Drivers often exceed speed limits. In response to the question whether, in the last month, they had driven faster than the speed limit, 68% of Dutch drivers responded they had done so on motorways, 69% on rural roads and 58% on urban roads. The average Dutch driver says to have exceeded the speed limit a few percentage points more often than the average European driver [7].
Observations of Dutch driving speeds confirm this picture: a lot of vehicles drive faster than the posted speed limit. Figure 1 shows that, on 50, 60 and 70km/h roads, 55% to 60% of the passing vehicles exceed the speed limit; on 80km/h roads this is about 50%, and on 100km/h roads 35% to 40%. The data were collected on non-national roads by NDW, Dutch National Data Bank for Traffic Data, which measured speeds driven at 35 to 50 locations. There are, however, considerable differences between times and locations concerning the extent to which limits are exceeded (Kijk in de Vegte & Hovestad, 2019; in: [8]). Among other things, this is related to traffic volume, credibility of the speed limit (see the question What are credible speed limits?) and the level of enforcement.
Figure 1. The share of vehicles exceeding the speed limit on the secondary road network (Source: Kijk in de Vegte & Hovestad, 2019; in: [8]).
Speeding is not just a Dutch problem. An overview of speeding offences in European countries [9] shows that, in the urban area, 35-75% of the observed speeds exceed the 50km/h limit (data from 15 countries), and 62-90% exceed the 30km/h limit (data from three countries). On rural roads, 18-70% of the observed speeds exceed the 80km/h limit (data from eight countries). On motorways with 120km/h limits, 23-64% exceed this limit (data from eight countries) and, in case of 130km/h limits, 19-23% exceed the limit (data from three countries).
The information above concerns drivers exceeding speed limits. But ‘speeding’ also concerns inappropriate speeds, i.e. speeds which are unsafe in view of the conditions (weather, traffic volume). This is harder to determine and therefore no data are available about how frequent this kind of ‘speeding’ is.
