limit zones and traffic calming measures.

Police

800 speed cameras installed along the most accident prone roads. The number of killed road users decreased by 60% on the test stretches with automatic speed camera enforcement. The police also carries out manual police speed enforcement regularly.

Success stories

The city of Gothenburg, approx half a million inhabitants, started more than ten years ago a traffic calming strategy, where they introduced more than 2300 measures, mainly speed humps, raised zebra crossings and small round-abouts. The safety effects are quite significant compared with other cities. In ten years time the number of injured pedestrians has dropped by 50% and the number of bicyclists have dropped by 70%. A research report concludes that approx 75% of this effect is thanks to traffic calming.

Small round-abouts as speed reducing measure: In 1991 a large scale trial was made using small round-abouts in the city of Växjö, Sweden. 21 round-abouts were built in 2 weeks time and were then kept for 6 months. The implications of the positive results indicated both in terms of safety and mobility for all road users were that to-day there are more than 1500 such small round-abouts. The safety effects of these are estimated to 40 fewer killed per year, 170 fewer seriously injured and 180 fewer slightly injured.

A cost-benefit analysis shows that speed-reducing measures in Swedish cities have been quite cost effective. The benefits are estimated to be 17,1 billion SEK and the costs 6,9 billion SEK.

What is needed for the future?

Motorcycles cannot be caught for speeding with automatic speed cameras, because the driver has to be identified according to the legislation. A change in legislation putting the responsibility on the vehicle owner would change the increasing trend of motorcycle fatalities in Sweden.

Automatic speed camera enforcement along stretches of roads could be introduced.

Relating fines for speeding to income would make the system more efficient too.