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Another frontier lost: OZ to end no-speed-limit roads
h/t: AutoblogAustralias Northern Territory is one of the few sacred places in the world where you can drive at unlimited speeds – legally. Despite the regions isolation and wide open landscape, the local government has decided to impose a speed limit of 110km/h on all open roads with 130km/h restricted for 4 of its major highways. That's 67 and 79 in real numbers. The move comes after the release of statistics from a damning report that found that three times as many people were killed on NT roads than elsewhere in Australia, per capita, with one person dying and nine seriously injured every week. The region is a popular spot for testing vehicles due to the long stretches of open highways and extremely hot temperatures. Porsche has favored the area because it could run its cars during high temperatures combined with sustained high engine speed, and recently tested its 911 Turbo there. Honda and Ford also confirmed testing in the region, but the new limits are likely to turn away carmakers. Americas Federal Highway Administration has found that theres no correlation between speed enforcement and traffic safety improvement. Now that the NT is off the list of unrestricted roadways, that leaves only stretches of the German inter-city Autobahn, rural parts of the Isle of Man and some roads in India. Might as well adopt sharia while you're at it. Posted by: Jackal 2006-11-06 |
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